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Machines vs. Workers

Machines vs. Workers
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February 8, 1983, Section C, Page 8Buy Reprints
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AS life in the new postindustrial society unfolds, economists look to history as well as statistical tea leaves to help them forecast the future. Eventually, they get around to the days when tractors reduced the number of laborers needed on farms.

Manufacturing, the high technology of its time, snatched up those agriculturally unemployed and put them to work in factories. And it is this fairly painless structural change in the economy that leads experts to believe that the new industrial revolution will be as benign: that tomorrow's fully automated service economy will absorb everybody, including retrained steel and auto workers whose jobs have disappeared.

Pleasant as that prospect may be, now comes Wassily Leontief, the New York University professor who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1973, to say it isn't so.

''Labor will become less and less important,'' he said in an interview. ''More and more workers will be replaced by machines. I do not see that the new industries can employ everybody who wants a job.''

Professor Leontief is a humane and gentle man of politically liberal leanings, a fly fisherman, a balletomane, a connoisseur of fine wines and a distinguished scholar. He hates unemployment, but facts are facts. He says the technological revolution now underway is different from those that have gone before, and it worries him.

Even now, as he becomes more and more convinced of the correctness of his hypothesis, he hopes he will be proved wrong, that somehow history will repeat itself. Yet, if it does not, he says, joblessness with its attendant hardships and social dislocations will become endemic.

The professor has an array of facts and figures to support his contention, but he is missing the definitive essentials. ''Do not forget I am speculating,'' he warned repeatedly. ''Do not forget my position cannot be won by argument alone.''

His speculations, nevertheless, are informed. He thinks conditions facing today's technologically unemployed are less like those of farm workers who moved to manufacturing and more like the plight of farm horses retired to pasture. ''If horses could have joined the Democratic party and voted, what happened on farms might have been different,'' he said. ''But only in the short run. In the long run, technology will always be introduced, whether quickly or slowly.''

The horse analogy haunts the professor. For a long time, several years in fact, he refused to speak openly about it because what it meant was so pessimistic. ''So horrible,'' he said, and later, ''A humane society must prepare to provide for these people.''

But first, he said, there should be an immediate national inquiry to establish what the new competitive enterprises are to be, which are beginning, what's on the drawing board, and what real employment numbers are projected. Besides proving or disproving his hypothesis, he said, a detailed study would be useful to would-be entrepreneurs and to workers.

''Think what would happen if all unemployed steel and auto workers were retrained to operate computers,'' he said. ''There aren't enough computers to go around. We'd have created a worse problem.''

Secondly, especially if the evidence supported his contention, he said, the society must think about how to support the permanently jobless and, in effect, how to live the jobless life. ''People with jobs will work fewer hours for less pay,'' he said. ''We have already begun to supplement incomes, although few recognize it. What is free education? Social Security? Medicare? Unemployment compensation? Aren't these supplements?''

Additional income would be needed, he said, yet that wouldn't solve the problem of what to do with the new leisure. ''It will take imagination,'' he said. ''Perhaps we should look to the educated upper classes of the past,'' he said. ''They studied.'' Also, they were architects, politicians, scholars and volunteers.

Not surprisingly, the professor believes in national policies tuned to economic reality rather than politics, and he is as distressed by protectionist Democrats as he is with laissez-faire Republicans.

''What President Reagan says of industry is, let everybody try. Some will succeed and some will fail. Natural selection in modern society is very expensive. We could build 20 new industries and wait to see which succeed. But should we? Even in nature, creatures find a way to cooperate and survive. Look at beavers. Beavers work together. Beavers don't build dams that don't work. In man, that's called planning.''

Besides the identification of future industry, he thinks the nation needs a policy-making mechanism that doesn't ''resemble four men driving the same car,'' an ethic that doesn't disparage the unemployable, and a retirement policy that in a job-short world provides for the young as well as the 60-year-old who has always had a job.

At 76, Professor Leontief writes, lectures and studies off and on around the clock. He does not ''distinguish between work and pleasure.'' Whether paid or not, he would go right on with his research. He knows he is one of the very lucky few.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 8 of the National edition with the headline: Machines vs. Workers. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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