If only manual laborers in 1850s England didn't rely on jobs that were replaced by machines (England went on to be far wealthier and provide far more opportunities to its people after the industrial revolution).
The Industrial Revolution was a terrible period for workers up until the labor movement began fighting for putting basic protections in place. Lots of people got very wealthy though, that's for sure.
This view of history as immutable, with the ends always meeting the means is the sort of thinking that I believe is holding us back as a society. Researchers are still studying the impact that the industrial revolution had on not just the environment, but also the mental health of the descendants of the working class in Europe: https://hbr.org/2018/03/research-the-industrial-revolution-l....
Those seemingly horrible jobs were better than what they had before. You can tell because people voted with their feet. They left their farms to take those jobs, and didn't go back.
Something similar plays out with "sweatshop labor" these days. People talk about the abuses, but there's often the same flow of people from the countryside lining up for the openings.
That's not to say that stopping stupid abuses and unsafe conditions isn't important, it's just important to keep in mind how bad things often were. Simply having a job with a salary that guaranteed you wouldn't starve was a huge improvement for some people.
Compared to what? Sure, it was awful compared to working at Google with unlimited snacks and all of that. Compared to being a peasant subsistence farmer, it wasn't so bad.
it was literally misery on scales that hadn't been seen before. children were expected to work in horrible and abusive conditions. everyone was working very long and gruelling days for next to nothing and had no way to protect themselves from exploitation.
In the UK industrial accidents were commonplace until the passing of The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. The very many maimings and deaths it has (belatedly) prevented are less common in subsidence farming.
Of course farmers get sick, but they don't get the diseases created by industry. There are a great many respiratory conditions and cancers that don't occur naturally.
Not sure if you're talking about industrial revolution or present day labor conditions...? Okay, we have child labor outsourced to poorer countries, but still confusing.
>Compared to being a peasant subsistence farmer, it wasn't so bad.
the life expectancy in Liverpool and some other parts of England during the peak of industrialisation fell to 25 years, the average height fell by almost 10cm, so actually it was pretty bad and it took decades for the situation to improve. I would have very much preferred to be a self-sufficient farmer during that time. Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens goes through a pretty big amount of data that shows that traditional communities and even hunter-gatherers lived much better and longer lifes than people that had to endure the human meatgrinder that was industrialisation.
Not being Nicolas Cage, I was not. However, there are many, many countries today who are similar to 19th century UK/US. Would you like to go to rural China and compare the peasant subsistence farming still happening there with urban China and its sweatshops?
> suffering is suffering.
Sure. People suffered. They suffered horribly as peasant farmers living on less than $2/day, or they suffered as laborers making possibly a bit more. Work was universally hard.
It's possible (likely) that future people will see what we went through - disease, hunger, unemployment, bad management, personal suffering/alienation and a host of other problems - and say literally the same thing about us. But although I think all of us can think of a few tweaks at the margins, we'd all utterly fail fully to replace the status quo most people accept, many try to change, a few succeed at changing and a precious few improve.
We should give the past the same courtesy we expect from future generations. And we should be willing to make some of the sacrifices today to ensure that future generations will endure. (And this includes things like ensuring the effects of climate change or nuclear weapons don't wipe us out.) The past is and forever shall be a foreign country.
> The Industrial Revolution was a terrible period for workers up until the labor movement began fighting for putting basic protections in place.
Yes, and that's why the labor movement is important (I'd like it to be much stronger than it is still today). Is your view that neither the Industrial Revolution nor the labor movement should have happened?
The information revolution appears to be having the opposite effect, with massive productivity gains resulting in fewer employees needed.
One of the outcomes of this is that parts of the country have been 'left behind' economically. This isn't only in England, but happening in other countries too (e.g. the USA). The surge in 'nostalgic'[0] voting (Brexit and MAGA spring to mind, respectively) is one of the outcomes of that occurring.
I'm hoping I'm wrong, and I'm hoping there's something around the corner that changes the situation specific to the information revolution, rather than an outside force (like say, a virus causing a massive shift in demographics), but the way things look right now, that's not a given.
