The Welfare State in Britain

Abstract

This essay is based upon the two assumptions set out below : First, that we are at the beginning of an acceleration in industrial development based upon the use of the computer which is likely to be as labour-saving in its effects as was the first main stage of industrialization based upon the steam engine. This comes after a long period in which new capital equipment has tended to be capital saving, not labour saving-an important counteracting force, acknowledged by Marx, to the Marxist economic model of polarization. This new development has already been recognized within a non-Marxist conceptual framework by James Meade in his Efficiency, Equality and the Ownership of Capital (1964).