Ignazio Visco: "For the times they are a-changin'..."
Lecture by Mr Ignazio Visco, Governor of the Bank of Italy, at the London School of
Economics Institute of Global Affairs and London School of Economics Student's Union
Italian Society, London, 11 November 2015.
* * *
This text draws on the first chapter of Perché i tempi stanno cambiando, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2015, which
originated from the author's "Il Mulino Lecture", 18 October 2014. I wish to thank Andrea Brandolini, Salvatore
Rossi and Francesco Spadafora for their many useful comments.
"For the times they are a-changin'". This is what Bob Dylan famously sang over fifty years
ago. And in this half-century, the times truly have changed.
The history of humankind is in itself a story of change: demographic, technological, religious,
social, political, economic. Economists often distinguish between "growth" and
"development". The former refers to the production of goods and services exchanged in
markets, which is an ingredient, and an important one, in economic and social well-being. It
needs to be considered, however, together with the other components of a society's
development, such as the distribution of natural resources, health and living conditions, or
the quality of the environment. All these elements are often but imperfectly correlated with
measures of economic activity like the gross domestic product, itself a useful but limited
indicator whose utilisation as an exclusive gauge has at times come under comprehensible
criticism.
In this regard, let us start with two issues. The first concerns labour, work. As Voltaire's Turk
explains to Candide, work serves to ward off not just need, but also boredom and vice. If our
living conditions have improved so enormously over the past few centuries, we owe it largely
to one fundamental institution, the market, which made it possible to transcend the old
subsistence economy based on barter. In the long run, market failures - which may range
from monopolies and positional rents to laws and customs unfavourable to business activity
or rules and supervisory practices incapable of deterring excessive risk-taking - engender
disequilibria, impede growth, undercut labour and hinder development.
The second question bears on the models used by economists. Often, these models depict
economic growth as a balanced, linear process, but in reality it is far from regular, a fact that
does not escape economists themselves. Yet over the past two centuries the market,
demographics and technical progress have produced wealth, work, and better living
standards for steadily increasing masses of people. This has come about through a series of
social, individual and collective travails that have made the process non-linear, yet not
random.
In what follows I will discuss the theme of change, in particular the rapid and constant
change now associated with technological developments, and the multiple interactions
between the legacy of the global financial crisis and new challenges. An increasingly
important issue in the debate is the impact of new technologies on jobs and on the skills
required to seize the opportunities and govern the risks of the digital revolution.
From industrial revolution to sustainable development
The industrial revolution of the late eighteenth century gave rise to the "first machine age"
(the second is the age we are now living in, as described by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew
McAfee).1 Innovation and automation have gradually transformed material production, in
agriculture and industry alike, and especially in manufacturing. The new opportunities
created over the course of this extraordinary period of human history have more than offset
the jobs destroyed by the new general purpose technologies: the steam engine, the internal
combustion engine, electric power.
In Why the West Rules - for Now,2 the Anglo-American historian Ian Morris develops an
index of social development based on energy use, civil organisation, military capability and
information technology. Brynjolfsson and McAfee observe that his index points to an
astonishing conclusion: none of the crucial innovations antedating the industrial revolution -
the domestication of livestock, the development of agriculture, the foundation of cities, the
rise of philosophy and the great religions, the invention of writing, the introduction of numbers
- had anything like the importance for socio-economic development of the exceptional
discontinuity of the late eighteenth century. This break was accompanied by the growth of
world population from 800 million in 1750 to over 1.5 billion in 1900, 2.5 billion in 1950,
3 billion fifty years ago and over 7 billion today.
It was precisely the postwar exponential demographic acceleration - the "population
explosion" - that prompted discussion on the "limits to growth." At the start of the 1970s the
Report of the "Club of Rome,"3 which centred on the predicted depletion of natural resources,
raised alarm about the survival of the Earth's ecosystem and of the human species itself.
Consisting, as is frequently the case for forecasting activity, in linear extrapolations of current
trends, these projections received great attention from the mass media and political leaders,
but they were greeted skeptically by many economists, including some of the most eminent
of the time. Without seeking to downplay the limits and risks of the exploitation of natural
resources implicit in the population explosion and exponential growth, the critics noted that
the Report failed to take due account of two major stabilisers: the ability of relative prices to
rebalance supply with demand and the response of technology.