[0] I'm deliberately ignoring the more controversial and/or negative aspects to those voting choices, as that would derail the conversation
I think in the short term, the information revolution appears similar to the industrial revolution: a category of jobs become obsolete, but long term, the economy grows, and adds many more categories of jobs.
The possibility that it won't merits consideration. It's entirely possible that new industries will spring up, but it would be dangerous to rely on that and plan as if it were certain. Even the "long tail" that people predicted for artists to make a living in a widely-connected economy has thus far largely failed to materialize.
The fact that I can't imagine it is no proof that it won't happen, of course. But I feel that we've gotten lucky in the past, and I hate depending on my luck.
i guess if you take this idea to its logical conclusion, we will end up in a post-scarcity economy where nobody "needs" to work, yet all their needs are met. So far, it's unclear whether this outcome will occur, and I do agree it's unclear what the outcomes of the information revolution will be, in terms of overall economic comfort of individuals.
This doesn't seem to be guaranteed by any law of economics, though. Despite the massive economic growth since the 19th century, the absolute number of job openings for horses has decreased substantially.
>One of the outcomes of this is that parts of the country have been 'left behind' economically.
That's the whole point of the comment you're replying to. This isn't new or unique to recent technological advancements. This is always the case when new technology displaces existing structures.
> England went on to be far wealthier and provide far more opportunities to its people after the industrial revolution
To compare this to the Industrial Revolution is just wrong. Period. Just as comparing today to the Gilded Age is wrong. Those were period of massive productivity growth (and also wage growth) despite being periods of high inequality.
On the contrary, we are in an age of tiny productivity growth and almost no wage growth. We have been through a decade with basically zero interest rates (or negative interest rates in parts of the world). To say, we've been through this before and we are all going to be better off for it, is just not true.
I see this all the time as the response to the argument that people rely on these jobs. The difference will be if, like England, the replacement jobs are more valuable by having greater leverage and impact. Or, as I suspect, the replacement jobs are fewer with similar or less value. I suspect we will see the latter pushing our lower classes into a tighter and lower band of incomes.
As far as I can see many of the jobs we do these days don't provide any real value. In this case cashier doesn't provide real value so good riddance. But I'm not confident we'll find ourselves in a better place in the future.
Also, somehow we undervalue manual labor with some skill and unions don't seem to work as well for non-factory/hospital/plant jobs.
I think the one difference is that despite the 1850s UK having (some) protectionism and (loads of) imperialism, they didn't have massive bureaucracies forbidding everyone from doing everything without permission.
This is not actually a problem of technology but of governance. And we should keep in mind that this kind of improvement would make retail workers much more productive as well as the industry more sustainable.
A lot of business strategy these days tend to forget that their labor are often their customers in a somewhat symbiotic relationship. This was part of the realization Henry Ford had when developing Ford motors and during the heydays of labor rights.
Cut your labor and you strangle your customer base. Now we're seeing a tendency of businesses focusing on more wealthy clients, luxury goods, etc. Some modern mall strategies are gearing at primarily targeting luxury stores vs appealing to the masses because the mass labor force purses are growing ever tighter (mainly because they're emptying).
Seems like a natural progression as the "wealth trickle" progresses more and more to a drought and pools up at the top in guarded reservoirs away from the majority: the labor force.
It's one thing to automate away tasks people don't want to do and replace those tasks with tasks people do want to do (and get paid for). It's an entirely different story when you eliminate work and provide no alternatives, displacing large segments of the population, then simply accumulate the labor cost savings for your business and chief investors while stagnating growth.
Most counter arguments to this trend point at historic technological shifts where new industry popped up to supply alternative means of living for the labor force. This makes an assumption that the change is the same and ignores the trends, hand waving it away in ambiguous complexity and proposing we play the experiment out. Most wanting to play the experiment out have little to lose and much to gain. The other side have a lot to lose and relatively little to gain.
We're seeing a lot more of businesses pooling cash and asset reserves and not reinvesting them back into society and people are starting to get a bit cranky about it.
>Now we're seeing a tendency of businesses focusing on more wealthy clients, luxury goods, etc.
