4 ms·

This perspective very much ignores economic friction. The luddites were a thing because, metaphorically, not every washer can become a programmer. These large s

by mamami 1y ago

This perspective very much ignores economic friction. The luddites were a thing because, metaphorically, not every washer can become a programmer. These large scale analyses often treat one person losing their job and a different person finding a job as equivalent, which does not reflect any kind of material reality

grafmax 1y ago
Yeah actually the labor conditions of the working class were horrible as they entered factories, conditions only remedied by the spurs of the labor movement.
- sskates 1y ago
  Being a farmer was worse!
  - grafmax 1y ago
    Farming was bad, but before the labor movement, factories were generally worse. People chose to move to factories not because they were superior to farming but because their old livelihoods were taken from them.
    - Jensson 1y ago
      Factories paid better. The working conditions might have been bad but factories paid so much more that people did it anyway, it isn't that you couldn't be a farmer but working in a factory made you richer.
  - achierius 1y ago
    No, that's not true. We can tell because farmers, by and large, strongly resisted attempts to push them off of their land, and generally only moved into cities in large surges every time the economy slumped (Baumol's cost disease having lead to cost increases for the tools they needed to do their farming). Before the modern era, cities were actually net-negative growth rates due to disease, starvation, exposure, murder, etc. -- a fact which was certainly not true of the countryside. Even just operationally we can think -- how common was it for farmers to lose an arm to a threshing machine, to develop black lung from inhaling coal, to take orders from another man like he was their boss? People liked being farmers, people liked owning their own land, people liked being their own boss, people liked feeding themselves, people liked to be independent and self-reliant. All of that goes away when one moves to the city to work in a factory or mine. What you're saying is a common understanding, but it's a false one, rooted in Victorian-era attitudes towards medieval peasants that really have nothing to do with reality.
    - jcranmer 1y ago
      I must disagree. The most important thing to understand about peasant farmers is that their economic prospects are tied to the availability of land, and land is a finite resource of which there is not enough and no more can be had. Most pre-modern societies are set up to extract every possible extra amount of food produced, which basically means that in times of plenty, you get more people who have no work available for them (which means they up and leave to the cities, the only places which have the sufficient labor pool). > People liked being farmers, people liked owning their own land, people liked being their own boss, people liked feeding themselves, people liked to be independent and self-reliant. Oooh boy. There's a vast array of different socioeconomic statuses varying through time and space, but broadly speaking, most peasants did not own their own land, and even the majority of people who did own their own land did not own enough to feed themselves from their own land. And even if you did own your land and enough of it to feed your family, you probably still need to borrow the plow and oxen teams, and other farming implements, from your local lord. And since you are perennially on borderline starvation, you're not independent and self-reliant, you're entirely reliant on the village communal support to help you get through those times when your fields were a little bare. Pretending that medieval peasantry was some sort of idyllic lifestyle is exactly the kind of Victorian-era fantasy you're decrying. What peasant life offered wasn't comfort but stability. Peasant life may suck, but at least you knew what you were in for. If you moved to a city (let alone further away), you left your support network, you left everybody you knew, maybe for a shot at a better life... but with essentially no recourse if anything failed. Or you could stay, where things wouldn't get better, but they also wouldn't get worse. Unless there were a major calamity and staying wasn't an option.
