"Has the machine in its last furious manifestation begun to eliminate workers faster than new tasks can be found for them?" wonders Stuart Chase, an American writer. "Mechanical devices are already ousting skilled clerical workers and replacing them with operators...Opportunity in the white-collar services is being steadily undermined." The anxiety sounds thoroughly contemporary. But Mr Chase's publisher, MacMillan, "set up and electrotyped" his book, "Men and Machines", in 1929. The worry about "exporting" jobs that currently grips America, Germany and Japan is essentially the same as Mr Chase's worry about mechanisation 75 years ago. When companies move manufacturing plants from Japan to China, or call-centre workers from America to India, they are changing the way they produce things. This change in production technology has the same effect as automation: some workers in America, Germany and Japan lose their jobs as machines or foreign workers take over. This fans fears of rising unemployment.
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