The issue of technological unemployment was a cause for concern for two of the greatest thinkers in the field of economic science: David Ricardo and Karl Marx. Both believed that the introduction of new machines could bring about chronic unemployment for a certain period of time. However, this was only a possibility that had already taken place within English industrial capitalism, but that could be avoid if new investments absorbed the workforce laid off by the introduction of new machinery. In the case of Brazil, the country underwent a restructuring period of its industrial base during the 1990s, which according to the methodology employed in our study, verified the existence of the technological unemployment phenomenon during much of the aforementioned decade.
Technological unemployment; Ricardo; Marx; Manufacturing industry
