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It's Not Technology That's Disrupting Our Jobs (nytimes.com)
The history of labor shows that technology does not usually drive social change, argues Louis Hyman, director of the Institute for Workplace Studies at the ILR School at Cornell. On the contrary, social change is typically driven by decisions we make about how to organize our world. Only later does technology swoop in, accelerating and consolidating those changes. From a report: This insight is crucial for anyone concerned about the insecurity and other shortcomings of the gig economy. For it reminds us that far from being an unavoidable consequence of technological progress, the nature of work always remains a matter of social choice. It is not a result of an algorithm; it is a collection of decisions by corporations and policymakers. Consider the Industrial Revolution. Well before it took place, in the 19th century, another revolution in work occurred in the 18th century, which historians call the "industrious revolution." Before this revolution, people worked where they lived, perhaps at a farm or a shop. The manufacturing of textiles, for example, relied on networks of independent farmers who spun fibers and wove cloth. They worked on their own; they were not employees.
In the industrious revolution, however, manufacturers gathered workers under one roof, where the labor could be divided and supervised. For the first time on a large scale, home life and work life were separated. People no longer controlled how they worked, and they received a wage instead of sharing directly in the profits of their efforts. This was a necessary precondition for the Industrial Revolution. While factory technology would consolidate this development, the creation of factory technology was possible only because people's relationship to work had already changed. A power loom would have served no purpose for networks of farmers making cloth at home. The same goes for today's digital revolution.
In the industrious revolution, however, manufacturers gathered workers under one roof, where the labor could be divided and supervised. For the first time on a large scale, home life and work life were separated. People no longer controlled how they worked, and they received a wage instead of sharing directly in the profits of their efforts. This was a necessary precondition for the Industrial Revolution. While factory technology would consolidate this development, the creation of factory technology was possible only because people's relationship to work had already changed. A power loom would have served no purpose for networks of farmers making cloth at home. The same goes for today's digital revolution.
So, it's not the technology, but the people that no longer need to hire people that are 'at fault'... lovely. Thanks for that insight!
The whole point isn't who to blame. It's the fact that technology is exposing a deep, deep flaw in the structure of our society.
If folks don't need to use other people to make money and own virtually everything, the economy itself is useless for any meaningful society.
And if technology makes it so that anyone that gets ahead can almost automatically build to the point where they break the idea of a meaningful economy.. then basing that society or economy on people being paid for things that can be automated is a losing move in the larger game.
If society at large seeks to actually serve to expand human experience beyond just the needs of the ultra-rich, then it likely should seek to use that same technology to get people to legitimately help other people, rather than just have the rich monetize more aspects of their lives.
The whole idea of corporations is kind of a new idea historically - we can invent other ideas, with more forethought than the way courtrooms defined the things we have running the world right now.
But we do have to understand why technology will end the good things about our current economy, beyond just finding folks to blame.
Ryan Fenton
... money has been decoupled from productive activity and investment seeking the highest returns and so gone largely into speculation and basically sophisticated forms of rent seeking and fraud. Let's be honest, technology just speeds this along by enabling big compaies to engage in labour arbitrage. Taking advantage of the huge wage differences of people across the globe thanks to the internet and most people don't have the money or are incapable of moving from where they are at from different reasons. This naive idea that human beings are fungible widgets has put a serious strain on society.
Let's not forget the concept of dead money, corporations are sitting on billions they are not investing in anyone or anything. We're experiecing total failure of capitalism and nobody noticed. AKA money is pooling in the hands of ceo's and the ceo's are just sitting on it, at sane society woud intervene and just start investing in people, tools and jobs if the corporate fatcats won't do it. So it's pure politics and mass political ignorance that's at the root of our problems. Basically people are rotting on the sidelines because our corporate leadership is an emporer with no clothes.
https://www.theglobeandmail.co...
The Industrial Revolution didn't start in the 19th century, it started in the 18th century.
This isn't a real story. It is a story about an academic who selected some niche terminology to make normal stuff sound like something new. But a new phrasing is something new in the present, not something newly discovered about the past.
You are right there is a big problem with this guys story - though not quite what you are saying.
I have been a student of the Industrial Revolution, and how it started, for a long time. And the concept of the "industrious revolution" has some validity I think, but it is nothing like what this guy describes.
In the industrious revolution, however, manufacturers gathered workers under one roof, where the labor could be divided and supervised. For the first time on a large scale, home life and work life were separated. People no longer controlled how they worked, and they received a wage instead of sharing directly in the profits of their efforts. This was a necessary precondition for the Industrial Revolution.
This. Didn't. Happen. There is no other way to put it. No, textile workers were not gathered into big pre-industrial workshops to spin thread, or weave cloth. They did this at home. The "industrious" part was the high degree of organization that this distributed textile industry achieved -- "putters out" distributed raw cotton to households, collected the thread that was spun, passed it on to homes were weaving was done, then collected the cloth. Businessmen in London financed this vast operation, and would later put their capital into factories. This large scale system of central organization, and the increased output it generated are the real "industrious revolution", along with the growing sophistication in the mechanical arts, which was the prerequisite for building factory machinery.
This was a necessary precondition for the Industrial Revolution. While factory technology would consolidate this development, the creation of factory technology was possible only because people’s relationship to work had already changed. A power loom would have served no purpose for networks of farmers making cloth at home.
Quite so. Which is why it wasn't invented until textile factories had been in operation for 15 years (1785) and first factory to use them wasn't built until 1790. The first factories didn't weave cloth, they spun thread, a much simpler process. Thread spinning factories put everyone did it on a spinning wheel out of work in the 1770s. The spinning jenny was invented in 1764, and factories using it (and Arkwright's water frame) started going up by 1770.
Home weavers took it on the chin full force 1810-1820 when weaving machines that could handle the many weights of fabric and weaving patterns became available. It was around 1811 that the Ned Ludd legend arose, with the Luddites.
And yes there was a pre-existing process that was changing the relationship to work. It was called "enclosure". Common fields that had been used by farmers for centuries were reorganized into estates that could be sold (or mortgaged), which created a new class of unemployed people - who could be put to work in factories.
The problem for the textile craftswomen and men of England was not that they were herded into workshops or factories, it was that factory equipment was something like 100 times as productive as spinning wheels (and later looms), so it required very few people to operate. Everyone else was simply put out of work.
Seriously this guy's article is a fun-house mirror version of real history. He is "an economic historian"? Dear Lord.
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