>specifically the Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries – did not lead to major social upheaval or widespread suffering.
Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries led to massive social upheaval. Average height of Englishman decreased before started to increase (based on military records). Workers started to organize, skulls were cracked. People were shot in the streets. Armies were ordered to kill workers. There were bloody civil wars and revolutions.
Industrial revolution was not possible without massive social change that created, land reforms, working class, middle class and increased private consumption and accumulation of capital. It was at times bloody, but in the Western Europe and North America continuity of government was maintained. Not so in Soviet Union or China.
Anti-Union violence, Union violence (union busting) communist violence, anticommunist violence was pretty intense at time even when the society as whole worked.
Let's use US as an example of well managed industrialization and social upheaval with small number of casualties. We can still list numerous conflicts with 10-100 deaths: The Molly Maguire trials (20 workers executed), Battle of Virden, 1898 Colorado labor war,Italian Hall disaster, Ludlow massacre, Thibodaux Massacre, Pullman Strike, West Virginia Coal Wars, Rock Springs massacre, 1905 Chicago Teamsters' strike, Steel Strike of 1919, The Herrin Massacre, 1922, Battle of Blair Mountain, Hanapēpē massacre, Harlan County War, Memorial Day massacre of 1937.
Future of Automation will create wealth and prosperity beyond all our dreams, but it requires massive political struggle that settles issues like privacy, rent seeking, ownership of personal information.
Violence in the street may be positive sign that automation is finally changing our society.
If we're blaming industrialisation for everything from labour disputes involving a few shootings to full-blown communism in largely pre-industrial countries, it's probably worth noting that revolutions and war were the rule rather than the exception for the previous few millenia as well. What was novel - albeit so novel it took generations to filter through - was universal education, the welfare state and the lifting of the majority of the population above subsistence incomes.
What was novel was company towns, cartels (Trusts) turning numerous industries into monopolies, etc. A lot of it really does curl one's toes (I'm just reading a Forbes collection of history articles.)
Yes peasant revolts happened before this. There was an old cruel aristocracy, and then a new, industrial aristocracy which was inexperienced, fumbling and cruel. Industrialization wasn't the first harsh transition in human history, but who argued it was?
That sentence fragment you cite leaves out that this is the view of "economists," not the author's. This claim is addressed and rebutted further down the page.
> Many economists say there is no need to worry. They point to how past major transformations in work tasks and labor markets – specifically the Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries – did not lead to major social upheaval or widespread suffering.
I think you'd have to count the American Civil War as a conflict caused at least in part by the industrial revolution, which would dramatically increase the toll it took in North America.
The cotton gin was textbook automation. In a strange twist of fate, it actually increased the demand for labor. Because it was very labor intensive to remove the seeds from a cotton boll, cotton wasn't a very profitable industry. After the gin (short for engine, what developers call automation engines), demand for labor and land skyrocketed.
The cotton gin is an example of an automation removing the need for labor (deseeding cotton) and subsequently creating a greater need for labor elsewhere (planting and harvesting). Of course, in this example, the increased labor demand ultimately resulted in 720K deaths.
As I've mentioned before, there's a book from 1926, "Chapters on Machinery and Labor", which outlines the three basic cases of what happens when new technology is introduced. Their examples are the Linotype, the glass-bottle blowing machine, and the stone planer.
The Linotype was a win for printing workers. Typesetting had been bottlenecking the process, and with fast typesetting, book and newspaper prices came down, and the volume of printed material increased enormously. That's the good case.
The glass-bottle blowing machine is the not-so-good case. Bottle-blowing used to take a team of five people trained to work together and manipulate molten glass, blowpipe, and mold with tight coordination. This was a skilled trade and paid well, but bottles were expensive. Automatic bottle-making machines could make bottles rapidly with minimal labor. Bottle sales went up, and the bottle business grew, but the skilled trade was dead. Most of the workers were shoveling sand in one end or taking bottles out the other. This didn't take much skill. Operating the machines was not too hard. You probably needed a maintenance guy who really understood them, but only one for many machines. So most of the skilled jobs went away, replaced by low-paid entry level jobs.
