Читать книгу Crisis and Inequality - Mattias Vermeiren - Страница 18

Two interlinked explanations are usually put forward by neoclassical economists to explain the re-widening of income gaps. The prevailing interpretation is SBTC: innovation in technology, especially the increasing use of computers, has increased demand for skilled labour relative to that for unskilled labour, and hence pushed up the wages of highly educated employees with university degrees relative to those of poorly educated workers who merely have high school diplomas (or less). This explanation is first and foremost based on the neoclassical view that a worker’s wage should be equal to the marginal product of labour – that is, his or her individual contribution to the output and profitability of the firm he or she works for. In this regard, high-skilled workers are believed to be more productive than low-skilled workers, who have a lower marginal product of labour and therefore should be paid less by their firm.

The other dimension of the SBTC interpretation is that a worker’s marginal product of labour depends not only on his or her skills but also on the supply and demand for these skills in the labour market – that is, the market where employers and workers interact as, respectively, buyers and sellers of labour. Although SBTC created more demand for high-skilled labour like engineers and software developers, the educational system failed to generate enough ‘supply’ of high-skilled labour. In some countries, like the United States, ‘educational progress’ – that is, the degree to which children attain levels of education higher than those of their parents – has even come to a standstill since the 1980s. Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz’s book The Race Between Technology and Education (2008) is the key reference text for this interpretation of rising income inequality in the advanced capitalist world:

During the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, the rising supply of educated workers outstripped the increased demand caused by technological advances. Higher real incomes were accompanied by lower inequality. But during the last two decades of the century the reverse was the case and there was sharply rising inequality. Put another way, in the first half of the century, education raced ahead of technology, but later in the century, technology raced ahead of educational gains.⁸

The neoclassical theory of SBTC is a clear attempt to explain the rise in income inequality by way of ‘market forces’ that are regulated by the ‘law of supply and demand’: if demand for a specific good (in this case, skilled labour) increases for any given supply of that good, the price of that good (in this case, the wage of skilled workers) will increase. The alleged efficiency of the ‘price mechanism’ to balance supply and demand in markets for goods and services (in this case, labour markets) is one of the key principles of neoclassical economics (box 1.2).