6 ms·

Luddites have been getting a bad rap for 200 years but turns out they were right

55 points by gyre007 9y ago

awinter-py 9y ago
it sounds like this article is asking 'when you replace many good jobs with fewer worse jobs + more automation, do you then redistribute the proceeds of that automation?' (i.e. make it illegal to make a profit selling textiles). Even if they did redistribute the new income to the whole country, it wouldn't bring back the weaving jobs. Those jobs are gone forever. Separately, legislating low margins in an industry sounds like trouble.
- codingdave 9y ago
  It is going to be easy to simply argue the details, but the broader question is more important -- For any specific use of technology, is it making our society a better place? Or a worse one?
  - twelve40 9y ago
    In Luddites' case the tech was clearly making our society a better place, it's (apparently) the transition that was not handled gracefully.
    - ntsplnkv2 9y ago
      That's a strong claim to make without an argument. How has automation and technology made society a better place?
      - adrianN 9y ago
        Look at the machine you're writing your comments on. That thing wouldn't be possible without automation and technology. Fewer people than ever are working mind-numbing, dangerous factory or agriculture jobs. That is a good thing.
        ntsplnkv2 9y ago
        Neither would the millions of deaths from new advances in military technology be possible without automation and technology. Neither would the perpetuation of fake information and news on a global scale be possible. For every bit of good the internet has done, it has also allowed bad things to occur too. I'm not saying there is no good, but to say that it is only beneficial is a strong claim, I would argue it is more neutral.
        julianmarq 9y ago
        I read the comment you replied to several times and couldn't find where it said that technology was only beneficial. Now your claim that is neutral is the strong one, but also one very easy to test: Don't use or consume anything made possible by technology, if your life isn't impacted in any way then you're correct... In this isolated, anecdotal case.
        ntsplnkv2 9y ago
        > In Luddites' case the tech was clearly making our society a better place, Is what OP said-that is subjective. How is our world, better? Is it truly better? Sure-I have benefited from use of computers, but many people have been killed from use of computers (drones, for example). It is very possible that all of this technology eventually wipes out humanity, which would not be beneficial, would it? The claim that technology has made society better is a very strong one, which no argument was made as for why. Your test isn't a proper test. Technology is neutral in the sense that all of the good it has brought, has also brought upon lots of bad. For every piece of technology used for good(missiles for space travel) there is an equivalent use that has done harm. (Cruise missiles, which have killed scores of people.) I'm not debating that technology had impact-but to say it is all beneficial, is a huge stretch.
        adrianN 9y ago
        Nobody forces the development and adoption of new technology. So any successful technology is "better" for the people buying it. How far back would you go to claim that technology is not beneficial? Pre-industrial? Pre-agriculture? Pre-tool use? Technology made humans the most successful multicellular species we know.
      - adrianN 9y ago
        Look at the machine you're writing your comments on. That thing wouldn't be possible without automation and technology. Fewer people than ever are working mind-numbing, dangerous factory or agriculture jobs. That is a good thing.
    - imartin2k 9y ago
      True, and it is likely the same now again. So the only real question is: Can we get there without the devastating side effects of the transition period, and how?!
      - wav-part 9y ago
        Yes we can. Food & Shelter is cheap. We can very well survive until new marketable skills can be learnt.
        ska 9y ago
        The lesson of the Luddites is that this doesn't really work - you are likely to have multigenerational negative economic effects. As a society you can either decide that is acceptable or plan to mitigate it, but ignoring it or wishing it away doesn't help.
        ntsplnkv2 9y ago
        Maybe for people living in Silicon Valley or the west, if this is even feasible.
    - marcosdumay 9y ago
      On the short term - I mean, a century, maybe plus another half - it wasn't. Technology was making the life of everybody miserable, except for some very few. With time something else changed¹, and tech became a good thing. 1 - My bet is on ubiquity. Capital became so common it started to lose the competition with labor, and all the low hanging fruits for automation were gone, so it couldn't compete on new ways.
bmh_ca 9y ago
Supply side economics - against which the Luddites railed - is predicated upon the notion that it is better for the individual to adapt to hardship in an age of plenty than to create scarcity by imposing hardship on production.
- datashovel 9y ago
  Does this philosophy also assume the wealthiest won't try to manipulate scarcity in order to gain more wealth?
  - golergka 9y ago
    All sides manipulate everything they can to gain more wealth. But as the parent comment says, not every possible manipulation is rational.
