Until now, the relentless march of technology and globalisation has played out hugely in favour of high-skilled labour, helping to fuel record-high levels of income and wealth inequality around the world. Will the end-game be renewed class warfare, with populist governments coming to power, stretching the limits of income redistribution and asserting greater state control over economic life?
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There is no doubt that income inequality is the single biggest threat to social stability around the world, whether it is in the US, the European periphery, or China. Yet it is easy to forget that market forces, if allowed to play out, might eventually exert a stabilising role. Simply put, the greater the premium for highly skilled workers, the greater the incentive to find ways to economise on employing their talents.
The world of chess, with which I am closely familiar, starkly illustrates the way in which innovation in the coming decades may have a different effect on relative wages than it did over the past three decades.
During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a brilliantly inventive chess-playing "automaton" toured the world's capitals. "The Turk" won games against the likes of Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin, while challenging many great minds to penetrate its secrets. Concealing a human player in a shifting compartment amid a maze of impressive-looking gadgetry, it took decades for outsiders to correctly guess how the Turk really worked.
Today, the scam has been turned on its head: chess-playing machines pretend to be chess-playing humans. Desktop-based chess programs have considerably surpassed the best human players over the past decade, and cheating has become a growing scourge. The French chess federation recently suspended three of its top players for conspiring to obtain computer assistance. (One way to uncover cheating is by using a computer program to detect whether a player's moves consistently resemble the favoured choices of top computer programs.)
There are many other examples of activities that were once thought exclusively the domain of intuitive humans but that computers have come to dominate. Many teachers and schools now use computer programs to scan essays for plagiarism, an ancient transgression made all too easy by the internet. Indeed, computer-grading of essays is a surging science, with some studies showing that such evaluations are fairer, more consistent, and more informative than those of an average teacher.
Computer systems are also gaining traction in medicine, law, finance and even entertainment. Given these developments, there is every reason to believe that technological innovation will lead ultimately to the commoditisation of many skills that now seem precious and unique.
My Harvard colleague Kenneth Froot and I once studied the relative price movements of a number of goods over a 700-year period. To our surprise, we found that the relative prices of grains, metals, and many other basic goods would revert to a central mean tendency over sufficiently long periods. We conjectured that even though random discoveries, weather events and technologies might shift relative values for certain periods, the resulting price differentials would create incentives for innovators to concentrate more attention on goods whose prices had risen dramatically.
People are not goods, but the same principles apply. As skilled labour becomes increasingly expensive, businesses have a greater incentive to find ways to "cheat" by using substitutes for high-price inputs. The shift might take many decades, but it also might come faster as artificial intelligence fuels the next wave of innovation.
Perhaps skilled workers will try to get governments to make it more difficult for firms to eliminate their jobs. But if the global trading system remains open to competition, that should prove little more successful than such attempts by unskilled workers in the past.
The next generation of technological advances could also promote greater income equality by levelling the playing field in education. Currently, educational resources - particularly university-level educational resources - in many poorer countries are severely limited relative to wealthy countries, and the internet and computers have exacerbated the differences.
But it does not have to be that way. Surely higher education will eventually be hit by the same kind of sweeping wave of technology that has flattened the car and media industries, among others. If the commoditisation of education extends at least to lower-level college courses, the impact on income inequality could be profound.
Many commentators seem to believe that the growing gap between rich and poor is an inevitable by-product of increasing globalisation and technology. In their view, governments will need to intervene radically in markets to restore social balance.
I disagree. Yes, we need genuinely progressive tax systems, respect for workers' rights and generous aid policies on the part of rich countries. But the past is not necessarily prologue: given the remarkable flexibility of market forces, it would be foolish, if not dangerous, to infer rising inequality in relative incomes by extrapolating from recent trends.
Kenneth Rogoff is a professor of economics and public policy at Harvard University and a former chief economist at the IMF
* Project Syndicate
