Technological Change and Wage Polarization – The Illiberal Populist Response

The purpose of this paper is discuss how technological change affect the labor market and what populist actions that are expected follow. The causes and consequences of possible technological unemployment will be addressed and to what extent it could be expected that the rapid technological change leads to unemployment (or that the labor market adapts in a similar way to previous technological changes as has been seen in history so far). A changing labor market will constitute challenges for the future of liberalism possible wage polarization and heterogeneous distribution of unemployment in the labor force might create a demand for policy solutions that have an illiberal direction. In the paper it will be argued that the threat of populism will come from a disgruntled middle class rather than as commonly believed the poorer stratas of the wage distribution.