Abstract

Call it displacement, technological unemployment, or what you will, automation is downgrading skilled labor, including while-collar workers and technicians, this labor expert observes, and points out that capital is also being constricted. He does not think the "whirling dervish of compulsive consumption" and its handmaiden synthetic obsolescence are stable props for an economy just emerging from a recession; suggests tax reform and an overhaul of classic economic concepts of wages and profits instead.