Technological paradigms, labour creation and destruction in a multi-sector agent-based model

Abstract

This paper presents an agent-based model (ABM) of endogenous arrival of technological paradigms and new sectors entailing different patterns of labour creation and destruction, as well as of consumption dynamics. The model, building on the labour-augmented K+S ABM, addresses the long-term patterns of labour demand emerging from heterogeneous forms of technical change. It provides a multi-level, integrated perspective on so called scenarios of the future of work, currently often restricted or to firm-level or to short-time sectoral analyses, and studies the conditions under which labour creation and destruction tend to balance. It is a relatively fair and stable distribution of income granted by a Fordist-type of regulation of the labour market that guarantees that the model never reaches stages of persistent technological unemployment. On the contrary, a systematic mismatch between production and consumption spheres emerges out of a Competitive (post-Fordist) wage-labour nexus, wherein the labour shedding effect of process innovation tends to prevail over the labour creating effect of product innovation.