    - datashovel 9y ago
      Is the only rational manipulation that which makes me more wealthy?
      - tomrod 9y ago
        Yes, if that manipulation is driven by you, and if "wealth" satisfies your subjective preferences. So it could be money and assets, or accomplishments, or relationships, and so on.
- RobertoG 9y ago
  Not really, supply side economics is predicated upon 'Say's law': the notion that supply create its own demand. A notion that have been rejected in mainstream economics since the 50's.
bko 9y ago
>“The lesson you get from the end of the Luddites is: Do the people that are profiting off automation today want to participate in distributing their profits more widely around the population, or are they going to fight just as hard as they did back then?”... [Luddites] just thought if you’re going to make more money because you’re more productive, you need to kick some of that money back down to the workers. In actuality, what happens is as expenses decrease through automation, either capital is bid up or prices are reduced so that the profit margin (net income over revenue) is in line with the amount of risk, along with other things. So, true, a market economy does not "kick some of that money down to the workers", but rather spreads the benefits and lower costs to everyone through lower prices or higher quality. Were all the benefits of automation going to the bottom line of the business owners, you would see a steady increase in corporate profit margin [0]. Right now they're near historic highs but that is only very recent and the trend is not in line with the trend of automation in the US. Furthermore, if you look at the top 1%, much of their income came from wages and self-employment business income: > The richest 1% earn roughly half their income from wages and salaries, a quarter from self-employment and business income, and the remainder from interest, dividends, capital gains and rent. According to an analysis of tax returns by Jon Bakija of Williams College and two others, 16% of the top 1% were in medical professions and 8% were lawyers: shares that have changed little between 1979 and 2005, the latest year the authors examined (see chart). The most striking shift has been the growth of financial occupations, from just under 8% of the wealthy in 1979 to 13.9% in 2005. Their representation within the top 0.1% is even more pronounced: 18%, up from 11% in 1979. [1] [0] https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ON-BL063_StWise_G_20150612191313.jpg https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ON-BL063_StWise_G... [1] http://www.economist.com/node/21543178 http://www.economist.com/node/21543178
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  > Were all the benefits of automation going to the bottom line of the business owners, you would see a steady increase in corporate profit margin. It's no coincidence that "corporation" was something that only became viable on that time. Really, you got a very selective symptom, got a positive result, and are just dismissing it. Why? > The richest 1% earn roughly half their income from wages and salaries That's only because 1% is too big a number. Square it and look again.
padobson 9y ago
My profile[0] has a quote about Marx and Smith hitting on the same idea, and this piece is a good illustration of that. We have two competing sentiments - that workers are exploited by capitalists for the value they provide via their labor, and that the overall efficiency of an economy is dependent on people working in their own self interest. I think the problem we face is not how best to redistribute wealth, but how to align these two sentiments instead of creating an adversarial relationship between labor and entrepreneur. And I think Marx was right - workers should own the means of production. However, the historical methods to achieve this have been overwhelmingly inefficient and usually enforced at the point of a gun. That's a mistake. Meanwhile, in capitalist economies, joint ownership enterprises rose up and the cost of automation came down. Anyone can now buy a share of Apple stock for a day's wage[1], and carry around one of their super computers for a week's wage[2]. The real problem is one of culture. The Luddites had enough organization to mount frontal assaults on the textile mills that threatened them, so why couldn't they pool their resources and start their own mills? Today, we encourage young people to take on loads of debt to go to college, ensuring they leave college subject to the whims of capitalists. The sentiment is right: it makes sense to encourage young people to carve out a living for themselves early in life. But the cultural method of achieving this makes no sense. It would make more sense to encourage young people to take minimum wage jobs when they turn 15 and investing every spare dime that they have - thus giving themselves a basic income early in life. The article suggests minimum wages, public pension funds, and higher taxes on business is the answer. I think it's absurd to penalize the most efficient, most product parts of an economy for being more efficient and more productive. If coercive redistribution is something we deem necessary as a society, then we should be redistributing ownership of our most profitable corporations to those who are least able to fend for themselves. An equity tax that takes shares of APPL from Tim Cook and gives them to people on food stamps. That way, marginal increases in productivity are not disincentivized by tax policy, and laborers who now own the means of production are no longer exploited, but rather rewarded in tandem with the entrepreneur. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=padobson https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=padobson [1]https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL?ltr=1 https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL?ltr=1 [2]https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-7 https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-7
