A critical review of the technology-inequality debate

In the last decades of the 20th Century, a large consensus emerged over the effect of technological change on wage distribution. The core of this theory becomes the backbone of a scientific paradigm that attempts to give an explanation for most of the open issues in currently developed economies, from rising of inequality in the USA to European unemployment, and from the different patterns of productivity to the institutional change. The dawn of this wisdom is reviewed, as well as the research program that consolidated it, with particular focus on the elements of internal coherence. The debate raised by this perspective is discussed and an explanation is presented on how the mainstream analysis was able to resist the critiques and translate itself into a coherent policy agenda. The alternatives approaches are reviewed, showing the lack of coherent framework. The article offers a epistemological point of view, since it shows that the reasons for the success are mainly rooted in the domain of competing scientific approaches