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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
This is an example of learning too much from history. Pick one or two examples that fit nicely into a theory, declare it a law or principle, and then use it to judge or predict other events. Other events may or may not fit the pattern, so it's still a crap shoot whether you can use this to predict or understand anything else.
Uber was enabled by technology, not by some sort of social pattern.
... 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...
What social phenomenon preceded Uber that enabled it? Unemployment? If that's the answer, then this pattern predicts everything and thereby predicts nothing.
People leaving restaurants and having to stand in the rain yelling at cars to flag down medallion cabs, and pondering, "There has to be a better way of doing this..."
It's been happening for centuries:
A programmable punch card loom replaced the need to have a group of four or more artisans spending weeks making one garment, and where no two were perfectly identical. The punch card operator just needed to make sure that the thread reels never ran out and even that was automated. That led to the Luddites. One that battle was over, looms could be powered by waterwheel power, then steam engines, then by electricity. Punched cards were replaced by electronics and then digital media. It only takes one Photoshop artist and a technician to operate 15 digital looms.
Automated traffic lights replaced the need for traffic police. Automated elevators replaced the need for elevator operators. Automated telephone exchanges replaced the need for telephone operators.
We had the Wapping dispute where print workers refused to modernize. They had left it so late to catch up, that by the time the management wanted to introduce new technology, those print shops consisting of copper drums, boilerplate and teams of men adding and removing metal print would be replaced by a commercial laser printer running PostScript and no-one was needed to convert journalist shorthand into metalwork. Their jobs had been vapourized overnight. This was before the internet so they couldn't retrain as web page designers.
In the 1990's, there was the goal of the "paperless office". By using high resolution large screens, there was less need to print documents out. The other advantage was that they could flatten management structures by going from a 1:3 ratio of directors:managers:supervisors:engineers down to a 1:10 ratio. Those managers either took retirement or moved into the financial industry.
The next phase is that engineers want to focus on one particular skill or set of skills, while project managers like to push engineers "outside their comfort zone" so that no one person is irreplaceable. That just leads to engineers choosing to be freelancers and contractors so that their duties are tied down in writing and they don't get nudged out of the way as new employees arrive.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
that it wasn't a bullet that killed JFK, it was the person who fired it. Which sounds reasonable, except that in the absence of said bullet he'd still be alive and that it was the accuracy of modern firearms that made the shot possible...
In the last 50 years America has doubled it's manufacturing output while cutting manufacturing jobs by 1/3. Our public policy has almost completely ignored that. The end of large scale manufacturing jobs as the primary employer is more than anything what killed Unions, and most economists agree that loss of bargaining power is why wages aren't going up even though unemployment is low.
This entire article strikes me as yet another attempt to fit the square peg that is corporate capitalism into the round whole that is society's well being. It's working backwards from it's conclusion.
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Simple minded view which indicates blindness to the complications which have arisen.
It starts out that to consume resources, man must invest and work to gather those resources.
Next, trade enters the picture and individuals exchange resources and both are better off.
Then banking enters the system, and rather than storing valuable resources, a placeholder is stored, an I.O.U. of sorts. Wealth is no longer perishable, it can be accumulated or saved over time.
Then those that save wealth, who store favors, gain a disproportionate advantage over those that don't. They are able to acquire ownership over greater means of production, and take a larger share of the resources, or the stored value of those resources.
Next the wealthy are then able to incentivize the workforce to engineer more effect means of production. Which allows them to gain more resources for less effort.
Then things start to break down. A growing population requires more resources. Those who control the means of production can do so at such high levels of efficiency that they do not need the laborers. Without a need, there is no incentive to redistribute resources. Any resources the workers provide only dilute the value of those resouces, and thus reduces the resources gained in return.
The next stage is one of two things, either those who have optimized the means of production begin giving generously from their capacity, rather than according to supply and demand economics, or the there is a layering effect, where the classes become separate economies or even nations. A third world country living amongst a first world country, potentially warring for the resources contained within.
There is a old Bible verse about feeding 5,000 people. It starts with one basket containing a few loaves of bread and fish.
As a people we produce more everday than we need. We have more than enough for everybody, but our economic system does not value human life intrinsically.
Thus we value the individual's ability to increase production capacity and wealth stores. Not all are equally suited to such advanced thinking and foresight. In a purely evolutionary system these once strong laborers, the former backbones of our economy, the shoulders upon which we have stood, would die off due to not being able to acquire and manage the resources to compete in an ever increasingly intellectually challenging economic game.
But there are those which ask the moral and ethical questions of "what am I working for?"... Are we merely working to i crease the wealth of a "noble few", while hoping to skim enough resources off the top to survive? Or are we working for some greater purpose? Are we working to ensure that all of humanity is free to pursue life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
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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The kinds of social decisions we can make, that is to say, the kind that are practical, are determined by the technology available.
You can't choose to have a city, and to have zero slave labor, if you tech level is only what the Romans had. The choice to abolish slavery was made only after the tech level made people productive enough that the city could function on the effort of paid laborers who are free to choose their own jobs.
And so on.
Actually, the Romans had access to a whole bunch of technology that could have replaced a lot of the slave labour but chose not to use it. They 1) thought it would be a bother to have a lot of jobless slaves and 2) figured slaves were cheaper in most cases. In other cases, they just didn't see the technology as something that could be useful for work and production, since they had slaves for that and didn't think there was any need to tinker with that.
Just like today, there are a lot of things you could easily automate (the technology exists), but it's still cheaper to have people do the work...especially if you can outsource the labour to a cheap and poor country. You can see today when you go from a country where labour is cheap to a country where labour is expensive, that in the latter, there is a lot more automation.
As for whether slavery was necessary in Roman society to build its cities...well, ancient China also had large cities, was technologically similar to Rome, but was much less reliant on slaves. Slaves existed yes, but were usually a much smaller portion of the population than in the Roman Empire and many emperors actively tried to ban slavery or reduce it.