- 9y ago
Kenji 9y ago
People who disregard other people's property and cause vast destruction because of their ideology are never right. I have no respect for them. There are non-destructive ways to bring your message across in this situation. A society with automation will always be richer than one without it. The fight against automation is really baffling me. People are actively fighting against progress. Automation eliminates boring stupid jobs and replaces them with great, interesting ones. I am extremely happy to live in a country that embraces science & technology.
- ntsplnkv2 9y ago
  Why should anyone care about their society if they reap no benefit from it?
  - Kenji 9y ago
    Can you also justify murder with that or only destruction of property?
    - ntsplnkv2 9y ago
      Many times revolutions have been murderous for that very reason. I think many Americans agree with the bloodshed of the American revolution.
    - Qwertious 9y ago
      You absolutely can - the basic argument for jobs is essentially "you can't reap the gains of society, if you aren't willing to contribute to it [in the form of doing your job]" - the underpinning argument being that there are jobs you can do. If there aren't any (paid) jobs, then you're stuck in a situation where people are taking away your rights to the gains of society, for their own benefit. At which point, you need to fix the system - either make it so that jobs aren't necessary to get the gains (i.e. the money), or create "jobs" that aren't strictly necessary, or, if you cannot fix the system, rip it down with violent revolution and make sure the replacement system isn't broken in the same way as the predecessor. Basically, it's outrage against a double-abstraction suckerpunch - either there's too much work or there's not enough work, you can't have both.
jtraffic 9y ago
For an illuminating perspective about different paths automation may take, which also uses history as a guide, see this: http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21701119-what-history-tells-us-about-future-artificial-intelligenceand-how-society-should http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21701119-what-history-... My key takeaway is that, often automation can drive prices down, which increases demand, which in turn increases employment. This counterbalancing effect can eventually increase total employment, although the new jobs may go to different people. AI replacing services is a bit different than robots replacing workers in manufacturing, in my view, because often the entire job is not replaced. It can have the effect of allowing the human to focus on (currently) non-automated portions of the job. Accounting is ripe for automation, for example, but I predict it will be a good thing for most accountants. Well, predictions are dangerous, but, there, I've said it. As far as manual labor is concerned, it seems to me that ship has sailed.
dalbasal 9y ago
I think it might be worth pointing out that catastrophic "technological unemployment" is far from a sure thing at this point. We're still speculating that this is a thing which may happen in the future. So far, labour force participation rates in developed economies is still in the same 60%-70% band that it's ranged in since women joined the workforce en masse in the 60s. I'm not saying it's impossible, just that we're not in any better a position to judge than 19th century people were. These things are pretty hard to predict. Ultimately "AI" is not unique economically (short of Kurzweil-esque machine consciousness). The industrial revolution massively reduced labour needed to produce spoons or cars but actually increased employment rates in manufacturing. It was trade that reduced manufacturing employment rates. The communications revolution replaced the need for secretaries, typists, errand boys and many other clerical roles. There might be more people employed in "administration" today than at any point in history^. The relationship between labour saving technology and the demand for labour is complex, difficult to speculate about. ^The administration boom (pointed out by David Graeber) is baffling to me. I'd love to hear some theories on it.
- RobertoG 9y ago
  Of course, as they say, making prediction is always difficult, specially about the future. But we can make educated guesses. We know from the past that new jobs are created in activities for what there are not machines able to do it. We are running out of things inside that category. It's not so bad an idea to stop and think about what could happen when we arrive there. "short of Kurzweil-esque machine consciousness" I have never received a dime for being conscious, but I have been paid for making inferences that machines can't do. That they can't do yet.

