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Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs? American Debate over Technological Unemployment, 19291981. By Amy Sue Bix. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. xii, 376 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8018-6244-2.)
Many Americans have forgotten the debate over the impact of technology on jobs. The extraordinarily long business boom of the 1990s has suppressed a central theme of modern industrialization-business use of new technologies to reduce labor costs. Professor Amy Sue Bix of Iowa State University does us the service of recalling this debate in a very thorough and balanced analysis.
Appropriately enough, she focuses on the 1930s, when high unemployment led many to reject the identity of technology and progress and to argue that mechanization deskilled and displaced workers. While that view won a sympathetic ear in the Roosevelt administration, many economists, engineers,...