Notwithstanding the demonstrated power of these two mechanisms, which makes such
longterm projections hazardous, the concern has not abated. The debate on "sustainable
development" - development that can "meet the needs of the present without compromising
the ability of future generations to meet their own needs"4 - shows that today it is impossible
to ignore the environmental balance of the planet and the reciprocal compatibility, or
tradeoffs, between economic, social and ecological objectives.
Climate change is no longer a scientific curiosity; it is a fundamental theme of today's public
debate. A significant step was the 2006 Stern Report,5 which followed a series of important
international agreements (chief among them the Kyoto Treaty of 1997) and thoroughgoing
albeit undervalued studies by the World Bank and the OECD. Some of its assumptions were
criticised, such as the discount rate it used to estimate economic costs, which was very low
and thus - like The Limits to Growth - likely to neglect potential mitigating and feedback
effects, such as those connected with technical progress. But two of the Stern Report's
recommendations appear to be of special importance: to tackle the challenge of climate
change at a global level, with the cooperation of all concerned, advanced, emerging and
developing countries alike; and to devise incentives for the invention and use of new
technologies to drastically curtail emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
Fifty years of great change
The transformations of the past half-century may not have been either linear or painless, but
the gain in well-being for most of humanity has been extraordinary.
The driving force has been technological change. This is made clear in a recent article by
Ayhan Kose and Ezgi Ozturk in the International Monetary Fund's slender review, Finance &
Development.6 The epoch-making impact of information and communications technology
becomes self-evident if we compare the time, cost and process of drafting and publishing an
article today and fifty years ago: a computer instead of a typewriter; the immediate online
availability of data and bibliographical references, rather than their laborious acquisition in
print, possibly requiring visits to more than one library; worldwide transmission with a single
click via e-mail and Internet, in place of print and the traditional distribution of paper copies
by post. The progress generated by the exponential growth in the computing power of
microchips (predicted fifty years ago by the legendary "law" of Gordon Moore7) transpires
from two simple facts. Today's typical smartphone has 3 million times the computing power
of the first minicomputer marketed successfully in 1965, at one 225th the cost. And I
presume that the power is improving and cost is decreasing even as we speak.
To add an example drawn from my own experience, back in the 1970s producing forecasts
and economic policy analysis based on simulations from an econometric model - which at
that time meant solving a hundred or so equations - could take several hours of
dataprocessing time. Already by the early 1980s, when we built the Bank of Italy's quarterly
model of the Italian economy, the time needed for each simulation had fallen to just a few
minutes. Today we can carry out complex stochastic simulations in just a matter of seconds.
Change gathered momentum following the end of the Cold War. The introduction of the
Internet in 1991 changed our way of communicating, forever, and the mobile telephone has
made communication incredibly widespread and incomparably cheaper. The first commercial
communications satellite was put into orbit by the United States in 1965; we currently have
about 400 active satellites worldwide. Whereas in 1980 there were 5 mobile phone
subscriptions per million population, there are now 90 for every 100 people. Technological
advance has brought about much more efficient energy use, saving more than 25 per cent
on energy for the same volume of goods and services produced, in comparison with 1991.
Globalisation itself has been facilitated by the technological revolution. In transportation, the
plunge in air travel prices has caused the number of passengers to soar, while rail travel has
gained in speed and quality. The contribution to world growth coming from today's emerging
economies, which had been excluded from the economic integration of the twentieth century,
has gone from 30 per cent in the 1965-1974 ten year average to 70 per cent over the last
ten years. The world economy is six times larger now than fifty years ago and per capita
output more than twice as great, even though world population too has more than doubled.
At the same time, the mobility of labour has raised the number of people who live outside
their native country, from under 80 million in 1970 to nearly 250 million nowadays; and the
migratory flow between developing countries now exceeds that toward the West.
These are clearly extraordinary changes. We are living in a different economy, a different
society, from those of even a quarter of a century ago: a global society, with an exceptionally
rapid and extensive diffusion of ideas and knowledge, an enormous mass of information
available, and nearly 300 times the global financial assets, in dollar value, compared with
1970 (while US consumer prices have risen just sixfold). In particular, the effects of
combining technological innovation with the opening of markets have been astonishing. The
stepped-up growth in per capita incomes and employment that has been achieved, thanks to
the new "supply chains," in many emerging countries, headed by China, is the clearest
testimony.
