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Reviews
No historian before [Bix] has examined systematically what she rightly calls the American debate over the role of machines in either reducing or increasing jobs... A first-rate historical study that simultaneously speaks to our high-tech present.Howard P. SegalNatureAmy Bix's fine book, carefully researched and gracefully written, surveys the extent of everyday hardship during the Great Depression. She concentrates on the debates over technological unemployment in the United States, debates that were 'entwined with particular musings about the meaning of American history, the western frontier, and a sense of national destiny.'.Ester FanoTechnology and CultureThis book succeeds splendidly as an intellectual history of automation as it has been generally understood for most of this century by business and labor leaders, intellectuals, engineers, politicians, and publicists.George LipsitzAmerican Historical ReviewThis superb account of the uproar, beginning in the 1930s, over 'technological unemployment' brings to life an unexplored area of popular economics and policy debate through much of the twentieth century.Howard BrickBusiness History ReviewA very thorough and balanced analysis.Gary CrossJournal of American History Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs? is an able and lucidly written account of the ongoing debate in the United States over the effects of technology on employment.Robert H. ZieglerEH.NETIt is to be hoped her book stimulates interest and provides the basis for further inquiry into the consequences of these aspects of the Information Revolution.Don LambertonPrometheusThis excellent study examines the multiple strands of concern about the threat to employment posed by mechanisation and automation, with the primary focus being on attitudes during the 1930s.M. J. FrenchBusiness HistoryFocusing on how the Depression impelled a national debate over technological unemployment, Bix examines the terms of that debate while exploring what it has to tell us about ourselves and our views about technology and progress. She makes plain early on that the debate was a proxy for something more profound: the uneasy American relation to the Machine Age and its progressive claims.Guy Alchon, author of The Invisible Hand of Planning: Capitalism, Social Science, and the State in the 1920s