Eugene Coyle wrote:
“If you invest in a technology that makes something more efficient, the fear is that people will be put out of work,” says Kevin Efrusy, the venture capitalist whose firm Accel Partners is the lead funder of several important Silicon Valley start-ups, including Facebook “But it’s just the opposite. When anything becomes cheaper, we consume a lot more of it. The overall economic effect is, you create and expand entire new industries and employment goes up.”
This sounds to me like standard stuff from a university level labor economics textbook (like, for example, Ehrenberg and Smith "Modern Labor Economics"). In Neoclassical terms the Efrsy statement is about the so-called substitution and scale (or output) effects that are derived from their production functions. Ehrenberg and Smith note that the overall effect of technological change on employment is ultimately an empirical question, not a theoretical one.
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