These changes, too, have not occurred in a straightforward, linear fashion, owing
unquestionably but not solely to discontinuities in geopolitical equilibria. In the economic field,
recurrent financial crises have struck single countries and regions, ultimately producing the
extremely severe global crisis of which we still face the legacies. The world economy has
gone through a recession every decade since the 1960s. The increase in welfare has not
been evenly distributed among the world population.
Although near a billion people still live in extreme poverty and destitution (with incomes of
less than $1.90 a day, the new benchmark recently adopted by the World Bank), the
objective of halving their number was attained in 2010, five years earlier than was called for
by the UN Millennium Development Goals of 2000. And apart from the billion who have been
lifted out of extreme poverty we should count another 2 billion added to the world population
over the last twenty-five years, mostly in the emerging and developing countries, who have
not entered this state. The gap in life expectancy between these countries and the Western
world (where it has nevertheless continued to lengthen) has narrowed dramatically.
However, while the international inequality in income distribution has diminished, the fact
remains that between 1990 and 2010 domestic inequality became more severe in two thirds
of the countries for which data is available.8 In the United States, while per capita output
expanded by some 40 per cent between 1990 and 2007, real median household income
gained less than 10 per cent. After the sharp drop in output and employment due to the
financial crisis, production has now regained and surpassed its 2007 level, but median
income has fallen back to the levels of over twenty years ago. It is often remarked that the
wealthiest 1 per cent of the population now accounts for about 20 per cent of US national
income, compared with 8 per cent fifty years ago. And the increase in the incomes of the
super-rich (the top 0.1 per cent) has been sharper still, with an accentuation of the
concentration of wealth.9
"Secular stagnation" and the "second machine age"
The fact that development is a non-linear process is perceptible, among other things, in the
lack of substantial productivity gains in the advanced countries consequent to the spread of
the new information and communications technologies.10 In most of these countries per
capita output has risen only modestly, where it has not actually contracted, as in Italy. The
global financial crisis, which stemmed from the bursting of the subprime mortgage bubble in
the United States in 2007, and the euro-area sovereign debt crisis, which was triggered in
early 2010 by the revelation of grave underestimates of the Greek budget deficit, have been
accompanied by what has come to be known, as if in contrast to the "Great Moderation" of
the previous two decades, as the "Great Recession."11
Even in the United States and the United Kingdom, the countries that left the acute phase of
the crisis behind them most quickly, the growth rate remains lower than in the pre-crisis
years. In the euro area as a whole output is still below its pre-crisis level, which it is projected
to regain by the end of this year. It is now quite generally held that the "potential" growth rate
too has been lowered by the reduction in investment and the very high levels of long-term
unemployment and underemployment.
The recession's legacy, in other words, consists of numerous, varied problems that threaten
to leave permanent, not just short-term scars on our economies. Today, there is renewed
debate on the risk of hysteresis (i.e., the extent to which the short-term cycle influences the
longer-term dynamics of the economy). Larry Summers has revived the "secular stagnation"
hypothesis originally advanced by Alvin Hansen in the 1930s and forcefully rebutted in
practice by the protracted economic expansion that followed World War II.12 It is somewhat
singular that there has been more (and earlier) discussion of this thesis in the United States
than in the euro area, where the difficulties that impede a return to sustained growth are
particularly evident and the deficit in employment and demand is so substantial.
The new secular stagnation hypothesis refers to the increasing propensity to save (in order
to pay down excessive debt) and to the reduction in investment and in aggregate demand in
recent years. The decline in the relative price of capital goods induced by technological
innovation, despite having resulted in a substitution of capital for labour, may also have
played a role in lowering investment expenditure in nominal terms. As Summers notes, unlike
new business ventures in the traditional sectors, those in the digital economy may require a
reduced amount of money to start up, thus resulting in a possible reduction in the aggregate
capital expenditure. In circumstances like these, maintaining the balance between saving
and investment - which is essential to achieving full employment - could require a level of
negative real interest rates (that is, net of inflation), that monetary policy cannot deliver.
Nominal interest rates, in fact, are now close to zero and the increase in prices is minimal.
The consequence is stagnant economic activity and the underutilisation of resources.
