Letter to NYT October 24, 2007

Prize that Even Some Laureates Question

Questions raised about the usefulness of the work done by th Nobel Laureates (News story, Oct. 21) seems justified by the absence of useful analysis of what may be the most serious threat to the health of the American economy. I refer to the destructive relationship between investment in production of goods and services and the profitable replacement of people with robots, computers, and overseas labor.
There seems to be little discussion of the vast economic dislocations caused by the once unimaginable increases in productivity of technology and the profitability of globalization. American workers without a college degree have no access to the benefits , which mainly go to wealthy investors in a self-magnifying process
The presidential candidates all seem to be preparing for office in that forgotten utopia where investment in business meant middle-class jobs for Americans, who paid taxes and joined unions. And to make the system work, taxes paid for an infrastructure that is now seriously in disrepair, including roads, bridges, seaports, sewer systems, and public education to the average level employees needed in those days to do their industrial jobs. That was Industrial Age Economics 101.
The Information Age and globalization changed all that years ago, but Americans, as Marshal McEwan said, have been looking in the rear-view mirror ever since. Investment in productivity has supported more robots, more computers, and cheap foreign labor and made vast profits that have largely gone to the top 5% of the population. Information Age economics has meant a growing wealth gap, two-job families and insufficient parenting time in a vastly complex society made more unmanageable by rising health costs and media and politics driven by money.
Big accumulation has mostly come from positions of inherited advantage, less from hard work than from exploiting the bounties of advanced financial systems and high technology. Those bounties were earned by the past contributions of all Americans and their benefits should be shared by all Americans.