The worst case was the stone planer. Back when brick was the key building material, stone lintels were used over doors and windows to provide structural support for the bricks above. Stone was chipped by hand by big guys with big hammers and big chisels to make flat, rectangular stone beams. The stone planer was a powered machine for squaring off a block of stone. Like a wood planer, but heavier-duty. No more need for big guys with chisels. Huge increase in productivity. But the market didn't grow, because stone lintels were a minor building component and cheaper stone lintels didn't mean more demand for them. So most of the workers lost their jobs.
Those three outcomes still apply to many cases of computerization.
Great examples. Really demonstrates the complexities we face.
This may be the best argument for basic income. Why don't we just admit that we just haven't a clue how things are going to pan out? Things could be fine, or things could get very nasty. Looked at this way basic income is not analogous to social welfare/security – when we admit that we have no clue how the future is going to unfold then basic income looks more like social insurance.
This puts me in mind of a thought I had this morning. Why are narratives compelling? Because they explain events. In the past before formal methods allowed us to develop accurate models humans used a narratives even where they are inappropriate. Now, because models have been so successful the pendulum has swung the other way and we tend to over-rely on model based explanations when really we have no clue.
What am I saying? Just suppose that the "elephant curve" has been brought about by automation or the 4th industrial wave as the article calls it. We have many many people predicting outcomes based on economic and social models that may fail to apply in spectacular fashion. Maybe what would be better would be to institute basic income to ride out digital automation while models are tested and refined. But also let us collect stories from now and from the recent past to use as cautionary tales whose main purpose is emphasize the point "we don't really have a clue and anybody who tells you they do is talking out of their ass".
Yeah, I struggle with this squaring this disruption with a generally libertarian economic stance. If we truly are at the edge of a disruption that will make the vast portion of workers under or unemployed, what does that mean in terms of social stability and survival for those people?
I'm not seeing good responses from libertarians regarding the inbalance in how law is practiced; would appreciate pointers to write ups of more effective libertarian-style remedies. That is, corporations with concentrations of power are treated by libertarians as possessing equal standing with individuals in a court of law. In practice, that is absolutely not how it works out. Yet, many a libertarian response to various problem spaces is "the courts will work it out!", in a deus ex machina style conclusion. Spend any appreciable time (>= 10 years) running a business, and you'll probably observe the same: I've yet to meet a business owner who subscribes to the "equal under law" libertarian ideal, everyone I've spoken with agrees that larger concentrations of wealth and power commensurately enjoy greater access and privileges in the court systems around the world that are unobtanium for smaller entities. I've heard the libertarian response of "we're just not capitalist enough" applied to this problem domain; look to US-style private arbitration to see how that's turning out. I've never been a fan of the "no true Scotsman" approach, anyways. Any libertarian-oriented remedies that realistically acknowledge how humans practice acquiring and deploying power of various forms would be appreciated.
From what I gather, there are really two facets of libertarianism. The social libertarianism, meaning let people do what they want, stop banning everything, drug war is futile, etc. Then there is the economic libertarianism, which means keep the government out of most, if not all business dealings. Deregulate, etc.
I highly suspect people are much more interested in the first, but not really the second. Interests who stand to benefit from the second are selling them as a package deal and we will end up only getting the second. In other words, the arrest machine will keep running, but businesses will be free to fleece customers, government and employees with impunity.
Surprising though, regulation is intended to save capitalism, not hurt it, at least in the long term. If capitalism runs down a path where it no longer benefits the vast majority of citizens in any given country, there will be hell to pay resulting in the end of capitalism. That would be a shame too, properly regulated capitalism is a really great system.
Maybe if the laws were closer to what libertarians would like, this equality in front of it would be achievable. The basic libertarian philosophy regarding law says the only enforcing laws should concern the non aggression principle.
