Inequality in a Globalized Economy

Joseph Dillon Davey

Chapter Chapter 9 in The Shrinking American Middle Class, 2012, pp 131-139 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Just as water will always pour downhill until it reaches its own level, capital will flow like water in its relentless pursuit of maximizing profits. It is clear that a very large proportion of jobs that have been lost to the middle class were not lost to offshore outsourcing but to productivity gains attributable to new technologies. Robots, wireless connectivity, and cloud computing have brought about a revolution in information technology that inevitably eliminates jobs. For example, voice recognition, translation programs, and self-driving cars are technological breakthroughs that are no longer distant dreams.1 It would be foolish to ignore the “countless secretaries were who replaced by word processing, voicemail, e-mail and scheduling software; accounting staff by Excell; people in the art department by desktop design programs. This is also true of trades like plumbing and carpentry in which new technologies replaced a bunch of people.”2 There are very few Luddites still around who would roll back these breakthroughs, and companies will continue to improve productivity and profits from future innovation. But labor costs will always impact the bottom line.

Keywords: Middle Class; Gini Coefficient; Hedge Fund; Indian Worker; Early Chapter (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-29507-1_10

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781137295071

DOI: 10.1057/9781137295071_10

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().