Luddite Fallacy Essay

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Recommended: Economic inequality in America

There has been much focus on the amount of power the upper one percent of
Americans have financially and politically. Much of the financial gains made today go to the top one percent of earners in the United States. This increase in inequality has grown substantially in the last forty years. Wage inequality is different than the push for equal pay. According to Fortune.com, the salaries of CEO’s compared to the average worker are 300 times more (Addady 1). One of the reasons CEO’s are profiting more money is because technological advances are replacing human labor with robots or software. This investment in technology by firms increases the bottom line and is ever more important with the rising minimum wages set by local, state, and federal …show more content…

Luddism symbolizes the fear of technological changes and the impacts they have on the industries in which these changes occurred. Current day economists now refer to this belief as the Luddite Fallacy, which is when people fail to recognize the compensation effects brought upon by these advances and this increase in productivity helps boost the overall wealth of society (Linton 529-530). Economists believe that if the Luddite fallacy were true, we all would be out of work because productivity has been increasing for the last two centuries. It has been proven not to be true because unemployment rates have been going up and down due to other reasons. Today, unemployment is relatively low, even with significant influences of tech …show more content…

This disruption gives those who have lost their jobs to improve themselves by furthering their education. The psychological effects on displaced workers only last until they find a replacement job. Today, the national unemployment rate is at five percent according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (Databases). Economic experts believe that technological advances are expanding at a faster rate than humans can learn to manage and adapt to the new skills necessary to survive in the evolving labor

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