Libertarianism doesn't provide a good methodology for prioritizing the well-being of disinenfranchized person's, so If your ethics tell you that preserving property relations are less important than elevating the condition of all humans, then perhaps it is time to evaluate alternative economic stances that prioritize property less than people.
One such alternative would seem to be Proudhon's anarchism (mutualism) or even Marx's (or his predecessor's) Communism, though I know this is generally an unpopular response, I see no reason why it has no merit.
Economic libertarianism is the XXI century version of Leibnitz optimism of the XVIII century, which was so eloquently critiqued by Voltaire in Candide -- with Capitalism replacing God. They just believe that capitalism is the best of all possible systems and if we just blindly follow its rules everything will be fine and well, it doesn't matter how many people suffer in the meantime.
English-speaking countries? Because as a native English speaker, I have no problem reading their words but I have no idea what kind of numbers they're trying to express.
Yeah I know they're roman numerals but I can't read roman numerals without significant effort. It's bad form to include large roman numerals in English text. The majority of English speakers aren't going to know roman numerals beyond 10.
In the 1800s and early 1900s at least some people could emigrate to countries like the US where there was still a lot of open space. Even that's not an option this time.
We are not running low on "open space" at all. The habitable area of the planet is vast.
Many of the emigrants of the 1800s ended up settling "new" land in the US. But there's vast territories around the world that are extremely inexpensive. Since the 1800s we have grown more dependent on the services provided by the state in urban areas.
In the 1800s you could go somewhere, kick out the natives and declare yourself the owner of the land. I don't think that's possible anymore. At least not in most habitable zones. Where in particular do you recommend people should go?
They left much of the areas they slaughtered the natives for, the midwest is still incredibly empty. Five states with eleven people per square mile or less, including Alaska. Plenty of space.
The "empty" midwest is all owned, though. $4000/acre, maybe? That's not much if you are trying to buy land to build a house. It's a lot if you're trying to acquire 1000 acres for a farm, though.
Alaska is largely government owned. It's empty, but that doesn't mean that you can take a chunk of land there.
You can, but you'll be dirt poor. Back when "dirt poor" was normal, and luxuries like "bathing every day" or "carpet" were uncommon, being dirt poor seemed acceptable. Now most people won't accept that as a lifestyle.
The problem isn't the abundance or lack of open space, it's the fact that the primary income sources from open spaces now requires massive amounts of capital to be competitive.
This. There's a reason that communist revolutions were fueled by a desire for bread, peace, and land. In the start of the 20th century, you could make a decent living if you owned nothing but the land you lived on.
I wonder what happens if we get robots that can provide a complete living off some plot of land. Like agriculture, energy and whatever you need. So in theory you could live autonomously then.
Somehow I think the owning class will come up with ways to make this illegal or impossible.
Why would robots make a difference? Currently, you can't really live off of a plot of land alone, but you'll be living quite well if you also own a bunch of high tech machinery to farm it efficiently. For a well-off Ferrari-owning farmer, the Ferrari is likely not among the most expensive vehicles he owns, the tractors/combines/whatever cost the big bucks.
That's what the poster above meant by "the primary income sources from open spaces now requires massive amounts of capital to be competitive", and owning these robots would be the massive amount of capital; you'd be able to sustain yourself because (and if) you'd have a lot of very expensive robots, not because you just had some land; and you'd also be able to sustain yourself by just investing the value of these robots.
I think that it was not so much about open space, as an opportunity to establish an economic independence. The likes of which the equivalents only exist in different forms today - much akin to dreams of startups today.
The idea that there was open space in the Americas before the Europeans came is a myth. It neglects the inconvenient fact that the native Americans were already here.
The indigenous population of the Americas was absolutely destroyed by Old World diseases. This happened mostly by accident (although sometimes done intentionally) but was probably near inevitable once first contact was made. (In many places it out-paced the actual extent of direct European contact as indigenous people traveled.)
