A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond

by Daniel Susskind

In a set of articles written in the early 1980s, Leontief made one of the most infamous claims in modern economic thought. What technological progress had done to horses, he said, it would eventually do to human beings as well: drive us out of work. What cars and tractors were to them, he thought, computers and robots would be to us.

Technological change may affect not only the amount of work, but also the nature of that work. How well-paid is the work? How secure is it? How long is the working day, or the working week? What sort of tasks does the work involve—is it the fulfilling sort of activity you leap out of bed in the morning to do, or the sort that keeps you hiding under the covers?

Forty years ago, the CEOs of America’s largest firms earned about 28 times more than an average worker; by 2000, that ratio stood at an astounding 376 times.26 At that point, a top CEO earned more in a day than an average worker did in an entire year.

In calling for a Big State, however, I mean something different: not using the state to make the pie bigger, as the planners tried and failed to do, but rather to make sure that everyone gets a slice. Put another way, the role for the Big State is not in production but in distribution.