Furthermore, the legacy of the financial crisis - namely the need to reduce financial leverage
and decrease public and private debt - would not appear to be temporary. Against the
backdrop of low inflation and reduced potential growth, the global ratio of debt to output
continues to rise.13
11
See, for one, C. Bean, "The Great Moderation, the Great Panic, and the Great Contraction,"
Journal of the European Economic Association, 8, 2-3, 2010. For a discussion of the legacy of the
financial crisis, see I. Visco, "The Aftermath of the Crisis: Regulation, Supervision and the Role of
Central Banks", CEPR Policy Insight, 68, December 2013. On the euro area sovereign debt crisis,
see I. Visco, "The exit from the sovereign debt crisis: national policies, European reforms and
monetary policy", in P. Horvath, P. Mooslechner and A. Staribacher, eds., Europäische
Wirtschaftspolitik der Zukunft, Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag von Ewald Nowotny, Wien, New
academic press, 2014.
12
L.H. Summers, "U.S. Economic Prospects: Secular Stagnation, Hysteresis, and the Zero Lower Bound",
Business Economics, 49, 2, 2014; A.H. Hansen, "Economic Progress and Declining Population Growth",
American Economic Review, 29, 1939. See also C. Teulings and R. Baldwin, eds., Secular Stagnation: Facts,
Causes, and Cures, VoxEU.org eBook, London, CEPR Press, 2014; and P. Pagano and M. Sbracia, "The
Secular Stagnation Hypothesis: A Review of the Debate and Some Insights", Banca d'Italia, Questioni di
Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers), 231, 2014.
13
L. Buttiglione, P. Lane, L. Reichlin and V. Reinhart, Deleveraging, What Deleveraging? The 16th Geneva
Report on the World Economy, London, CEPR Press, 2014.
Apart from the short-run Keynesian effects linked to rigidity and constraints on the
adjustment of relative prices, we should consider the possible medium-term repercussions
that a protracted state of high unemployment and disinvestment could have on the
economy's capacity for growth. In the longer run, poor expectations for demand in
connection with population ageing can make the picture even gloomier. Moreover, we are
certainly aware - even if the risk is still remote - that holding interest rates very low for very
long periods may result in fueling excessive financial risk-taking, imprudent lending practices
and, ultimately, dangers for financial stability.14
A second version of the stagnationist hypothesis, put forward notably by Bob Gordon, does
not consider demand and investment but instead focuses on the supply side, and in
particular on the rate of growth of productivity, i.e. the economy's potential output for a given
amount of available human and material resources employed in the production process.15
The key argument here is that the great inventions that have resulted in massive productivity
increases have for the most part already been introduced, so that a return to more moderate
growth rates is inevitable. This thesis is at once daring and perhaps over-simplified, even
though it is supported by some careful analysis of the data and of historical trends, both
aggregate and sectoral.
What truly characterises the new information and communications technology is its suitability
for widespread use in practically every area of economic and social life. The introduction of
personal computers and the Internet may have been gradual, not significantly different, in
terms of the time taken, from electrification.16 However, as Brynjolfsson and McAfee have
observed, it is perfectly possible that the digital revolution is still far from having worked all its
effects on productivity.
Even if it is apparently gradual, the nature of technical progress in the digital age, they say, is
exponential, as in the ancient (Persian) legend in which grains of rice placed on a
chessboard must be doubled from one square to the next: the volume is almost negligible at
first but in the second half of the board it becomes overwhelming. Not to mention other
pioneering areas of research like robotics, genomics and artificial intelligence, which may
have incredible applications that were once unimaginable (save for people like Jules Verne
or Isaac Asimov), with an extraordinary impact on productivity and in the ultimate analysis on
our well-being. This is the "second machine age."17
The challenge of technology
Starting with the first industrial revolution, technical progress has regularly displayed the
ability to engender not only widespread rises in per capita income and living standards but
14
See also L.H. Summers, "Reflections on the 'New Secular Stagnation Hypothesis'", in Teulings and Baldwin,
op. cit.
15
R.J. Gordon, "Is US Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds", NBER
Working Paper 18315, 2012; and more recently, R.J. Gordon, "The Turtle's Progress: Secular Stagnation
Meets the Headwinds", in Teulings and Baldwin, op. cit. For a contrary thesis, see J. Mokyr, "Secular
Stagnation? Not in Your Life", ibid.