So there WAS vast expanses available by that time, even without intentional genocide (which also happened).
Disease killed a lot of the native population, maybe even decimated, but it did not leave the USA a vast open space. Otherwise the US Army would not have had almost continuous warfare from the conclusion of the Revolution War to the surrender of Geronimo (minus the Civil War) to displace the natives to make room for American settlers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...
A large percentage of the land battles of the War of 1812 were fought between the US and natives because the US wanted the land of the natives to become open space so the natives allied themselves with Britain.
Lewis and Clark would not have survived or even made it to the coast if they had not had help from most of the tribes they met along the way. Of course we displaced all of the natives they met eventually.
So why settlers spent so many bullets to kill people who were already dying by nobody else's fault? And if there was so much open space in America, why Europeans happened to locate exactly in the "very few" places where natives lived? Strange, indeed.
In the specific year you state was four years before Lewis and Clark started their expedition. They would not have survived if they did not have help from most of the natives they met along the way, one of the main objectives was to document all the natives that lived there. That would have been kind of weird goal if it was all open space.
re point one
the __lowest__ plausible percentage of North America and South Americans that died of disease before ever hearing a rumor of it source is 90% and has a fair chance of being higher, the disease front traveled as quickly as the natives, refuges from one dying village to the next, or people coming to investigate why no body has visited from the next community over in a while.
The deliberate atrocities later were just a mop up action in the larger picture.
I've read estimates of smallpox outbreak at 20-50% mortality across the continent. Some areas in New England are estimated to have a 96% mortality rate. Pretty crazy.
The libertarian would say that if the general public gets access to advanced robotics then there will be enormous prosperity. For example, imagine if you could buy a robot that would survey your backyard, order equipment from amazon, start planting food, set up irrigation, harvest and deliver it to a neighbors automatically? Free locally grown food for everyone. Now, isn't that awesome? You could also rent a robot that would find water, dig wells, trench, put in pipes, etc. The possibilities are endless to take PRODUCTION of goods out of the hands of specialized highly capitalized organizations and into the hands of anybody who can rent a robot.
The problem is is that a robot this advanced could also be used for very sophisticated bad purposes, so you're going to have lots of regulation and big corporations will only be able to use these robots and you'll have to buy things they produce with whatever meager wages they let you have.
Just take out a loan. The food cost savings and excess production will pay for the loan and they can repo the robot if you don't pay. The robot will even be able to tell you if it's likely to be cash flow positive.
Only people working would qualify for a loan. Those people would have more prosperity until the robots cratered all wages and prices, being free labor and flooding the market with excess.
When the prices crash a large number of people with robots will be unable to pay back the loan. Their robots will be repossessed. They will now be out of a job and with no robot.
The poor would get left over food from the kindness of people with robots? They'll certainly never work again.
The robot will properly buy futures contracts so that the borrower will be insulated from any food price fluctuations. If the numbers don't add up the lender will not make the loan. There will not be any "overproduction". The robots will instead recommend another line of business where the robots production will be profitable given the price of market futures for those products.
I have an American friend who lives in Argentina who works online. The cost of living is such that he can work two months and pay his living expenses for two years. Those horribly low prices in Argentina are totally killing him. Not!
So what you are saying is the disaster is there will be so much food that people won't be able to eat it all and the prices will crash? Imagine if everybody had unlimited amounts of everything they wanted! How would we support prices?
This kind of thinking reminds me of the great depression where they would destroy food to keep up prices even as people were starving.
BTW, The novella "Manna" by Marshall Brain is kind of a good take on the future with robots and everything, though I don't really like his "happy" future.
BTW, thanks for giving me a hard time on this. I am getting to the point where this is going to be a bit of a manifesto and you're helping me flesh things out.
I'll be interested to see if any manifesto can plot a path through societies looming issues. I don't see a scenario where we can maintain our current style of capitalism without things breaking down in one way or another.
