Leontief's Worry: Jobs destroyed much faster than created

In 1982 Wassily Leontief worried about the prospect for jobs in future economies. When asked if he worried about inflation, he said no, "inflation is just a tax." What Leontief worried about was "stripes on the cans in supermarkets," ATM machines, and so on. He worried in short that our technological advances, while enhancing productivity would destroy jobs much faster than they could be created in whatever economy might arise from the ashes of Shumpeter's creative destruction. I have kept a "hard copy" of his interview since, often wondering whether we, as a people, would be clever enough to create a future brighter than the one he and others before him had foretold.

I haven't yet found an online copy of Leontief's 1982 interview, but I did find a 1998 interview (with Ralph Buultjens).

…What are your larger concerns about the global economy?

Among other concerns is the question of technology and employment. Will technology plus movement of jobs to poorer nations result in growth without employment in the industrial economies? We talk about stimulating growth, but unless it is accompanied by increases in employment we will get situations where countries can get richer and people in them get poorer. This will give rise to ser-ious political tensions and inflame anti-internationalist forces. This is what worries me about Western Europe. Their economies are showing signs of recovery, but without creating jobs this means little for most citizens. …

For America, my concern is the impact which some future recession will have on a society where individuals below the age of thirty have not experienced one. Will there be a kind of national nervous break-down among younger people, or will they adjust and fight their way back? This is a test I do not wish on anyone, but one which will surely come at some time. Consumerism is not a good preparation for difficult days - or for periods of stock market decline! …

…[T]he role of the state?

Most of our century has seen a struggle between the idea of state power and the idea of individual rights. In the first half of the century, it looked as if the state would triumph; in the second half, individual rights have emerged as more import-ant. In our enthusiasm for individual rights, we must not forget that there are certain things that only the state can do. For instance, it is states which will have to bring some order into the new world of global finance. Our great quest today is to find the correct balance between the power of the state and the freedom of the individual. Both have a role to play and I think the appropriate balance depends on culture - on the cultural context of a country or a society. This is why international prescriptions for local problems do not always work and sometimes aggravate the ills they seek to cure!
Will there be a global financial regimen?

One will probably emerge in the decades ahead. We have a worldwide system; very new and very active. We do not know whether it can discipline itself effectively. The early indications are that this may not be possible. If an international regimen evolves, it will need to be carefully organized so as not to over-regulate. There is so much money moving so fast that a traffic cop would probably help the flows and see that they are legal. The best national economies have mechanisms to enforce legality. The international economy will probably develop some similar mechanisms. Yet we have to be careful because we may need policemen, but we do not need police states! [emphasis added here]

Thrity years earlier Kurt Vonnegut Jr. wrote Player Piano, 1952, about a future world where a few engineers and managers ran the world's computer savvy machines, leaving "workers" restlessly sitting idle in government camps without work or hope. Vonnegut built both the title and the text of Player Piano from Norbert Wiener's work. Weiner said, most elegantly, "[W]hen human atoms are knit into an organization in which they are used, not in their full right as responsible human beings, but as cogs and lever and rods, it matters little that their raw material is flesh and blood. What is used as an element in a machine, is in fact an element in the machine" (1950. The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society, p. 254). Wiener portrait.

Daniel Chandler traces these roots among others in his Fear of losing Our Souls.

Finally, let's let Daniel Dinello have the last word from the introduction to his new book Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology.

Techno-heaven awaits you. You will be resurrected into posthuman immortality when you discard your body, digitize your mind, and download your identity into the artificial brain of a computer. Cyber-existing in virtual reality, you will live forever in a perfect simulation of divine bliss. This techno-heaven is envisioned by a cult of techno-priests—scientists and their apostles—who profess a religious faith that the god Technology will eliminate the pain and suffering of humans by eliminating humans. These techno-utopians fervently believe that technological progress will lead to perfection and immortality for the posthuman, cyborg descendants of a flawed, inevitably extinct humanity. Is this a happy dream or a dismal nightmare? …

This book explains the dramatic conflict between the techno-utopia promised by real-world scientists and the techno-dystopia predicted by science fiction. Such technophobic science fiction serves as a warning for the future, countering cyber-hype and reflecting the real world of weaponized, religiously rationalized, and profit-fueled technology. …

Most science fiction … projects a pessimistic vision of posthuman technology as an autonomous force that strengthens an anti-human, destructive, and repressive social milieu. Yet the realization of oppression can spur action. Rather than promoting submissive surrender to a dangerous inevitable posthuman future, science fiction encourages questions about the nature of technology and its unbridled expansion fueled by religious propaganda, military objectives, and corporate profit-making. Science fiction helps us understand the magnitude of the techno-totalitarian threat so we might invent tactics for confronting it.

More:
Nuking the Economy, Paul Craig Roberts, 2006.

Why the Future Doesn't Need Us: Our most powerful 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech - are threatening to make humans an endangered species. Bill Joy.

The Brief Reign of the Knowledge Worker: Information Technology and Technological Unemployment, Kit Sims Taylor, 1998.

Comments

[clapton]

I like the direction where you are coming from... maybe we are lost at the crossroads...

Cheers!
Clap
America First! @ http://americafirst2004.blogspot.com
-- Be sure and follow links to other doors of perception :-)

[Lord]

No lack of jobs, but too many that pay less than people's free time is worth, and thus the advent of leisure, not a leisure of affluence but a leisure of subsistance.

[Juan]

So, we find ourselves enmeshed in a form of what was termed 'immiserizing growth', and all precisely logical within the illogical logic of a system driven to eliminate its own basis, living labor.

[Dave]

Jaun,

Your comment reminded me that Robert Heilbroner said, in his book "Behind the Veil of Economics," that many of the great economists envisioned that capitalism would eventually do itself in. We might be witnessing the final chapters.