Technology's Revenge

For the first 20 years after _Player Piano_ appeared, it seemed that Vonnegut could not have been more wrong. Between World War II and the early 1970s, the world's advanced economies were spectacularly successful at creating precisely the kind of employment that he imagined automation would destroy: well-paying jobs for workers of average skills and education. Social observers waxed eloquent over the unprecedented prosperity of the working class. Thanks to the 30-year "Go-Getter Bourgeois business boom," writer Tom Wolfe announced, "the word proletarian can no longer be used in this country with a straight face." Economists, who had always regarded most fears about automation as nonsense, felt confirmed in their dismissal of the issue.