| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs? America's Debate over Technological Unemployment, 1929–1981. By Amy Sue Bix. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. xii, 376 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8018-6244-2.)

Many Americans have forgotten the debate over the impact of technology on jobs. The extraordinarily long business boom of the 1990s has suppressed a central theme of modern industrialization—business use of new technologies to reduce labor costs. Professor Amy Sue Bix of Iowa State University does us the service of recalling this debate in a very thorough and balanced analysis. 1

Appropriately enough, she focuses on the 1930s, when high unemployment led many to reject the identity of technology and progress and to argue that mechanization deskilled and displaced workers. While that view won a sympathetic ear in the Roosevelt administration, many economists, engineers, and business leaders insisted that technology created new jobs by increasing consumer demand and shifted employment from dirty industrial to clean service sectors. When organized labor and intellectuals demanded reduced working hours (a six-hour day) to "soak up" displaced workers and to free time from the market, business and scientific groups used world's fairs and a well-oiled publicity machine to create a picture of limitless technological innovation that led to increased consumption and more jobs. While Bix focuses on the ideological debate, she also details the particular problems of technological displacement in steel, telephone, and music industries. . . .

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