From "The Brief Reign of the Knowledge Worker: Information Technology and Technological Unemployment", sadly only available from
Google Cache:
Whenever productivity increases someone gains, but it is not always the worker. Labor market conditions - notably the unemployment rate - , the degree of competition among firms, and institutional factors such as the strength of government will all affect the distribution of the gains from increased productivity. With sufficient competition productivity gains may be spread throughout the society via lower prices. With low unemployment rates and/or strong unions they will be spread via higher wages. Government might capture the gains through taxation and spread them to society via spending on education or health care. If unemployment is high, unions are weak, firms face little competition, and government lacks the ability to increase taxes, productivity gains will accrue to the firms' managers as higher salaries and to the firms' owners as higher profits.
If the high productivity growth stemming from the new information technologies leads to even moderate technological unemployment, it is likely that the gains will be captured by a few superstars, a handful of top managers, and the owners of the firms. The same network effects that make a product more valuable to us when others use it as well (such as email systems and computer operating systems) have the effect of reducing competition. And the very technologies that make distance irrelevant give many firms a global choice of locations which weakens the power of government.
Pretty prescient for a paper written before the dot-com bubble burst. I don't believe for a moment that this current financial crisis diminishes the power of the monied. If anything, it gives them more bargaining chips in the labor market, a squeeze I've already felt (along with countless others). I won't go so far as to say this crisis was engineered, but the reaction of "panic, therefore, panic" is definitely being encouraged by those who stand to gain.
Note, however, the "and/or" in the first paragraph. More on this in a bit.