16
B. Jovanovic and P.L. Rousseau, "General Purpose Technologies", in P. Aghion and S.N. Durlauf, eds.,
Handbook of Economic Growth, Amsterdam, Elsevier, 2005.
17
These analyses pay little attention to the possible effects of computerization and the digital revolution on
people's cognitive capacities (beyond the impact on labour demand and the distribution of income), but other
authors see them as anything but negligible. See for instance, N. Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", The
Atlantic, July-August 2008, and M. Näsi and L. Koivusilta, "Internet and Everyday Life: The Perceived
Implications of Internet Use on Memory and Ability to Concentrate", Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social
Networking, 16, 2, 2013. See also the theses of Norbert Wieser, mathematician and the inventor of
cybernetics, on the severely depressing effect of automation on employment, in N. Wieser, The Human Use of
Human Beings, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1950.
also expanded and more rewarding job opportunities. The destruction of jobs in the
industries affected by process and product innovation has always been accompanied by a
rapid creation of new jobs in the economy as a whole. What underlies this mechanism is the
ability of technical progress to trigger a virtuous sequence of productivity gains, a reduction in
unit production costs, increased demand for the new goods and services, and rising national
income.
The digital revolution, which we experience every day in our ways of communicating and
acquiring information, confirms the far-reaching benefits that the entire society obtains from
technical progress. But digital technologies have a distinctive feature: the greater speed with
which they tend to replace labour, even in fields in which human intervention has always
appeared to be decisive. This suggests the revival of the concept of "technological
unemployment" proposed by Keynes in his 1930 essay on the prospects for future
generations18 and thus indicated as one of the forces behind the decline in job opportunities
and the stagnation of wages and incomes observed in a number of industries and countries.
As we know, without bringing Ned Ludd or Karl Marx into it, this debate is not new. But we
can recall Keynes's own optimism and his prediction that given the tendencies of technical
progress and the increase in productivity in the United Kingdom and the United States and
"assuming no important wars and no important increase in population, the economic problem
may be solved ... within a hundred years" with a fourfold to eightfold rise in per capita
income. Today we are talking about a global economy, new technologies and population
ageing; we note that exceptionally violent wars and population growth have not been lacking,
but even so the order of magnitude of the rise in per capita income that Keynes projected for
the century does not appear to be unreasonable. However, his fear that the most severe
challenge would be how to occupy our leisure time, as we would be astonishingly more
wealthy but technologically unemployed, has certainly not materialised.
Fifty years ago, when Dylan's emblematic song first appeared in the United States, a small
book was published in the United Kingdom that dealt with production efficiency, income
distribution and corporate ownership. It was written by James Meade, an economist and
Keynes' disciple, well-known for his work in the field of international trade, which would
eventually earn him the Nobel Prize in 1977.19 More than pose the social and economic
problem of what to do when automation means that "we need to work only an hour or two a
day to obtain the total output of real goods and services needed to satisfy our wants," Meade
asked "What shall we do when output per man-hour of work is extremely high but practically
the whole of the output goes to a few property owners, while the mass of the workers are
relatively (or even absolutely) worse off than before?"20
What can we say on this point today? To my mind, we must consider the matter on three
levels. First, the crucial question is to determine whether the net loss of jobs due to
technological innovation is temporary or permanent. As I recalled above, history shows that,
although automation has certainly brought about the substitution of capital for labour in given
economic sectors, for the economy as a whole, technical progress has been the source of
new and better work opportunities. It is legitimate to ask whether things may not be different
this time around. So far, in the United States and elsewhere, new technology has created a
polarisation of occupations, with employment gains concentrated in low-paid service jobs and
high-paid jobs requiring considerable educational attainment, to the expense of mid-skilled
jobs.
