Volume 31, Number 14 · September 27, 1984
A Parable of Automation
By James Fallows
Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation
by David F. Noble
Knopf, 409 pp., $22.95
Computerized Manufacturing Automation: Employment, Education, and the Workplace
US Congress, Office of Technology Assessment
Government Printing Office, 471 pp., $14.00
Human Resource Implications of Robotics
by H. Allan Hunt, by Timothy L. Hunt
W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 216 pp., $14.00
The machine-tool industry occupies a place of rare importance in the literature of economics. In part that is so because of the things the industry makes. From the machine shops of a nation come the dies that are used to stamp or form nearly every mass-production item, from automobile fenders to soft-drink bottles—as well as the precision-machined goods of the old and new industrial eras, from tank turrets and turbine blades to disk drives for computers. But there is another reason that labor economists, especially those of the left, have concentrated on machine tools: the industry embodies the labor theory of value more fully than any other.
Review, 4355 words
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