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I would hope it's not like that. Not after reading a quote someone posted about Lowell just yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18060336 https://new

I would hope it's not like that. Not after reading a quote someone posted about Lowell just yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18060336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18060336

nostrademons 8y ago
The interesting thing about that quote is that her family would've been fucked - even more fucked - had the Lowell factories not existed. The source of her family's misery was "a father’s debts are to be paid, an aged mother to be sup- ported, a brother’s ambition to be aided", all of which are pre-existing conditions that ultimately result from life (and perhaps some poor financial management). Similarly, I think we're fucked today, and the source of our fuckedness has nothing to do with technology. It comes from overpopulation (there are now 7.4B people on this earth, compared to 4.5B when I was a kid and 1B when my parents were kids), and climate change, and resource depletion, and living like the good times will always go on rather than investing in the future. Life requires resources - when the planet has more lives to support and fewer resources to support them, the standard of living will necessarily go down.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  It's not a part of history I know enough about - the quote raises almost as many questions as answers. I surely wouldn't appreciate being locked in a factory for a 12 hour shift whatever the reasons. The little I do know about factory towns make me think the father's debt might very well be because of the factory town. It was common for the worker to be paid in factory currency to be spent in the factory store, live in a factory house, and for things to be organised such that they'd never make enough to pay off a debt accrued when they arrived and took on the house, or make enough to ever leave. They were a very different thing to the model towns of the philanthropic industrialists of the Victorian age. To your second point, sadly, I am in full agreement.
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    In her specific case, the factory didn't cause her father's debt. Sarah Bagley was born in Sandia, NH; like many of the early mill girls, she was a domestic migrant [1]. The roots of her family's financial troubles were just that her parents each had many siblings and then they had 4 kids, which meant that whatever property the family owned would've been long since diluted. I don't want to make the point that she shouldn't have been fighting for labor rights - a 40 hour work week and egalitarian distribution of wealth is better than what conditions were like in the 1840s, and we wouldn't have gotten them without activists like her. I do want to make the point that empirically, some period of time where everybody in the labor force is fucked over seems to be necessary for economic development. Without it, there's no incentive to, well, ditch the labor force for the far more uncertain world of entrepreneurship & innovation. And this has been observed in basically every industrializing country - Britain, Germany, Russia, Japan, now China. Once the new industries and new technologies are established, then there's usually a consolidation period where social equilibrium is restored; in the U.S, this was from the 1930s-1980s. It appears that you can't do the latter until the former is complete, though, because you don't know what form the industries will take or what the centers of power will be. Unions were a very effective check on industrialists, but it seems likely they won't be nearly as effective in the information age, because the set of roles that workers occupy in the tech economy is more diverse, and their necessity to a company's day-to-day operations is smaller. If all engineers at Google walk off the job, Google Search will continue to run, and it will continue to run for several weeks afterwards. That blunts the effect of a strike or work stoppage. Probably we need things like regulations around data ownership & access, pro-competition statutes, and widespread education & job training to restore social equilibrium in the data age. It's really hard to judge until all the technologies that'll make it up have been invented though. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Bagley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Bagley

I would hope it's not like that. Not after reading a quote someone posted about Lowell just yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18060336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18060336

nostrademons 8y ago

The interesting thing about that quote is that her family would've been fucked - even more fucked - had the Lowell factories not existed. The source of her family's misery was "a father’s debts are to be paid, an aged mother to be sup- ported, a brother’s ambition to be aided", all of which are pre-existing conditions that ultimately result from life (and perhaps some poor financial management). Similarly, I think we're fucked today, and the source of our fuckedness has nothing to do with technology. It comes from overpopulation (there are now 7.4B people on this earth, compared to 4.5B when I was a kid and 1B when my parents were kids), and climate change, and resource depletion, and living like the good times will always go on rather than investing in the future. Life requires resources - when the planet has more lives to support and fewer resources to support them, the standard of living will necessarily go down.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
It's not a part of history I know enough about - the quote raises almost as many questions as answers. I surely wouldn't appreciate being locked in a factory for a 12 hour shift whatever the reasons. The little I do know about factory towns make me think the father's debt might very well be because of the factory town. It was common for the worker to be paid in factory currency to be spent in the factory store, live in a factory house, and for things to be organised such that they'd never make enough to pay off a debt accrued when they arrived and took on the house, or make enough to ever leave. They were a very different thing to the model towns of the philanthropic industrialists of the Victorian age. To your second point, sadly, I am in full agreement.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  In her specific case, the factory didn't cause her father's debt. Sarah Bagley was born in Sandia, NH; like many of the early mill girls, she was a domestic migrant [1]. The roots of her family's financial troubles were just that her parents each had many siblings and then they had 4 kids, which meant that whatever property the family owned would've been long since diluted. I don't want to make the point that she shouldn't have been fighting for labor rights - a 40 hour work week and egalitarian distribution of wealth is better than what conditions were like in the 1840s, and we wouldn't have gotten them without activists like her. I do want to make the point that empirically, some period of time where everybody in the labor force is fucked over seems to be necessary for economic development. Without it, there's no incentive to, well, ditch the labor force for the far more uncertain world of entrepreneurship & innovation. And this has been observed in basically every industrializing country - Britain, Germany, Russia, Japan, now China. Once the new industries and new technologies are established, then there's usually a consolidation period where social equilibrium is restored; in the U.S, this was from the 1930s-1980s. It appears that you can't do the latter until the former is complete, though, because you don't know what form the industries will take or what the centers of power will be. Unions were a very effective check on industrialists, but it seems likely they won't be nearly as effective in the information age, because the set of roles that workers occupy in the tech economy is more diverse, and their necessity to a company's day-to-day operations is smaller. If all engineers at Google walk off the job, Google Search will continue to run, and it will continue to run for several weeks afterwards. That blunts the effect of a strike or work stoppage. Probably we need things like regulations around data ownership & access, pro-competition statutes, and widespread education & job training to restore social equilibrium in the data age. It's really hard to judge until all the technologies that'll make it up have been invented though. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Bagley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Bagley