CAPITALISM AND AUTOMATION = report by James Wilcox.
A recent book by the bourgeois economist J.E.Meade (Cambridge University) entitled "Efficiency, Equality and Ownership of Property", asks some pertinent questions about the effects of automation:
"Most discussions about the social and economic problems which will arise in an automated world run in terms of the rise in real output and real income . per head of the population. What , we ask, shall we all do with our leisure when we need to work only an hour or two a day to obtain the total output of real goods and services needed to satisfy our wants? But the problem is reaily Pid much more difficult than that. The question we should ask is: What shall we all do when output per manhour of work is extremely high but practically the whole of the output goes to a few property owners, while the mass of the workers are relatively ar ioven abactony) worse off than before ?"
licence is led to pose this question by the following considerations: "In the highly developed industrial countries a substantial proportion of the real product does not accrue to the owners of property and property is very unequally owned. (Elsewhere in the book Meade calculates that 5 per cent of the population rereive 92 per cent of all income from wealth. cf. P27) There is already therefore a problem. The pattern of real rates which is required on efficiency grounds may lead to a very high levei of real income per head for the small concentrated numbers of rich property owners, And it is possible, though not certain, that this problem will become more acute as a result of automation = automation will certainly increase the output per head which will be produced by the aid of the new automated machinery. But it could conceivably reduce so much the amount of labour needed with each new machine at a given cost that the total demand for labour was actually reduced - it is clear that automation might well cause output per head to rise relatively to the marginal product of labour. In this case efficensgy pricing would require that an ever increasing proportion of o1.tut accrued to the property owners and the a5 distributional dilemma would to thishextent bé intensified."
It is useful to remember that the author of the above lines appears never to have heard of such concepts as "the organic composition of capital" yet his analysis leads him to postulate a tendency very similar to that formulated >y in Capital.