I saw this at the bakery I worked at before. The manager I worked under talked about how he wanted to target wealthier clients or at least people willing to pay a lot more for their products, which means eventually pricing out the current customer base that makes up the low income community that this business serves that were a lot more tight with their money. It's so sad and shortsighted. They are more than happy to sell out the customers they currently have in pursuit of the customers who don't/won't come in the first place. I think businesses like that deserve to die. It's a tragedy when good food becomes gated and the poor are left with options like McDonalds or other fast food chains.
Yes but it's a tragedy of the commons / prisoner's dilemma issue. If your store employs 1% of the people in a given area, and therefore also 1% of your customers, you can't prevent the other 99% from laying off their own workforce and affecting you, unless you collude with them somehow. On the other hand, increasing your workers' pay will give you no meaningful sales benefit as it can at most affect that 1%.
It could also drive up competition for good labor and increase turnover at other locations as more try to "move up" to a better paying location.
When I was in my late teens, I worked tech support at a given location... A new call center for another company opened up paying about 25% more. This had a lot of people switching jobs and pay overall for the area for that type of work went up. Other companies relaxed or offered other benefits (subsidized vending machines and food trucks, for example).
If 1% of the market for employees moves, that can have sweeping impacts overall. Take WinCo vs Walmart as another example. The shear impact of the appearance of a better workplace will often drive foot traffic, especially combined with competitive pricing. Brand image is a thing, and how a company treats it's labor is part of a brand's image.
I agree with your point and it seems (to me) to be a natural progression/emergent behavior of the current implementation of capitalism we subscribe to.
It could potentially be even more axiomatic than that and an unavoidable result of core/firmly held beliefs with trade systems that there will always be those to exploit the weaker (in an economic system) to the point where the system becomes unsustainable.
It often reminds me of agent based models of predator/prey systems where ultimately, the incorrect balance of predators, their efficiencies and successes result in a systematic collapse where the predators starve themselves to death by not allowing the prey to procreate and gather resources necessary that predators ultimately survive on.
In this case, if the wealthy (predators) don't allow the labor force (prey) to collect resources, create value, etc. before snatching added value up ('eating' if you'll humor the idea), they ultimately end up with no future value added from labor force (prey) because the labor doesn't have resources anymore to add value.
From your example following the same basic model, if some of the predators allow themselves to refrain from eating too much and allow the prey to better maintain stable set resources through self control, nothing stops their competitors (other prey) from focusing on their short term gains with no control (yum, more dinner). Ultimately, those predators looking at maintaining a long term stable system will starve if his/her competitors don't share the same views and are allowed to follow the more basic rules. It seems to me, you have to introduce artificial rules into the system to maintain the system (e.g., government regulation or new fundamental underlying rules to the dynamics).
Obviously, the real relationship is far more complex than this view and this model has many shortcomings, but it seems to provide at least some potentially valuable insight to the situation, IMHO.
This reminds me of the Aberhart quote recommending airports be built with spoons and forks, not modern machines, if a jobs program is what's required. Perhaps we could add more jobs by having people hand total receipts and the computers could just check them for accuracy :)
My own perspective is that it is basic reality that a large number of low-skill jobs will be automated over the next 10 to 20 years. Rather than complain, I prefer to think about what society can and should do about it.
In my case, I don't believe that we should create makework low skills jobs to 'solve' this 'problem' of humans no longer being needed to run cash registers though; I have a hard time imagining most people preferring to run a cash register as their ideal day job.
I don't understand the notion of moving backward in order to keep jobs for people. I get why people say they want that (fear of losing their jobs), but I don't really understand the logical progression to getting there and I believe its influenced by:
a) Practically, this imposes a big problem to future society if low-skill jobs are gone.
b) I'm definitely privileged to have a "high-skill" job so my fear factor here is irrelevant.
That said - if this were really a concern people were serious about, I don't see why we don't just ban cars/trains/airplanes/etc. and have caravans to do all trading once again. It would create tons of jobs all in the name of regress.
In the UK, many shop floor staff in supermarkets work part-time and it's been designed that way to exploit the benefit system. Very few traditional 40 hour week jobs are actually available but lots at 16 hours or so with lots of unfilled vacancies.
