Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs?: America's Debate over Technological Unemployment, 1929-1981 (review)

Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs? America's Debate over Technological Unemployment, 1929-1981. By Amy Sue Bix. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Pp. x+376. $45.

Amy Bix's fine book, carefully researched and gracefully written, surveys the extent of everyday hardship during the Great Depression. She concentrates on the debates over technological unemployment in the United States, debates that were "entwined with particular musings about the meaning of American history, the western frontier, and a sense of national destiny" (p. 8). She convincingly describes the lives and emotions of employed and unemployed Americans. She also summarizes some of the social research conducted during the depression years. This summary gives focus to her passionate denunciation of widening income gaps, hardships entailed in upgrading workers' skills, the precariousness of employment, and a perceived lack of purpose in work as well as in leisure--in short, the deficiencies of the era of prosperity that followed the depression, deficiencies that were evident in, and were in fact caused by, many of the same forces that acted to overcome the depression.

The perception throughout the depression years that accelerated technological change was a cause of mass unemployment translated into an expectation of America's social and economic downfall. This perception echoed the atmosphere of the Luddite revolt of the early nineteenth century, at the outset of the Industrial Revolution in England. In the 1930s, after decades of prosperity-related technological optimism, the same fear had reemerged in the United States.

During the Depression, mass unemployment was aggravated by enormous increases in manufacturing productivity. Bix surveys the literature documenting this problem and identifies two basic viewpoints, one pessimistic, the other optimistic. The pessimistic view was articulated in studies begun before 1929 that were continued within the activist framework of the New Deal. The pessimists provided evidence that industrial production in 1937 (before the relapse, in 1938, into "the Roosevelt Recession") could very nearly reach the level of 1929, but with a smaller labor force; in 1937, some 20 percent more jobs would have been needed in order to simply go back to the level of unemployment in 1929. While the 1938 recession did subside, underemployment remained an unsolved problem until the outbreak of the Second World War.

Bix recounts the arguments of the optimists as well, namely that the United States would invent its way out of labor displacement, an argument based on the unrestrained promotion of scientific and technological progress. The job-creating effects of new inventions would eventually confirm America's world-record levels of productivity, income, and employment. The 1933 Century of Progress exhibition in Chicago and the 1939 World of Tomorrow exhibition in New York were showcases for all the wonderful new products and the mass consumption that would open a path to recovery.

In the real world of the end of the 1930s there were indeed many new products and inventions, unforeseen in 1929, but there were also at least eleven million unemployed. President Franklin Roosevelt, in his State of the Union address of 1940, declared that the country had to find jobs "faster than invention can take them away." At the same time, ex-President Herbert Hoover declared that there were enough new inventions to put those eleven million unemployed Americans to work. Until 1942 the dismal social scientists appeared to be telling the right story, but then came the domestic wartime boom, when demand management and technological progress yielded higher incomes and millions of new jobs.

The best representatives of the optimists and the pessimists agreed that technological progress was a generator of contradictory trends: it caused labor displacement but also created jobs. They were all careful readers of Ricardo's machinery question and--however dismal their view of increasing unemployment--they would not have given credence to apocalyptic forecasts of the displacement of humans by robots, à la Jeremy Rifkin.

Bix's description...