ABSTRACT
Human work is an exceedingly complex and many-faceted phenomenon that has been studied and commented upon from many vantage points—as an economic factor, a social institution, a focus of politics, a set of events in history, and as a moral value. Of the many current relations between social change and work, three problems appear to be crucial: the effects of automation on work, the relations between poverty and work, and work and productivity. The problems of poverty in the United States are enormously complicated by ethnic and racial issues, which we have not touched at all. It is still far from certain that our society is willing and able to provide decent jobs for the very poor. The most common measures of productivity among input-output economists are labor productivity and total-factor or multifactorial productivity.