You're friend in Argentina:
* has the ability to get a job from home, which means it's probably a tech/outsourcing job in a first world country. That doesn't take care of 95% of the population. That doesn't fix the issues.
* In the robot scenario where robots are smart enough to understand markets/futures and can decide a completely different line of work, and then do that work, those remote jobs are gone. Your friend is out of work. He doesn't get a robot.
* the company that hires him has to compete for resources in their country of origin. Their local pay requirements determine what they think a "good deal" on labor is. That country would have robots as well and their wages would crater. Again your friend's cush life would disappear, unless he could buy a robot.
>what you are saying is the disaster is there will be so much food that people won't be able to eat it all and the prices will crash? Imagine if everybody had unlimited amounts of everything they wanted! How would we support prices?
Now you are getting to the root of the issue.
We produce enough food in the US that nobody should go hungry, yet we have swaths of kids that don't know where their next meal is coming from.
We have enough abandoned houses that nobody should be homeless, but people still live on the streets.
In capitalism, a private person/entity produces and someone else has to PAY to use what's produced. The issue isn't that there won't be enough to go around. The issue is that our current system will allow lots of people to starve and do without even when there is excess.
You used the term libertarian. That might be why you're getting all the push back. Maybe I'm misinformed on the topic. Libertarians believe an unregulated market and human morality will make everything better. Those two things combined gave us the triangle trade, raw goods (America) --> manufactured goods (Europe) --> slaves (Africe). We also got child labor, poisonous food being sold, no education, life threatening work conditions, etc.
>This kind of thinking reminds me of the great depression where they would destroy food to keep up prices even as people were starving
Being against this strategy is the antithesis of capitalism. If I give away food, prices drop. If I reduce the supply then prices will go up.
During the great depression, prices dropped so low that all farmers were going to go bankrupt. Farmers themselves were dumping crops and rioting to keep crops off the market to try and increase prices. Farmers were marching on courts because they were demanding that foreclosures stop.
If you let farmers flood the market with goods (lowering prices), while allowing them to refuse to pay their debts, then what kind of economy do you have? It's not capitalism.
My concern is that the coming wave of automation will recreate the great depression x10. The population at large doesn't see it coming, and maybe I'm a chicken little. 30% of the US population think poor people are just lazy, and that if they just worked harder they'd be better off.
When automation comes full force, then our economic and political system will change. The question is what will it change to, and what will the transition look like. There's a happy path and a bloody path.
>When automation comes full force, then our economic and political system will change. The question is what will it change to, and what will the transition look like. There's a happy path and a bloody path.
This is what I keep harping on with folks. I think automation will hit and hit hard and our current economic/political structures are not ready for it or won't be able to adapt fast enough (hence your depressionx10 or just a massive inequality gap).
We already have 'more productive' economies but we have stagnant wage growth, increasing rental/housing costs due to people leaving for cities since there are little/no economic prospects in rural areas now, and, as you said, logistical problems in fulfilling basic necessities. Not to mention mental models that say that these 'unemployed' folks are bad and should just retrain/go to bootcamp/move elsewhere.
Consumption-wise, we can buy whatever we want. Shitty food is cheap, electronics, etc, all cheap. But some of the base foundations in Maslow's hierarchy don't come very cheap anymore and it's harder and harder to get to the higher reaches.
* My friend is not a rockstar programmer. He's about average, and in San Francisco he was living in Bayview and getting his house and his car regularly broken into and barely scraping by. Now he lives like he makes 5x the money he did in SF and his taxes are vastly lower since he's making less money, but living better. This is one of the largest mysteries of modern capitalism. Why are the prices for things so vastly different in different countries?
