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You're missing the trees for the forest. The Industrial Revolution was terrible for the people who were working during it. Their jobs got eliminated and they on

by heylook 2mo ago

You're missing the trees for the forest. The Industrial Revolution was terrible for the people who were working during it. Their jobs got eliminated and they only sorta sometimes were able to retrain for the new jobs, and the working conditions in those new jobs were atrocious, exactly because they were new enough that we didn't yet have safety regulations for them. It was only their children who eventually saw any improvement in working/living conditions, and it was only because of all the absolutely awful things that happened to their parents. Safety regulations are written in blood. It only looks like consistent improvement if you zoom out to a level that obscures intra-generation experiences. At the level of the actual human beings subjected to the turbulence, it was awful.

bunderbunder 2mo ago
I’ve seen a similar thing with globalization. Macro scale, it’s great. Much number go up. Zoom in, though, and it also impoverished my hometown and many others like it. A whole generation saw their job prospects gutted, and had no realistic options for a career shift because it’s really hard to get an entry level position when you’re middle aged; doubly so when there’s a glut of middle aged people looking for jobs. And waving away the pain those people experience with an appeal to large scale, intergenerational, historical trends is simply heartless.
mplewis 2mo ago
Exactly. Workplaces became safer and more equitable to the laborers despite technological advances, not because of them.
briga 2mo ago
Awful compared to what though? To our modern perspectives yes, but for subsistence farmers working in the fields 16 hours a day and rarely far away from starvation, life in a factory might not seem so bad. After all, wages were far worse before the factories and wage growth was almost non-existent.

by heylook 2mo ago

bunderbunder 2mo ago

I’ve seen a similar thing with globalization. Macro scale, it’s great. Much number go up. Zoom in, though, and it also impoverished my hometown and many others like it. A whole generation saw their job prospects gutted, and had no realistic options for a career shift because it’s really hard to get an entry level position when you’re middle aged; doubly so when there’s a glut of middle aged people looking for jobs. And waving away the pain those people experience with an appeal to large scale, intergenerational, historical trends is simply heartless.

mplewis 2mo ago

Exactly. Workplaces became safer and more equitable to the laborers despite technological advances, not because of them.

briga 2mo ago

Awful compared to what though? To our modern perspectives yes, but for subsistence farmers working in the fields 16 hours a day and rarely far away from starvation, life in a factory might not seem so bad. After all, wages were far worse before the factories and wage growth was almost non-existent.