A recent, widely-cited study by two researchers at Oxford has estimated that 47 per cent of
existing jobs in the United States risk being automated out of existence, possibly within a
decade or two.21 Other analysts, at the Bruegel research centre,22 have produced estimates
of over 50 per cent for the main European countries, including Italy (which so far appears to
have suffered more from globalisation and the heightened competition of the emerging
market economies than from technological innovation). Such estimates will certainly make a
powerful impression on readers, but they must be handled with great caution, given the
patent difficulty of assigning risk percentages to jobs whose content may change radically
thanks to the new technology itself. In the past we have seen drastic transformations in the
composition of employment: just think of the drastic drop in agricultural employment in the
industrial countries since World War II. The destruction of some jobs will certainly correspond
to the creation of new ones, and the net result is anything but a foregone conclusion, though
of course we cannot ignore the adverse effects characteristic of a phase of transition like the
present.
As yet, the new information and communications technology is still complementary to
managerial and intellectual jobs but substitutive of routine tasks. The new wave of
technological innovation in the fields mentioned earlier (robotics, genomics, artificial
intelligence) could nevertheless have a substantial impact on the labour demand relative to
non-routine tasks that cannot, apparently, be standardised, at both high and low levels of
skill.23
The second question is the relationship between technological progress and the increase in
income inequality so forcefully anticipated by Meade. Such a vast issue cannot be discussed
in a few lines. The sensation made by Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century24
readily demonstrates how topical it is. Here the point seems to me to be not just to decry the
emergence of entertainment superstars, top executives and the great rentiers (the top
0.1 per cent of the population), who would appear to be - thanks to skill, luck, or monopoly
positions - the great beneficiaries of the economic transformation of recent decades, and
accordingly call for income redistribution for reasons of social equity. Rather, it is to
determine the extent to which current and prospective trends in technology can alter, for the
purposes of economic growth, today's relationship between capital and labour, how great the
risk is that substantial portions of the work force will be driven out of the production process,
regardless of their level of education and competence. The question, therefore, is what to do
to avert human, social and political consequences that are potentially very severe indeed.25
These are clearly questions for the long term. We must be skeptical of extreme projections
that would have all or almost all workers replaced by robots and the owners of capital
expropriating, in the form of profit, practically all the income produced. Such predictions are
afflicted by the obvious limits of linear extrapolation; they fail to consider the safeguards and
21
C.B. Frey and M.A. Osborne, The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation?,
Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, September 2013.
22
J. Bowles, The Computerisation of European Jobs, Brussels, Bruegel, July 2014.
23
For a review of the debate see A. Sabadash, "ICT-induced Technological Progress and Employment: A Happy
Marriage or a Dangerous Liaison? A Literature Review", European Commission, Joint Research Centre,
Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, Digital Economy Working Paper 07, 2013.
24
T. Piketty, Le capital au XXIe siècle, Paris, Seuil, 2013; English translation, Capital in the Twenty-First
Century, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2014.
25
The issue is broached with force in Friedman, op. cit. See also L.H. Summers, "Economic Possibilities for our
Children", NBER Reporter, 4, 2013, and T.B. Atkinson, "After Piketty", British Journal of Sociology, 65, 4,
2014.
feedback that have tended to arise, in a more or less spontaneous fashion, in the course of
human history. Nor, however, can we fail to observe that in the years to come, such issues
as the concentration of market shares, equality of opportunity, the progressiveness of tax
systems, workers' employability, and ownership rights will inevitably be subject to political
debate and decision, in a context that is difficult because, for one thing, it no longer
corresponds to national borders.
The third consideration, given the re-emergence of issues like technological unemployment,
income and wealth concentration and the domination of capital (machines) over labour,
involves the possible repercussions on aggregate demand. Those who argue that the fruits
of technical progress and the relative increase in productivity will mainly benefit the relatively
few owners of the new technology firms are certainly raising the question of distributive
fairness. At the same time, however, if they are to be produced at all, those fruits need a
sufficiently high level of effective demand. In other words, there is also a broader,
macroeconomic question involving the distribution of income: in order for the goods and
services that will make up tomorrow's output to be sold, income, jobs and property will have
to be widely distributed throughout the population. In other words, for the enormous
increases possible on the supply side to materialise, there will have to be consumers in a
position to create effective demand for the new goods and services.
Supply and demand today
The matters addressed to this point concern a possible future, a future that is distant but
perhaps not too much so. Accordingly, in discussing them we must keep an open mind, in
the awareness that it is not about tilting at the windmills of machines dominating men, or
capital irremediably crushing labour. We must remember that just as today's work is far
different from yesterday's, so tomorrow's will differ from today's. And the same goes for
capital: "digital" capital will have ve