I don’t really have a coherent thesis in this response, just some thoughts/references that came to mind:
I thought this recent paper was a pretty reasonable framework for thinking about the high-level effects of automation on labor.
Wage stagnation: I thought Table 1 here was a pretty good overview of different studies, their methodologies and results
Wage stagnation: I think the type of issue raised in GDP-B: Accounting for the Value of New and Free Goods in the Digital Economy is plausibly an important addition to the discussion. We know GDP has never been a great proxy for welfare and it’s plausibly getting worse over time. Importantly, it sounds plausible that the growth of the digital economy will be correlated with automation.
“it seems reasonable to worry about what might happen should the conditions that led to democracy no longer hold.” It also seems plausible to me that there’s path dependence/hysteresis such that democracy could persist even in the face of other conditions. One story you could tell along those lines is that populations in many countries are now generally older, wealthier, and more educated.
On inequality and stability: Max Weber’s criteria for fundamental conflict (from Theoretical Sociology) are:
(1) Membership in social class (life chances in markets and economy), party (house of power or polity), and status groups (rights to prestige and honor) are correlated with each other; those high or low in one of these dimensions of stratification are high and low in the other two.
(2) High levels of discontinuity in the degrees of inequality within social hierarchies built around class, party, and status; that is, there are large gaps between those at high positions and those in middle positions, with large differences between the latter and those in lower positions with respect to class location, access to power, and capacity to command respect. And,
(3) low rates of mobility up and, also, down these hierarchies, thereby decreasing chances for those low in the system of stratification from bettering their station in life.
I don’t really have a coherent thesis in this response, just some thoughts/references that came to mind:
I thought this recent paper was a pretty reasonable framework for thinking about the high-level effects of automation on labor.
Wage stagnation: I thought Table 1 here was a pretty good overview of different studies, their methodologies and results
Wage stagnation: I think the type of issue raised in GDP-B: Accounting for the Value of New and Free Goods in the Digital Economy is plausibly an important addition to the discussion. We know GDP has never been a great proxy for welfare and it’s plausibly getting worse over time. Importantly, it sounds plausible that the growth of the digital economy will be correlated with automation.
“it seems reasonable to worry about what might happen should the conditions that led to democracy no longer hold.” It also seems plausible to me that there’s path dependence/hysteresis such that democracy could persist even in the face of other conditions. One story you could tell along those lines is that populations in many countries are now generally older, wealthier, and more educated.
On inequality and stability: Max Weber’s criteria for fundamental conflict (from Theoretical Sociology) are:
Waning democratic influence: Artists of the Possible: Governing Networks and American Policy Change since 1945 suggests that direct democratic influence has always been limited.