by Jonathan Todd
I’ve admired Thomas Paine throughout my adult life. But I didn’t expect to find a discussion of his ideas towards the end of a book subtitled “work, progress, and prosperity in a time of brilliant technologies”, The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee.
In the second machine age, the world that digital technologies are creating around us, as steam enabled the first industrial revolution, “we need to think much more deeply about what it is we really want and what we value, both as individuals and as a society,” Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue, which is why reflections on Paine and other philosophers are brought into the book’s concluding section.
Brynjolfsson and McAfee are to be congratulated for bringing these debates out of the reflective corners of Silcon Valley and Tech City, and to a wider audience. But public and political debate should be more urgent. Labour has been guilty of not contributing as fully as we might.
While debate among economists has raged for two decades as to whether globalisation or technological change does most to explain widening inequality in advanced democracies, Labour has tended to put more rhetorical and policy emphasis on adapting to globalisation. Research reproduced in a new Policy Network book (see Figure 1, page 8) makes clear that economists see technology, rather than globalisation, as the bigger driver of inequality.
