Technology Advancement And Its Effect On Unemployment Rate

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eventually to be replaced by robots and computers."[3]

What are we to make of all these claims and predictions and the rhetoric that surrounds them? Conservative economic thinkers tend to disparage persons who fear the rapid advance of technology by labeling them "Luddites."[4] This term is both unfair and inaccurate. The real Luddites, of the early 1800s, were uneducated working people who destroyed textile machinery and other symbols of advancing technology, which, despite their efforts, were to move the broad spectrum of humanity above the subsistence level for the first time. Today's proponents of economic activism are typically not of the working class and are usually quite well educated. Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief, who gave the keynote speech for the National Academy of Engineering at its 1983 symposium "The Long-Term Impact of Technology on Employment and Unemployment," cannot fairly be called a Luddite, yet he expressed concern about what he saw as ...

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of howling (or lobbying), is directly related to the degree of artificiality in the particular labor markets affected. It will be argued below that the workers harmed by technological advancement are those who have been receiving wages in excess of the amount they would receive in a fully competitive labor market. In other words, they have been receiving economic rent. It will be further argued that those workers remain unemployed when displaced by technology because they seek to regain their former employment or seek employment in another industry that pays excessive wages. In other words, they are unemployed because they are rent seekers. Finally, the effects of slow and rapid ...

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