Technology, inequality and economic growth

It is a matter of common observation that inequalities have been increasing in almost every part of the world in the 1980s and 1990s, reversing the more egalitarian trends which prevailed in the early post-war period. This paper seeks to show: (1) that something alternating phases of retrenchment and egalitarian trends have been characteristics of industrial capitalist society throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and (2) that these long swings of social policy are related to the diffusion of major new technologies in the economic system. Finally, the paper discusses very briefly a few of the main directions in which social policy should move if the present inegalitarian trends are to be reversed.