ABSTRACT
The effects of new technologies are now not limited to loss of low-skill jobs only. Its effects have now reached the middle-level segment. The new information and communication technologies, by automating many routine tasks, are in fact eliminating clerical and professional employment opportunities. The rapid acceleration of technological progress is also contributing to increasing income inequalities in the industrialised countries. Large scale displacement of workers by automation is an obvious causal factor. The historical experience of capitalism also reveals a tendency of concentration of productive capital in ever fewer hands. Piketty estimates the average annual rates of return on capital in the advanced industrial countries in the late 20th and early 21st centuries to be around 4-5 per cent and takes this level as the level likely to prevail in the future as well. According to Piketty’s estimates, the capital-income ratio in Britain and France in 2010 is roughly 5-6 and is about 4 in the United States.
