The Second Machine Age: A Return to Normalcy?

Most discussions about the current state of the USA focus on the plight of the working man, his inability to provide for his family despite working multiple jobs, the need for a change back to the good old days, sentiments most accurately captured by a certain presidential candidate’s slogan, “Make America Great Again.”  This call to return to a better time refers to the boom years experienced in the decades following the Industrial Revolution and the World Wars, fondly remembered by those of older generations as times of great prosperity. 

Although the country did indeed experience great prosperity, many ignore the turmoil which led to the economic boom.  The Industrial Revolution was marked by extremely poor, often deadly, working conditions in the factories which churned out mass produced goods by the truckload; workers had few rights and could easily be replaced as necessary due to the unskilled nature of the work.  The Great Depression was ended only by America’s participation in the Second World War, and the middle class to which politicians so often appeal has only existed since the end of that world-wide conflict.   This middle class was a result of the economic prosperity brought on by the industrial bulk left over from wartime, as well as the 1944 GI Bill and various other measures that allowed returning soldiers to affordably build comfortable lives for themselves.  So when people call for a return to a time of middle class prosperity for all, they really mean a return to no more than one or two generations ago.

The entire concept of a middle class in America thus seems to be a recent construction, with no real historical basis upon which to rest.  In discussions of technology’s impact on society, as in The Second Machine Age, with its talk of “bounty” and lack of “spread,” people often focus on technology’s ability to increase economic inequality between classes of citizens via centralization of capital control.  However, is it really technology that is causing the rise of income inequality, or is America’s economy simply returning to its peacetime state?  While technology seems to be facilitating this centralization of wealth, it could be simply exacerbating a preexisting trend back towards the inequality of pre-World War 2 America.  Much of the data cited and graphed by The Second Machine Age goes back only to the early 1970’s; it doesn’t show how most measures of inequality take a hit with the creation of the middle class, but are now returning to pre-war levels.

The question then shifts, away from the overused “How do we return America to its former glory” to a more open ended “How do we create a new economic equilibrium where a middle class is a sustainable construct?”  Technology, while currently increasing the “spread” between economic classes, could eventually serve as an equalizing agent in society; computer technology is a new invention whose full impact has not yet been realized.  But utilized indiscriminately, all the new technology wrought by this second machine age will likely facilitate society’s slide back into the pre-middle class normalcy of inequality and centralized capital control characteristic of historically regular economies.