Technological unemployment: a discussion

The objective of this work is to provide a critical assessment of the basic methodology advanced in current macroeconomic theories to understand the relationship between technological progress and unemployment. The standard reference will be the so called natural unemployment schemes, that in what follows will be fully identified with equilibrium unemployment theories1. Our conviction is that unemployment theories abandoned the representation of technological unemployment as a phenomenon with a definite temporal dimension, where it is possible to distinguish over time the phase of ejection from the phase of reabsorption of workers. This traditional way of thinking2, shared by authors like Wicksell, Marshall and Pigou, survived up to the eighty’s3. The recent adoption of intertemporal equilibrium constructions definitively identified the notion of technological unemployment to the logical comparison of alternative equilibrium paths associated to different productivity parameters. The equilibrium nature of this comparison imposes to focus on economies which istantaneously adapt to the technique in use. This work suggests an alternative research perspective where capital ac-