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Among the most viable of all economic delusions is the belief that machines on net balance create unemployment. Let us turn to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.
by andrenth 4y ago
Among the most viable of all economic delusions is the belief that machines on net balance create unemployment.
Let us turn to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The first chapter [...] is called “Of the division of labor,” and on the second page of this first chapter the author tells us that a workman unacquainted with the use of machinery employed in pin-making “could scarce make one pin a day, and certainly not twenty,” but with the use of this machinery he can make 4,800 pins a day. In the pin-making industry there was already, if machines merely throw men out of jobs, 99.98 percent unemployment.
Arkwright invented his cotton-spinning machinery in 1760. At the time it was estimated that there were in England 5,200 spinners using spinning wheels, and 2,700 weavers - in all 7,900 persons engaged in the production of cotton textiles. The introduction of Arkwright’s invention was opposed on the ground that it threatened the livelihood of the workers, and the opposition had to be put down by force. Yet in 1787 [...] the number of persons actually involved in the spinning and weaving of cotton had risen from 7,900 to 320,000, an increase of 4,400 percent.
- pydry 4y agohttps://qz.com/962427/what-its-like-to-be-a-modern-engraver-the-most-automated-job-in-the-united-states/ https://qz.com/962427/what-its-like-to-be-a-modern-engraver-... Not much has changed. It's generally regarded as preferable to try and gently guide the pitchforks away from squishy human elites, though. Robots and the inevitable march of technological progress are both good scapegoats for policymaking that very deliberately expands the precariat.
- mattigames 4y agoUnlike the cotton spining machine the aim of the robots is explicitly aimed to reduce the number of humans on any economic manufacturing chain, it has no resemblance to cotton-spinning specially when the space for growth has been reduced so much (unless you subscribe to the believe it is infinite), there is an obsession to believe everything has already happened before and that any concerns with tech can be dismissed by cherry picking examples of anybody complaining about any tech in the past.
- thelock85 4y agoWhat bearing does an increase in the overall number of industry workers have on whether or not the manual weavers and spinners were justified in their concerns (with respect to their own livelihood) about automation? With respect to that increase, there is context missing around the American South exponentially increasing cheap cotton exports around the same time, where coincidentally laborers were not even workers but enslaved peoples. Even if the takeaway is livelihoods overall improved because of more jobs, then that is at the hidden cost of free (and grossly inhumane) labor elsewhere in the supply chain during the time period.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- CyanBird 4y agoThe cotton industry in England is an horrendous example given that English industrial development on cotton pivoted entirely on the captured and forced to deindustrialize subcontinent of India where it was made so all imports of cotton had to be made from England, therefore allowing a captured market to subsidize English industry in detriment of their own population and competition either in quality or quantity
- ericmcer 4y agoThe cotton-spinning machine would be equivalent to inventing an entire new method for building something. The robots today are 1-to-1 replacements for a specific human task.