Jeremy Rifkin's "The End of Work""

The theme of Jeremy Rifkin's The End of Work is that global culture is entering a new phase: one where fewer and fewer workers are needed to produce the goods and services for the global population (p. xvii). He maintains the world is entering a new age of global markets and automated production (p. 292). His analysis examines the technological innovations and market-directed forces he argues are moving us into a "near workerless world" and he explores this technological revolution in an attempt to address the problems he believes will accompany the transition (p. xvii).

Rifkin concludes it is still within our power to harness this revolution in a direction beneficial to a majority of American workers. Many analysts have covered the material he covers in this book, thus, the material and concepts he addresses, such as the growing gap between rich and poor, are likely to be familiar to the reader. However, Rifkin's socio-historical perspective, in which he offers documentary evidence to support his analysis, is largely convincing. The fact that most readers will likely be familiar with the massive layoffs in the recent past will also provide support for his conclusion. Nonetheless, he fails largely to offer any new insights into the problems of the technological revolution.

One of the underlying tenets Rifkin reveals is that the technological revolution is creating two very different Americas: the haves and the have-nots (p. 177).

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omy are in the knowledge sector. Rifkin argues the administration's response is nanve because it believes large numbers of unskilled and skilled blue and white collar workers can be retrained to become physicists, computer scientists, high-level technicians, molecular biologists, business consultants, lawyers, accountants, and the like (p. 36). Furthermore, he argues even if re-education and retraining on a mass scale were implemented, there will not be sufficient high-tech jobs available in the automated economy to absorb the vast numbers of dislocated workers (p. 37). Rifkin argues repeatedly that one of the problems underlying management and government's response to the effects of technology is their continued adherence to the idea of "trickle-down technology" despite mounting evidence of the destabilizing impacts of the new high-technology revolution (p. 40). Basically, trickle-down technology argues that technological innovations, advances in productivity, and falling prices will generate sufficient demand and lead to the creation of more new jobs than are lost (p. 40). The theory states new laborsaving technologies increase productivity and allow suppliers to produce more goods more cheaply (p. 16). This increased supp

Category: Economics - J