Why Productivity Growth Does Not Lead to Employment This Time

choi

Two reviews of the same book:
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew AcAfee, Race Against Machine; How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. Digital Frontier Press, published as an ebook, 2011.

(1) James Crabtree, Robots Are Finally Capturing Our Jobs; Book review; Until now, technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed. That is no longer the case, according to this compelling ebook. Financial Times, Oct 31, 2011
("But it is compelling for its claim to explain two crumbling economic laws: the first that growth will create jobs; the second that rising wages will follow rising productivity. The authors think this stems from the erosion of a third pattern--that technology creates at least as many jobs as it destroys. Many intuitively doubt this idea, as the looms long ago smashed by Ned Ludd attest.")

My comment:
(a) There is no need to read the rest of this review.
(b) Ned Ludd
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ned_Ludd
(1779)


(2) Steve Lohr, More Jobs Predicted for Machines, Not People. New York Times, Oct 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/2 ... nes-not-people.html
("Productivity growth in the last decade, at more than 2.5 percent, they [authors Brynjolfsson and McAfee] observe, is higher than the 1970s, 1980s and even edges out the 1990s. Still the economy, they write, did not add to its total job count, the first time that has happened over a decade since the Depression")