Technological Change, Inequality, and Social Unrest: Evidence from Agriculture

Abstract

Technological change is often biased, producing wealth that is distributed unequally across social groups. Does technology-driven inequality also contribute to social unrest? Such concerns date to Karl Marx, but have acquired renewed salience in the age of artificial intelligence and robots. This paper draws lessons from a major technological revolution in agriculture: the green revolution. In India, the spread of a new crop technology, high-yielding variety (HYV) crops, improved agricultural productivity, but also generated rising inequality between landowners and the rural poor. Drawing on a panel dataset linking district-level estimates of HYV crop adoption to digitized crime records, this paper provides evidence that the spread of the new crop technology contributed to a wave of banditry (dacoity), a crime associated with class conflict in agrarian societies. The technology-violence relationship was concentrated in districts with colonial-era landlord-based (zamindari) land tenure systems, plausibly because of less pass-through of agricultural productivity improvements to wages.