55 points by gyre007 9y ago

it sounds like this article is asking 'when you replace many good jobs with fewer worse jobs + more automation, do you then redistribute the proceeds of that automation?' (i.e. make it illegal to make a profit selling textiles). Even if they did redistribute the new income to the whole country, it wouldn't bring back the weaving jobs. Those jobs are gone forever. Separately, legislating low margins in an industry sounds like trouble.

codingdave 9y ago
It is going to be easy to simply argue the details, but the broader question is more important -- For any specific use of technology, is it making our society a better place? Or a worse one?
- twelve40 9y ago
  In Luddites' case the tech was clearly making our society a better place, it's (apparently) the transition that was not handled gracefully.
  - ntsplnkv2 9y ago
    That's a strong claim to make without an argument. How has automation and technology made society a better place?
    - adrianN 9y ago
      Look at the machine you're writing your comments on. That thing wouldn't be possible without automation and technology. Fewer people than ever are working mind-numbing, dangerous factory or agriculture jobs. That is a good thing.
      - ntsplnkv2 9y ago
        Neither would the millions of deaths from new advances in military technology be possible without automation and technology. Neither would the perpetuation of fake information and news on a global scale be possible. For every bit of good the internet has done, it has also allowed bad things to occur too. I'm not saying there is no good, but to say that it is only beneficial is a strong claim, I would argue it is more neutral.
        julianmarq 9y ago
        I read the comment you replied to several times and couldn't find where it said that technology was only beneficial. Now your claim that is neutral is the strong one, but also one very easy to test: Don't use or consume anything made possible by technology, if your life isn't impacted in any way then you're correct... In this isolated, anecdotal case.
        ntsplnkv2 9y ago
        > In Luddites' case the tech was clearly making our society a better place, Is what OP said-that is subjective. How is our world, better? Is it truly better? Sure-I have benefited from use of computers, but many people have been killed from use of computers (drones, for example). It is very possible that all of this technology eventually wipes out humanity, which would not be beneficial, would it? The claim that technology has made society better is a very strong one, which no argument was made as for why. Your test isn't a proper test. Technology is neutral in the sense that all of the good it has brought, has also brought upon lots of bad. For every piece of technology used for good(missiles for space travel) there is an equivalent use that has done harm. (Cruise missiles, which have killed scores of people.) I'm not debating that technology had impact-but to say it is all beneficial, is a huge stretch.
        adrianN 9y ago
        Nobody forces the development and adoption of new technology. So any successful technology is "better" for the people buying it. How far back would you go to claim that technology is not beneficial? Pre-industrial? Pre-agriculture? Pre-tool use? Technology made humans the most successful multicellular species we know.
    - adrianN 9y ago
      Look at the machine you're writing your comments on. That thing wouldn't be possible without automation and technology. Fewer people than ever are working mind-numbing, dangerous factory or agriculture jobs. That is a good thing.
  - imartin2k 9y ago
    True, and it is likely the same now again. So the only real question is: Can we get there without the devastating side effects of the transition period, and how?!
    - wav-part 9y ago
      Yes we can. Food & Shelter is cheap. We can very well survive until new marketable skills can be learnt.
      - ska 9y ago
        The lesson of the Luddites is that this doesn't really work - you are likely to have multigenerational negative economic effects. As a society you can either decide that is acceptable or plan to mitigate it, but ignoring it or wishing it away doesn't help.
      - ntsplnkv2 9y ago
        Maybe for people living in Silicon Valley or the west, if this is even feasible.
  - marcosdumay 9y ago
    On the short term - I mean, a century, maybe plus another half - it wasn't. Technology was making the life of everybody miserable, except for some very few. With time something else changed¹, and tech became a good thing. 1 - My bet is on ubiquity. Capital became so common it started to lose the competition with labor, and all the low hanging fruits for automation were gone, so it couldn't compete on new ways.

bmh_ca 9y ago

Supply side economics - against which the Luddites railed - is predicated upon the notion that it is better for the individual to adapt to hardship in an age of plenty than to create scarcity by imposing hardship on production.

