Education, Technology, and Post-Work Policy Imaginaries

• In Event: 51.063 - Education and Technological Unemployment: Dilemmas and Possibilities

Abstract

‘End of work’ narratives concerning extensive replacement of human labour by machines are as old as capitalism itself. Historically, however, new technologies have ultimately generated more new employment categories than they have destroyed. Recent developments suggest that this may be changing. For instance, according to a 2013 University of Oxford study, over the next two decades almost half of all current jobs in the United States are at ‘high risk’ of automation (Frey & Osbourne, 2013). While mainstream economics has begun to seriously consider an end of work, it has broadly refused to interrogate its own neoclassical assumptions of efficient markets and marginal productivity as the only viable mechanisms for distributing ethical social outcomes. This is reflected in how education and human capital development are taken up in the new end of work literature as the primary means to address the negative impacts of technological unemployment (Means, 2017).

In response, this paper forwards a post-work model of critical policy analysis that situates neoliberal policy in relation to the unfolding historical modulation of capital, technology, labour, and subjectivity formation (Ball, 1997, Gale, 2001). Specifically, this includes critical deconstruction of two neoclassical principles undergirding human capital based education discourses: (1) the efficient markets hypothesis, or the notion that aggregate private exchanges within self-regulating markets always tend toward economic equilibrium and full employment; (2) the theory of marginal productivity, which suggests that supply of skilled labour creates its own demand and that the distribution of income is determined by the relative productivity of labour. Methodologically, the paper relies on immanent critique of these two principles (i.e. demonstrating their internal contradictions and detachment from questions of history, power, ethics, and politics) via analysis of two prominent educational policy models: (1) the school quality model: (2) the social context model. First, I suggest that both of these educational policy approaches are rooted in neoclassical economic premises regarding human capital, education, capitalism, and employment. Second, I suggest that both of these policy models reflect a view of an ideal “resilient” neoliberal subject (homo economicus) to be produced through education that internalizes and obfuscates the structural contradictions and realities of a potential post-work landscape. As such, conservative “school quality” and liberal “social context” models offer a set of myopic policy prescriptions incapable of resolving the structural consequences associated with a potential post-work future, including intensifying inequality, overaccumulation, and stagnation in the capitalist system. An adequate post-work policy imaginary capable of meeting these challenges thus requires abandoning these models in favour of post-capitalist models.

Author

• Alexander Means, University of Hawaii at Manoa