* If the robots can run the futures market and do general purpose programming then we probably won't even need money because we will have perfected central planning. Instead the robots will be playing a game called "The Humans" which is like when we play "The Sims" with the goal of trying to make the Humans happy. This will go on at a superhuman level of intellect and we won't even be able to analyze what the heck is going on, much like we can't really know why Alpha Go makes the moves it makes. We just won't turn it off because we can't live without it. This is the good or bad future depending on the ultimate fitness function, which in the good future is make everybody happy and not where the fitness future is based on deep ecology (DE) [1] which would prefer a 95% population reduction.
* My friend might not be a web developer, but he could probably get a job working on designing some guy's Burning Man float who owned a robot for enough to live well since it would require an absolutely trivial amount of effort to live since there would be so much supply.
* As far as Libertarianism goes, your formulation seems to be that that means no rules. No not really. I don't think ANY libertarian that is respected by the libertarian community would think slavery or poisoning people should be legal so you really have got a strawman there. Besides if we had no rules at all the wealthy Deep Ecology people could get together and decide they wanted to exterminate everybody they don't need to maintain things with killer robots who unlike in the movies have perfect aim and tactical strategy.
* The foreclosures during the great depression were due to collapse of bank reserves due to fractional reserve banking. You had short panics in the 19th century before the fed and fractional reserve banking, but not depression like scenarios of rapid credit contraction as the money multiplier work in reverse. This is unfortunately a very very deep rabbit hole side issue that requires a 30 page essay to get through. In China, which is probably more capitalist than the U.S, they have a different system. They have tons of companies that have bad debts and the government prints money out of thin air to selectively bail them out without austerity forced on the taxpayer, which is why they haven't had a credit crunch that has predicted every year for the last 30 years.
* The happy path of the future AI automation is normal people get access to these robots and use them to produce unlimited prosperity. The bloody path is only the elite get access and they decide to wipe out everyone else with killer robots because they find them to be irritating useless eaters.
But I don't need a robot to order from Amazon or survey the back yard. In fact I insist on a robot that doesn't order from Amazon. I just need one to do the digging and stooping and weed pulling.
I just had to make the example so ridiculously automated that a 400lb opioid addicted alcoholic high school dropout illiterate person on the bottom end of every bell-curve with a criminal record and bad credit that can barely operate Netflix using a voice interface and saying "I wanna see dat funny show dat given me da gigglez" will be able to use and benefit from this technology so the basic income crowd would be satisfied that no one would be left out.
> but in the Western Europe and North America continuity of government was maintained.
Empires fell during this time in western europe. And we had a civil war in the US.
> Let's use US as an example of well managed industrialization and social upheaval with small number of casualties.
You forgot the mass extermination of natives in the US due primarily to industrialization. And the civil war which was bloodier than all the other wars we participated in combined.
The nations first to industrialize benefited immensely at the expense of others. But it was extremely bloody in the US as well.
By the time the industrial revolution started the Native population had already been devastated by disease. The Native Americans whose land we took were post-apocalyptic survivors--their civilizations were a shadow of what they were before the old world diseases wiped them out.
>And the civil war which was bloodier than all the other wars we participated in combined.
Only because the causalities from both sides count as American casualties, and because we developed better medical treatment and sanitation technology.
Far more civil war soldiers died of disease than combat, which was mitigated in later wars through advanced technology. The number of US combat deaths was higher in WWII.
> By the time the industrial revolution started the Native population had already been devastated by disease. The Native Americans whose land we took were post-apocalyptic survivors--their civilizations were a shadow of what they were before the old world diseases wiped them out.
This is an oft-repeated genocide denial. Yes, disease killed many natives but that's not what committed genocide against the natives and stole their land. This is the same genocidal denial peddled by some who want to excuse nazis by claiming the jews died of disease in the holocaust.
> Only because the causalities from both sides count as American casualties, and because we developed better medical treatment and sanitation technology.
What's your point? Dead is dead. Should they not be counted?
> Far more civil war soldiers died of disease than combat
This is the case in most wars. Not just the civil war. Most of the deaths in ww2 were due to disease/starvation/etc rather than combat. Should we not count those?
