Fully Automated Luxury Socialism: The Case for a New Public Sector

Rapid technological change is again stoking fears of a secular shift toward higher unemployment and a lower rate of labor-force participation. Today this debate turns primarily on impending dislocations in the service sector, led by the automation of private freight, transportation, and retail. But those who frame the question of technological unemployment in this way—as a problem of lost income and private security for individuals—have lost a key insight of the last period of automation alarmism. At the peak of the postwar boom, forward-thinking intellectuals interpreted the threat of joblessness as a question of how Americans would rediscover meaningful social purpose outside the private workplace.