datashovel 9y ago
Does this philosophy also assume the wealthiest won't try to manipulate scarcity in order to gain more wealth?
- golergka 9y ago
  All sides manipulate everything they can to gain more wealth. But as the parent comment says, not every possible manipulation is rational.
  - datashovel 9y ago
    Is the only rational manipulation that which makes me more wealthy?
    - tomrod 9y ago
      Yes, if that manipulation is driven by you, and if "wealth" satisfies your subjective preferences. So it could be money and assets, or accomplishments, or relationships, and so on.
RobertoG 9y ago
Not really, supply side economics is predicated upon 'Say's law': the notion that supply create its own demand. A notion that have been rejected in mainstream economics since the 50's.

bko 9y ago

>“The lesson you get from the end of the Luddites is: Do the people that are profiting off automation today want to participate in distributing their profits more widely around the population, or are they going to fight just as hard as they did back then?”... [Luddites] just thought if you’re going to make more money because you’re more productive, you need to kick some of that money back down to the workers. In actuality, what happens is as expenses decrease through automation, either capital is bid up or prices are reduced so that the profit margin (net income over revenue) is in line with the amount of risk, along with other things. So, true, a market economy does not "kick some of that money down to the workers", but rather spreads the benefits and lower costs to everyone through lower prices or higher quality. Were all the benefits of automation going to the bottom line of the business owners, you would see a steady increase in corporate profit margin [0]. Right now they're near historic highs but that is only very recent and the trend is not in line with the trend of automation in the US. Furthermore, if you look at the top 1%, much of their income came from wages and self-employment business income: > The richest 1% earn roughly half their income from wages and salaries, a quarter from self-employment and business income, and the remainder from interest, dividends, capital gains and rent. According to an analysis of tax returns by Jon Bakija of Williams College and two others, 16% of the top 1% were in medical professions and 8% were lawyers: shares that have changed little between 1979 and 2005, the latest year the authors examined (see chart). The most striking shift has been the growth of financial occupations, from just under 8% of the wealthy in 1979 to 13.9% in 2005. Their representation within the top 0.1% is even more pronounced: 18%, up from 11% in 1979. [1] [0] https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ON-BL063_StWise_G_20150612191313.jpg https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ON-BL063_StWise_G... [1] http://www.economist.com/node/21543178 http://www.economist.com/node/21543178

marcosdumay 9y ago
> Were all the benefits of automation going to the bottom line of the business owners, you would see a steady increase in corporate profit margin. It's no coincidence that "corporation" was something that only became viable on that time. Really, you got a very selective symptom, got a positive result, and are just dismissing it. Why? > The richest 1% earn roughly half their income from wages and salaries That's only because 1% is too big a number. Square it and look again.

padobson 9y ago

My profile[0] has a quote about Marx and Smith hitting on the same idea, and this piece is a good illustration of that. We have two competing sentiments - that workers are exploited by capitalists for the value they provide via their labor, and that the overall efficiency of an economy is dependent on people working in their own self interest. I think the problem we face is not how best to redistribute wealth, but how to align these two sentiments instead of creating an adversarial relationship between labor and entrepreneur. And I think Marx was right - workers should own the means of production. However, the historical methods to achieve this have been overwhelmingly inefficient and usually enforced at the point of a gun. That's a mistake. Meanwhile, in capitalist economies, joint ownership enterprises rose up and the cost of automation came down. Anyone can now buy a share of Apple stock for a day's wage[1], and carry around one of their super computers for a week's wage[2]. The real problem is one of culture. The Luddites had enough organization to mount frontal assaults on the textile mills that threatened them, so why couldn't they pool their resources and start their own mills? Today, we encourage young people to take on loads of debt to go to college, ensuring they leave college subject to the whims of capitalists. The sentiment is right: it makes sense to encourage young people to carve out a living for themselves early in life. But the cultural method of achieving this makes no sense. It would make more sense to encourage young people to take minimum wage jobs when they turn 15 and investing every spare dime that they have - thus giving themselves a basic income early in life. The article suggests minimum wages, public pension funds, and higher taxes on business is the answer. I think it's absurd to penalize the most efficient, most product parts of an economy for being more efficient and more productive. If coercive redistribution is something we deem necessary as a society, then we should be redistributing ownership of our most profitable corporations to those who are least able to fend for themselves. An equity tax that takes shares of APPL from Tim Cook and gives them to people on food stamps. That way, marginal increases in productivity are not disincentivized by tax policy, and laborers who now own the means of production are no longer exploited, but rather rewarded in tandem with the entrepreneur. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=padobson https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=padobson [1]https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL?ltr=1 https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL?ltr=1 [2]https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-7 https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-7

