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The Technology Trap

by Carl Benedikt Frey · 481 pages · ~8.5 hrs

EconomicsScience & TechnologyHistory

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An economic history of automation that uses two centuries of evidence to explain why technological progress produces political backlash. Carl Benedikt Frey, co-author of the widely cited study estimating how many jobs are susceptible to computerization, argues that the crucial distinction is between technologies that replace workers and technologies that make them more productive. The Industrial Revolution began with the former. Frey documents the decades in which British mechanization enriched factory owners while wages stagnated, child labor expanded, and living standards for large parts of the workforce did not recover for a generation, a period long enough that the Luddites and machine breakers were responding to real material losses rather than irrational fear. He then shows why the technology went forward anyway: Britain's landed elite had already been weakened, and craft guilds lacked the political power to block it, whereas earlier societies from imperial Rome to Ming China had suppressed labor-replacing invention precisely because rulers feared unrest. The twentieth century inverted the pattern, with electricity and the assembly line raising demand for workers and producing the broad prosperity that made progress politically uncontroversial. Frey's concern is that the current wave of automation resembles the first pattern more than the second, and that the resulting concentration of gains is already visible in the geography of populist voting. The book's contribution is to treat the politics of technology as an economic variable rather than an afterthought.

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