Technology And Inequality: The Impacts Of The Industrial Revolution To The Digital Revolution

Technology has significantly changed our lives over the last couple centuries. From the industrial revolution to the digital revolution, it has affected not only the way we work and create things, but also the way we interact with information and even with each other. However, just like with the industrial revolution, some argue that today’s the rapidly evolving technology is replacing labor instead of complementing it and contributing, if not instigating, the wide disparity in income and the stagnant lower and middle-class wages observed in developed economies. In **Technology and Inequality**, **Teach Leaps, Job Losses and Rising Inequality**, **Technology didn’t kill the middle class jobs, public policy did**, and **The Onrushing Wave**, authors David Rotman, Eduardo Porter, Dean Baker, and an unnoted author

For example, Rotman synthesizes the view of Thomas Piketty, who believes that today’s economic imbalance can be attributed to corporate executives who are earning disproportionate, in terms of pay to performance ration, amounts of money. Moreover, Piketty believes that accumulated wealth also dictates today’s economic landscape, pointing out that when return on capital outpaces economic growth, wealthy people become even richer while leaving everyone else behind with stagnant or decreasing wages. Another alternative view, as expressed by Baker, is that policy is the principal cause of today’s economic imbalances. He dismisses the technology theory as a cop-out for elites to evade responsibility for inequality. He backs up his argument by citing his own research, which indicates that the growth in employment is in the low-skilled sector which should see sharp rises in wages if Autor or Brynjolfsson are correct. Baker goes on to express dissent against policies like open trade, tax-cuts for the elite, the weakening of unions and the deregulation of traditional industries, which allows firms to undercut