9y ago

Kenji 9y ago

People who disregard other people's property and cause vast destruction because of their ideology are never right. I have no respect for them. There are non-destructive ways to bring your message across in this situation. A society with automation will always be richer than one without it. The fight against automation is really baffling me. People are actively fighting against progress. Automation eliminates boring stupid jobs and replaces them with great, interesting ones. I am extremely happy to live in a country that embraces science & technology.

ntsplnkv2 9y ago
Why should anyone care about their society if they reap no benefit from it?
- Kenji 9y ago
  Can you also justify murder with that or only destruction of property?
  - ntsplnkv2 9y ago
    Many times revolutions have been murderous for that very reason. I think many Americans agree with the bloodshed of the American revolution.
  - Qwertious 9y ago
    You absolutely can - the basic argument for jobs is essentially "you can't reap the gains of society, if you aren't willing to contribute to it [in the form of doing your job]" - the underpinning argument being that there are jobs you can do. If there aren't any (paid) jobs, then you're stuck in a situation where people are taking away your rights to the gains of society, for their own benefit. At which point, you need to fix the system - either make it so that jobs aren't necessary to get the gains (i.e. the money), or create "jobs" that aren't strictly necessary, or, if you cannot fix the system, rip it down with violent revolution and make sure the replacement system isn't broken in the same way as the predecessor. Basically, it's outrage against a double-abstraction suckerpunch - either there's too much work or there's not enough work, you can't have both.

jtraffic 9y ago

For an illuminating perspective about different paths automation may take, which also uses history as a guide, see this: http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21701119-what-history-tells-us-about-future-artificial-intelligenceand-how-society-should http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21701119-what-history-... My key takeaway is that, often automation can drive prices down, which increases demand, which in turn increases employment. This counterbalancing effect can eventually increase total employment, although the new jobs may go to different people. AI replacing services is a bit different than robots replacing workers in manufacturing, in my view, because often the entire job is not replaced. It can have the effect of allowing the human to focus on (currently) non-automated portions of the job. Accounting is ripe for automation, for example, but I predict it will be a good thing for most accountants. Well, predictions are dangerous, but, there, I've said it. As far as manual labor is concerned, it seems to me that ship has sailed.

dalbasal 9y ago

I think it might be worth pointing out that catastrophic "technological unemployment" is far from a sure thing at this point. We're still speculating that this is a thing which may happen in the future. So far, labour force participation rates in developed economies is still in the same 60%-70% band that it's ranged in since women joined the workforce en masse in the 60s. I'm not saying it's impossible, just that we're not in any better a position to judge than 19th century people were. These things are pretty hard to predict. Ultimately "AI" is not unique economically (short of Kurzweil-esque machine consciousness). The industrial revolution massively reduced labour needed to produce spoons or cars but actually increased employment rates in manufacturing. It was trade that reduced manufacturing employment rates. The communications revolution replaced the need for secretaries, typists, errand boys and many other clerical roles. There might be more people employed in "administration" today than at any point in history^. The relationship between labour saving technology and the demand for labour is complex, difficult to speculate about. ^The administration boom (pointed out by David Graeber) is baffling to me. I'd love to hear some theories on it.

RobertoG 9y ago
Of course, as they say, making prediction is always difficult, specially about the future. But we can make educated guesses. We know from the past that new jobs are created in activities for what there are not machines able to do it. We are running out of things inside that category. It's not so bad an idea to stop and think about what could happen when we arrive there. "short of Kurzweil-esque machine consciousness" I have never received a dime for being conscious, but I have been paid for making inferences that machines can't do. That they can't do yet.