      - Balgair 1y ago
        Bret Devereaux is going through the 'peasant experience' right now here: https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-i-households/ https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an... It's not done yet, and I am eagerly awaiting the end results. That said, from what I can tell from his writings, jcrammer is mostly correct. The peasant life - the modal life - was just awful hard work for many decades. It was not nice and it was not better than the factories most of the time. Yes there were bad factories, a lot of them, but they lasted a brief time. The Factory Act in Britian was in 1833, only a few decades after the factories were even a thing. Aside: We really need better education in labor laws overall.
  - p4coder 1y ago
    Only if you think living longer is bad. Till early 20th century, urban life expectancy was lower than rural life expectancy in Britain. It was dubbed urban penalty. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7186836/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7186836/
- mieses 1y ago
  if you took away the factories, the outcomes for the working class were probably worse. it's easy to form polemics against new things that could have done better.
  - exasperaited 1y ago
    This is literally not true. People did dangerous jobs beforehand but the danger was handled in experienced contexts and with meaningful consequences. If your ten-year-old apprentice died because of your negligence, it damaged your business both in the day to day, in the long run, and reputationally. So you kept your apprentices alive, and you ultimately had to feed them. For the first few decades of the industrial revolution, if a kid died in a factory situation because they lost concentration out of hunger and exhaustion, so what? Get another kid. Deaths of semi-skilled labour happened at scale, because the agency of those who were looking after them was taken away. It really did take mass protests and labour organising to deal with it. Industry has an institutional memory of what that cost them, which is why unions are treated the way they are now, and why they are so urgently needed again.
    - grafmax 1y ago
      Yeah people look at the rise in quality of life in this period and through a simplistic view misattribute it to “factories”. Factories initially lowered living standards among workers and increased productivity. That’s because gains in productivity went to the owners. It’s only the labor movement that was able to shift some of that new productivity to the people who did the actual work and pull the working class out of the horrific conditions capitalism had created - through collective bargaining and the reforms instituted under pressure from labor.
      - exasperaited 1y ago
        Exactly this. The early factory environments were more terrifying than contemporary war zones; objectively dangerous, non-stop, deafening machinery with no safety mechanisms where some jobs done by children were literally life-and-death.
anon7725 1y ago
The Luddite analogy is apt, however its sense is opposite to the way that it’s usually presented. The Luddites were skilled artisans in the textile industry. They often worked from home, owning spinning and weaving equipment and acting as what we’d call independent contractors today. The mechanization of the textile industry resulted in work that required less skill and had to be performed in a dangerous factory for suppressed wages that were determined by a cartel of factory owners rather than a robust market of small makers. Sitting here 200 years on from the Industrial Revolution it seems to be an obvious good. But it sure did not sound like an appealing thing to live through if you weren’t one of the few owners of the means of production.
- sethammons 1y ago
  The pollution and waste of textiles brings into question the obvious good. Yes, we have $5 shirts. But also yes, we "donate" old clothes and those donations end up clotting the beaches of impoverished nations. Scrub through this report from ABC so your stomach can do backflips on how bad externalities are not tracked in modern prices: https://youtu.be/bB3kuuBPVys?si=Lgb4z-nvrXqYkLQt https://youtu.be/bB3kuuBPVys?si=Lgb4z-nvrXqYkLQt

