The Technology Trap (Frey)

The Technology Trap is the foundational work of the political economy of automation, tracing from the Industrial Revolution through the digital era the recurring pattern in which the same technical capability produces opposite distributional outcomes depending on the power structures surrounding its deployment. Frey’s central argument is that the standard story of technological progress—displacement in the short run, enrichment for all in the long run—conceals the duration of the short run, and the duration is the whole question. His treatment of the Engels’ Pause, the sixty-year gap during which productivity surged while real wages stagnated, is the book’s analytical core: a period in which ordinary workers saw their productivity soar and their living standards remain flat for the entirety of their working lives is not adequately described by reference to its eventual resolution. The book distinguishes enabling technologies, which raise the value of labor by multiplying what each worker can accomplish, from replacing technologies, which eliminate the