Customer Reviews

Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Has been a good book although can be a bit bland and alliterated. This is the dated version written @ 1995, give or take a year.
As stated in the subject reads like a college textbook, that may have even been its original purpose for composition. However, it is hard to argue with the author's hypotheses.

This is a distressingly prescient book written more than a decade ago, it could be an analysis of today's headlines regarding joblessness, under employment and temp employment replacing the work situation we have all known in better times.
For your own sake, read this book!

Based on the five star reviews, I thought this might be an interesting read. But within 20 pages it was clearly leftist academic nonsense. I should have noticed that Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought "Why Marx was Right".

The authors were able to see that automation would displace low skill workers and that globalization would reduce wages for those low skill workers still employed and over time these effects would be felt further up the ladder as the world wide labor pool became more skilled. They were not alone.

But for prescience try this from the 1994 edition: "Layoffs at General Dynamics and other major defense contractors, combined with the depression in oil prices that has virtually wiped out domestic drilling, has plunged Texas into an unprecedented decline."

Their prescription is the six hour work day, no doubt with the same pay for 75% of the work, publicly financed multi-family rental housing, free child care, like Europe, and free post-secondary education, not surprising from two academics.

If you think ten pages of movie reviews on Do the Right Thing, Working Girl and Last Exit to Brooklyn is instructive for analyzing labor market trends, this may be the book for you.