Yochai Benkler, Harvard Law

Robots and oligarchy: power, productivity, and inequality in the early 21st century
Yochai Benkler, Harvard Law

Description

Semester: 
Fall 2016
Lecture Time: 
Friday, October 21, 2016 - 1:30pm to 3:00pm
Lecture Location: 

Room R1220, Ross School of Business

Abstract

Democratic capitalism is in crisis. The shocking success of the Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom and the nomination of Donald Trump as presidential candidate for the Republican Party in the United States marked victories for xenophobic economic nationalism that would have been unimaginable in these two bastions of free trade, globalization, and liberal pluralism a decade ago. On the left, the New Labour/New Democrats reorientation toward acceptance of the basic assumptions of neoliberalism has all but collapsed. Income inequality and its structural causes has retaken a central role in politics that it has not had since the 1960s. Whether the economic anxiety this change reflects will be channeled toward destructive, anti-democratic identity politics or toward a restructuring of the social organization of market-based productivity will depend partly on how well we diagnose the sources of crisis and the range of practical interventions that can be deployed to reconstruct a more egalitarian and stable society. The talk will outline the argument of a book in progress on the causes of the period of Oligarchic Capitalism from 1973 to 2008 and the available responses in the coming decade or two. In particular, it will outline a critique of arguments that technology was the leading cause of inequality, that capitalism in itself did it, or that capture of the regulatory system by business interests did. Instead, I outline a multi-dimensional story about the shifts of power across social, political, cultural (both high and popular), organizational, legal, technical and economic systems that are semi-autonomous, but interacted and fed back onto each other to cause a radical departure from the equilibrium of relatively high productivity, low income inequality among white male workers that marked the so-called "Golden Age" of capitalism from 1946-1973. The talk will conclude with observations regarding how concerns over robots or on-demand platforms as drivers of future inequality are likely misplaced, and what aspects of contemporary networked society and technology, in particular the rise of the ideas of the commons and cooperation, can become a component of the broad range of interventions necessary to re-embed markets in social relations and produce a more egalitarian and politically stable market-provisioned society.

Recording & Additional Notes