In an extremely helpful review of Sichel's book, Doug wrote : "Even if you
assume that computers yield superprofits, above the "normal" rate (as some
studies have claimed), their overall contribution would still be minimal,
given their small share of the overall capital stock. But if they were
yielding such big returns, it's a safe bet that firms would be investing a
lot more in computers than they are."
Doug, isn't the argument of Herrnstein and Murray, Seymour Itzkoff, Peter
Brimelow and others--all assumed to be cranks--that the constraint on more
computer investment or the achievment of a new techno-economic paradigm (in
Carlota Perez and Christopher Freeman's term) is the shortage of educated
labor competent enough to use the tech to realize a productivity
revolution? Actually aren't they arguing that there is really an oversupply
of the cognitive, g-deficient underclass, resulting from
welfare-subsidized, low quality immigrant dysgenics--an underclass which
not only simply can't be trained at any reasonable cost or perhaps at all
to labor in a high productivity, computer-mediated workplace but also
diverts resources from the necessary training of the g-heavy labor
force--hence, the absence of a surge of investment in computer equipment
and other new skill-demanding capital equipment, hence the productivity
slowdown, hence the growing social crisis (documented by for example
Jeffrey Madrick, The End of Affluence). If Andy Grove says only the
paranoid survive, I must admit to a paranoia about the persistence of a
powerful racialized undercurrent of social darwinism and dysgenics in the
way elites make sense of the slowdown of the American economy. I believe
that at some point revolutionaries will have to deal a death blow to this
ideology.
Rakesh