>This is an oft-repeated genocide denial. Yes, disease killed many natives but that's not what committed genocide against the natives and stole their land.
The current consensus is that disease was the primary cause of depopulation. Perhaps you should read some of the current work in the field.
That doesn't change the fact that European colonists conquered and subjugated the remaining Native population.
>This is the same genocidal denial peddled by some who want to excuse nazis by claiming the jews died of disease in the holocaust.
Nonsense. You're going against the scholarly consensus here--just like holocaust deniers.
>This is the case in most wars. Not just the civil war. Most of the deaths in ww2 were due to disease/starvation/etc rather than combat. Should we not count those?
You held up the Civil War as an exemplar of terrible wars, saying that it was "bloodier than all the other wars we participated in combined". The implication is that it was somehow worse than other wars.
The point is that this is a useless comparison to make and taken out of context you can draw conclusions that don't fit the facts. Previous wars were less bloody because they involved fewer combatants. Later wars were less bloody because we developed new sanitation techniques. And ww2 was much worse in terms of civilian casualties. You can't really draw conclusions about the time period or the social upheaval caused by the industrial revolution based on civil war casualty numbers.
>The current consensus is that disease was the primary cause of depopulation. Perhaps you should read some of the current work in the field.
As I said, that's just genocidal denier's distracting tactic. Also, the consensus is that most victims of the holocaust died of disease/starvation. That doesn't change the fact that the genocide took place. You keep harping on it as if the disease caused the genocide. It didn't. It was european colonization. If europeans didn't come to america and steal native lands, americas would be full of natives - disease or not.
> That doesn't change the fact that European colonists conquered and subjugated the remaining Native population.
And the genocide. Keep denying it all you want, it doesn't change reality.
> Nonsense. You're going against the scholarly consensus here--just like holocaust deniers.
The only one denying genocide is you.
> You held up the Civil War as an exemplar of terrible wars
No. I said it was the worse was america experienced. I didn't say it was an "exemplar of terrible wars".
> saying that it was "bloodier than all the other wars we participated in combined".
Because it's true.
> The implication is that it was somehow worse than other wars.
Yes. It was the worst war america fought in. It was the bloodiest. It caused the most damage. It resulted in the most casualties in absolute terms and as a percentage of the US population. If you can find a war that was worse for america, please let me know.
> Previous wars were less bloody because they involved fewer combatants.
No kidding.
> You can't really draw conclusions about the time period or the social upheaval caused by the industrial revolution based on civil war casualty numbers.
Sure you can. Especially in terms of the civil war and its place in american political and military history.
Listen, you are a genocide denier. And now you are arguing against the civil war facts. I'm finished here. You are free to believe what you want.
>You keep harping on it as if the disease caused the genocide. It didn't. It was european colonization.
European colonization brought disease, but disease spread west faster than settlers, or even explorers.
Disease is the cause of the Native American population decline. Without disease the settlers wouldn't have been able to push the remaining Native peoples off of their lands. In the vast majority of cases disease was a byproduct--the settlers didn't intend for hundreds of thousands of people thousands of miles from them to die.
There were many cases where Europeans intentionally killed Native Americans, in some cases intentionally spreading disease.
You seem to have a very difficult time with nuance. Yes European colonizers caused millions of deaths, but the vast majority were caused indirectly without the knowledge of the colonizers. Yes the Civil War caused the highest death toll in US history, but only because both sides were considered American (despite the fact that they weren't American during the war).
>Listen, you are a genocide denier.
Please try to be a little more civil. This is hacker news not reddit.
>And now you are arguing against the civil war facts. I'm finished here.
I never argued against any facts you presented. My argument is that these facts are useless without context.
> I'm finished here.
I doubt it. I'm fairly certain you're going to reply to this.
Can you elaborate further on how the extermination of the natives was driven by industrialization. Having lived and traveled all over the west it is predominately, agrarian, large tracts given over for cattle. I believe their extermination had less to do with industrialization and more to do with taking the land.
