In the prior two posts in this set I described how the leading mainstream economic explanation of rising inequality and its primary critique treat technology. The former takes technology as central, but offers too deterministic or naturalistic a conception of both technology and markets such that it functions, in effect, to legitimize the present pattern…
Yesterday I outlined the ways in which the dominant “skills-biased technical change” and “winner-take-all economics” explanations of inequality share an idealized view of both markets and technology as natural and necessary. Today I’ll write about the most influential criticism of these dominant stories that have been developed by labor economists. These focus on the central…
Yochai Benkler — What role does technology play in rising inequality? Is it, as the dominant view among policymakers argues, the primary explanatory variable, operating in reasonably efficient markets to shape the value of different workers, and hence the pay they can command? Is it, as labor economists critical of the mainstream imply, a side…