A world without jobs?

(the effects of information technology on employment)

SINCE the beginning of the industrial revolution people have predicted that machines would destroy jobs. In the early
19th century the Luddites responded by destroying the looms and jennies that threatened their livelihood. Marx said that,
by investing in machinery, factory owners would create a vast army of unemployed. And in the late 1940s Norbert
Weiner, a pioneer of computing, forecast that this new technology would destroy enough jobs to make the depression of
the 1930s look like a picnic.

Fear of what machines will do to men at work waxes and wanes. Right now, the fear is growing strongly. Typical of the
new wave of pessimistic forecasts is a book, "The End of Work" (G.P. Putnam's Sons), by Jeremy Rifkin, an American
technophobe whose previous target was the biotechnology industry. Within the next century, he predicts, the world's rich
economies will have virtually no need of workers. Predictions such as this reinforce a growing fear in the middle classes
that technology, having eliminated much of the work previously done by manual workers, is about to cut a swathe through
white-collar ranks as well.

Are such fears justified? In one way, yes. Millions of jobs have indeed been destroyed by technology. A decade ago, the
words you are now reading would have reached you from two sets of hands: those of a journalist and those of a typesetter.
Thanks to computers, the typesetter no longer has a job. But cheer up--a bit, anyway. Although the typesetter no longer
has that job, he may well have a different one. John Kennedy put it well in the 1960s: "If men have the talent to invent
new machines that put men out of work, they have the talent to put those men back to work." That is as true now as it was
then, and earlier.

In the past 200 years millions of manual workers have been replaced by machines. Over the same period, the number of
jobs has grown almost continuously, as have the real incomes of most people in the industrial world. Furthermore, this
growth and enrichment have come about not in spite of technological change but because of it.

The idea that technology is capable of creating more jobs than it destroys, and will do so again, would not surprise an
economist. Later, this article will describe the mechanism that explains why you would expect it to be the case. But first it
is necessary to look at a big claim made by people like Mr Rifkin and other modern- day Luddites. They argue that the
wave of technological change now under way is different in pace and nature from any of its predecessors. If they were
right, the reassuring lesson of the past--the evidence that technology has created jobs faster than it …