I'm not pushing for any particular interpretation here, but that cattle process could be viewed as early industrialized animal production made possible by the railroad. Graze in open areas, drive a bunch a cattle to centralized markets for transport/slaughter.
> I believe their extermination had less to do with industrialization and more to do with taking the land.
Industrialization is what prompted and allwed ships to bring millions of europeans to the US. It's what allowed railroads to ship millions to the midwest and the west. And of course the desire for oil/resources and farmland/etc. Industrialization is what allowed our armies to wipe out and clear the natives west of the mississippi.
>Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries led to massive social upheaval.
interesting that it also correlated with emergence of national identities in Europe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_of_nationalism_in_Europe). There is some parallel here to the nationalistic anti-globalization movements starting to rise today.
What I find interesting is that the second paragraph starts with:
>They point to how past major transformations in work tasks and labor markets – specifically the Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries – did not lead to major social upheaval or widespread suffering.
Which is then followed by this in the 4th paragraph:
>The aftermath of the Industrial Revolution involved two major Communist revolutions, whose death toll approaches 100 million.
A good fictionalization of the events surrounding technological change undermining the existing social order, at least in the late 19th century, is Dostoyevsky's "The Devils". In that book they have the old landed gentry being slowly undermined by technology and new ideas from the west while these younger wild eyed engineers and intellectual radicals are growing up ominously in the next generation.
I would suggest reading the article beyond the second paragraph.
To avoid the HN snark police (oops), here is a relevant passage:
> They are definitely right about the long period of painful adjustment! The aftermath of the Industrial Revolution involved two major Communist revolutions, whose death toll approaches 100 million. The stabilizing influence of the modern social welfare state emerged only after World War II, nearly 200 years on from the 18th-century beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.
Yeah, I also misunderstood this at first. The article begins by _rebutting_ the claim that automation did not cause changes in the employment market that were disruptive and destabilizing.
The thesis seems to be that we should consult historians, not just economists, on this subject.
Modern economy theory is laughable when looked from a historical perspective. All modern economic theories look at society as in stable equilibrium, since they believe that prices tend to equilibrium by nature. Of course you just need to look at history to verify that such equilibrium is nothing more than momentary, the big economic changes really happening as the result of unexpected disruption, like world wars, "unpredictable" banking collapses, etc.
Yeah but you can't ask a historian why this is happening and thus you can't ask them what to do about it moving forward. A technologist on the other hand is able to advice on why it's happening and help outline potential solutions.
But it's details in general I agree that Economists are the least interesting people to ask.
Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries led to massive social upheaval. Average height of Englishman decreased before started to increase (based on military records). Workers started to organize, skulls were cracked. People were shot in the streets. Armies were ordered to kill workers. There were bloody civil wars and revolutions.
Industrial revolution was not possible without massive social change that created, land reforms, working class, middle class and increased private consumption and accumulation of capital. It was at times bloody, but in the Western Europe and North America continuity of government was maintained. Not so in Soviet Union or China.
Anti-Union violence, Union violence (union busting) communist violence, anticommunist violence was pretty intense at time even when the society as whole worked.
Let's use US as an example of well managed industrialization and social upheaval with small number of casualties. We can still list numerous conflicts with 10-100 deaths: The Molly Maguire trials (20 workers executed), Battle of Virden, 1898 Colorado labor war,Italian Hall disaster, Ludlow massacre, Thibodaux Massacre, Pullman Strike, West Virginia Coal Wars, Rock Springs massacre, 1905 Chicago Teamsters' strike, Steel Strike of 1919, The Herrin Massacre, 1922, Battle of Blair Mountain, Hanapēpē massacre, Harlan County War, Memorial Day massacre of 1937.
Future of Automation will create wealth and prosperity beyond all our dreams, but it requires massive political struggle that settles issues like privacy, rent seeking, ownership of personal information.
Violence in the street may be positive sign that automation is finally changing our society.