by mamami 1y ago

grafmax 1y ago

Yeah actually the labor conditions of the working class were horrible as they entered factories, conditions only remedied by the spurs of the labor movement.

sskates 1y ago
Being a farmer was worse!
- grafmax 1y ago
  Farming was bad, but before the labor movement, factories were generally worse. People chose to move to factories not because they were superior to farming but because their old livelihoods were taken from them.
  - Jensson 1y ago
    Factories paid better. The working conditions might have been bad but factories paid so much more that people did it anyway, it isn't that you couldn't be a farmer but working in a factory made you richer.
- achierius 1y ago
  No, that's not true. We can tell because farmers, by and large, strongly resisted attempts to push them off of their land, and generally only moved into cities in large surges every time the economy slumped (Baumol's cost disease having lead to cost increases for the tools they needed to do their farming). Before the modern era, cities were actually net-negative growth rates due to disease, starvation, exposure, murder, etc. -- a fact which was certainly not true of the countryside. Even just operationally we can think -- how common was it for farmers to lose an arm to a threshing machine, to develop black lung from inhaling coal, to take orders from another man like he was their boss? People liked being farmers, people liked owning their own land, people liked being their own boss, people liked feeding themselves, people liked to be independent and self-reliant. All of that goes away when one moves to the city to work in a factory or mine. What you're saying is a common understanding, but it's a false one, rooted in Victorian-era attitudes towards medieval peasants that really have nothing to do with reality.
  - jcranmer 1y ago
    I must disagree. The most important thing to understand about peasant farmers is that their economic prospects are tied to the availability of land, and land is a finite resource of which there is not enough and no more can be had. Most pre-modern societies are set up to extract every possible extra amount of food produced, which basically means that in times of plenty, you get more people who have no work available for them (which means they up and leave to the cities, the only places which have the sufficient labor pool). > People liked being farmers, people liked owning their own land, people liked being their own boss, people liked feeding themselves, people liked to be independent and self-reliant. Oooh boy. There's a vast array of different socioeconomic statuses varying through time and space, but broadly speaking, most peasants did not own their own land, and even the majority of people who did own their own land did not own enough to feed themselves from their own land. And even if you did own your land and enough of it to feed your family, you probably still need to borrow the plow and oxen teams, and other farming implements, from your local lord. And since you are perennially on borderline starvation, you're not independent and self-reliant, you're entirely reliant on the village communal support to help you get through those times when your fields were a little bare. Pretending that medieval peasantry was some sort of idyllic lifestyle is exactly the kind of Victorian-era fantasy you're decrying. What peasant life offered wasn't comfort but stability. Peasant life may suck, but at least you knew what you were in for. If you moved to a city (let alone further away), you left your support network, you left everybody you knew, maybe for a shot at a better life... but with essentially no recourse if anything failed. Or you could stay, where things wouldn't get better, but they also wouldn't get worse. Unless there were a major calamity and staying wasn't an option.
    - Balgair 1y ago
      Bret Devereaux is going through the 'peasant experience' right now here: https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-i-households/ https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an... It's not done yet, and I am eagerly awaiting the end results. That said, from what I can tell from his writings, jcrammer is mostly correct. The peasant life - the modal life - was just awful hard work for many decades. It was not nice and it was not better than the factories most of the time. Yes there were bad factories, a lot of them, but they lasted a brief time. The Factory Act in Britian was in 1833, only a few decades after the factories were even a thing. Aside: We really need better education in labor laws overall.
- p4coder 1y ago
  Only if you think living longer is bad. Till early 20th century, urban life expectancy was lower than rural life expectancy in Britain. It was dubbed urban penalty. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7186836/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7186836/
mieses 1y ago
if you took away the factories, the outcomes for the working class were probably worse. it's easy to form polemics against new things that could have done better.
- exasperaited 1y ago
  This is literally not true. People did dangerous jobs beforehand but the danger was handled in experienced contexts and with meaningful consequences. If your ten-year-old apprentice died because of your negligence, it damaged your business both in the day to day, in the long run, and reputationally. So you kept your apprentices alive, and you ultimately had to feed them. For the first few decades of the industrial revolution, if a kid died in a factory situation because they lost concentration out of hunger and exhaustion, so what? Get another kid. Deaths of semi-skilled labour happened at scale, because the agency of those who were looking after them was taken away. It really did take mass protests and labour organising to deal with it. Industry has an institutional memory of what that cost them, which is why unions are treated the way they are now, and why they are so urgently needed again.
  - grafmax 1y ago
    Yeah people look at the rise in quality of life in this period and through a simplistic view misattribute it to “factories”. Factories initially lowered living standards among workers and increased productivity. That’s because gains in productivity went to the owners. It’s only the labor movement that was able to shift some of that new productivity to the people who did the actual work and pull the working class out of the horrific conditions capitalism had created - through collective bargaining and the reforms instituted under pressure from labor.
    - exasperaited 1y ago
      Exactly this. The early factory environments were more terrifying than contemporary war zones; objectively dangerous, non-stop, deafening machinery with no safety mechanisms where some jobs done by children were literally life-and-death.

anon7725 1y ago

The Luddite analogy is apt, however its sense is opposite to the way that it’s usually presented. The Luddites were skilled artisans in the textile industry. They often worked from home, owning spinning and weaving equipment and acting as what we’d call independent contractors today. The mechanization of the textile industry resulted in work that required less skill and had to be performed in a dangerous factory for suppressed wages that were determined by a cartel of factory owners rather than a robust market of small makers. Sitting here 200 years on from the Industrial Revolution it seems to be an obvious good. But it sure did not sound like an appealing thing to live through if you weren’t one of the few owners of the means of production.

sethammons 1y ago
The pollution and waste of textiles brings into question the obvious good. Yes, we have $5 shirts. But also yes, we "donate" old clothes and those donations end up clotting the beaches of impoverished nations. Scrub through this report from ABC so your stomach can do backflips on how bad externalities are not tracked in modern prices: https://youtu.be/bB3kuuBPVys?si=Lgb4z-nvrXqYkLQt https://youtu.be/bB3kuuBPVys?si=Lgb4z-nvrXqYkLQt