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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

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.

Being a farmer was worse!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bret Devereaux is going through the 'peasant experience' right now here:

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.

I'm familiar with Bret Devereaux, but you're underestimating the state of industrial labor. It did not suddenly get happy-cheery in 1833; if anything I would say almost another century of intense political organization was necessary before people were "secure" in their lives and jobs again. C.f. the Coal Wars in Appalachia.

>land is a finite resource of which there is not enough and no more can be had.

That's not as true in the US's development. There's such an abundance of land and rapid expansion made it easier and easier for new landowners to grab acres of land. American to this day is still very sparse as a country.

US farmers had a bunch of land and possibly slave labor. They had little need to adapt to new tech. And yes, stability is key if you have it; it's a fleeting feeling (even to this day).

> What peasant life offered wasn't comfort but stability.

Until the local lord took a fancy to a different type of agriculture, drove you off and ploughed your village back into the soil!

I've been watching time-team recently and this seems to come up semi-frequently. Your family could have been there for 200 years, no matter, bye now!

In Victorian England farmers were being displaced through the enclosure movement. Common land was privatized. The old way of life (farming) was taken away from them by the upper class. An economy shifting to factory labor was also a factor - farming lost its sustainability for most poor farmers in the new economy. Farming was hard and becoming harder. Factories were horrific. The notion that people simply chose factories because their old way of life was available to them and factories were just “better” is an oversimplification.

Even "medieval peasantry" was a bit of an odd phrase.

The middle ages saw the growth of cities, commerce, increasingly industrial agriculture, etc. It also saw non-peasant societies like the vikings, muslim civilization, etc.

There were massive social safety nets in the form of guilds, religious orders, and political patronage organizations. Disease was a much bigger threat than starvation.

You're right the Victorians, like the Pre-Raphelites and Oxford movement, fetishized medieval life. But that was a reaction against anti-medieval Tudor-begun propaganda in place since the Plantagenets were defeated at the Battle of Bosworth Field (1485).

> non-peasant societies like the vikings, muslim civilization

Surely the viking and muslim kingdoms had the base in farmers? I mean, neither were nomad civilizations.

> Even "medieval peasantry" was a bit of an odd phrase.

It really isn't. This is the accepted term in academia, so long as you don't dispute the user of the term "medieval". While the period did see an outgrowth of cities, the vast majority (80%++) of the population was rural in almost every country throughout the period, including Scandinavian ones: Viking was a profession, not a culture, and the vast majority of Scandinavians, including Vikings, were in fact farmers, which is evidenced by how once the "Great Heathen Army" secured a foothold in Northumberland they proceeded to build a bunch of farms, thus all the places now named "-by" in northern England. Similarly, "Muslim civilization" was not a monolith. Yes, Arabia is not exactly conducive to settled agriculture, but Egypt and the Levant -- the political heartlands of Arab civilization from the 8th century and onwards -- were among the most agriculturally productive lands on earth, and a similarly large proportion of their population was engaged in the hereditary profession of agriculture as a result.

> There were massive social safety nets in the form of guilds, religious orders, and political patronage organizations. Disease was a much bigger threat than starvation.

This is true, and something very commonly overlooked. People think of medieval life as "brutish and short" but in reality these were stable, largely prosperous societies.

I appreciate your trying to engage in this but I don't think your response is founded in historical fact.

> most peasants did not own their own land,

If you mean most individuals then sure, but on a per household basis actually most peasants did indeed have land to call their own. E.g. reference The Decline of Serfdom in Late Medieval England. The "bottom rung" was predominantly half-virgater villeins, who were unfree leaseholders with barely enough to feed their family -- but they did still 'own' their land insofar as they had perpetual usufruct to it, and by the early 1500s paid essentially nothing in rent due to inflation and hereditary fixed rent levels.

> What peasant life offered wasn't comfort but stability.

Sure, I don't disagree. I never tried to claim that peasant life was great and enjoyable -- but people, especially people with kids to take care of, tend to value a baseline of stability above all else.

> how common was it for farmers to take orders from another man like he was their boss?

Historically most farmers were some form of serf. So I think it was common.

Maybe he thinks about US farmers? But even there I am pretty sure most were not working their own lands, slaves and hired hands and so on seems to have been pretty common.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

> Historically, technological revolutions have increased productivity and labor force participation, despite many pundits at the time worried about loss of jobs.

That was basically true from about 1830, when railroads came out of beta, to 1979.[1][2] During that period, wages roughly tracked productivity. There are solid US stats on this from at least 1950.

This has happened in other countries, too, but generally later than in the US. Here's a study from Japan.[3] In the UK, productivity and wages parted company around 2008.[4]

There are stats for China, but they only go back to 1995 and aren't taken that seriously even in China. Plus, China now has 200 million gig workers (!)[5] and data collection on them is weak. Official workforce size in China peaked in 2015, which may indicate that many gig workers are not being counted. This needs to be looked at more closely.

Productivity is going great, but the gains don't go to workers much.

[1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

[2] https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2023/03/when-comparing-wages...

[3] https://www.rieti.go.jp/en/publications/summary/25090019.htm...

[4] https://fraserofallander.org/link-labour-productivity-wage-g...

[5] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/09/18/chinas-200m-gig...

That's not about wages, but labor force participation. What changed around 1979 was that workers who were freed up due to automation, were employed in lower paid service roles that's why wages stopped following productivity. But they weren't left unemployed - through 1970s unemployment was quite high by today's standards, we are living in times of longest ever sustained low unemployment.

We're in sustained under-employment. About half of people in the US who have college degrees are working in jobs that don't need a degree. 70% of Uber drivers started driving after they lost a job. Unemployment of new college graduates has increased recently. This hit graduates of the computer boot camps a year or two ago, and this year it hit Berkeley CS graduates.

Most people eventually find some kind of job. The alternative is being homeless.

That's only because everyone and their dog now get a useless degree... People should be discouraged from education that's above their ability, no one needs so many graduates.

25-55 employment vs population is now highest on record barring a few years in ~1997-2000 during the dotcom boom and even that by only a tiny bit. Also, remember that employment is now suppressed by many people going FIRE, which was a rare exception 25 years ago. Many of my friends left the world of work for good years ago, all their late 30s or early 40s.

I'm always reading that pensioners, college students, teenagers, and others would like to work part-time but do not find the work, so that counts as underemployment too eh.

I think a combination of a higher minimum wage and a shorter standard work week - introduced simultaneously in discrete steps over three or four years, say - would transform lives on a massive scale.

But unfortunately everything in America seems to be at best ossified, and at worst headed into the dumper.

Lost in this discussion is that there is an economic target for a minimum level of unemployment. It's how inflation control targeting works.

People want inflation when it's their own wages, and they want labour supply to be constrained to achieve that. But as soon as the wage inflation feeds through to price inflation, they get very upset. Transient but significant inflation was one of the successful attacks on Biden's economic record, for example.

Wages are flat because it's policy for wages to be flat so that prices can be flat.

> Wages are flat because it's policy for wages to be flat so that prices can be flat

This is ridiculous because prices haven't been flat but wages largely have

Historically it seems humanity is often better off after major advances.

But it’s the transition that is the problem. The people living through the transition have to go through hell.

Especially from Global South who somehow do not even find a footnote in a lot of research

Yeah, I'm always annoyed at how blasé people are about these transition periods, where they seem to think the ends justify any means, and any chaos which happens as a result of the means.

You see this all the time when some new technology, especially an information disintermediation technology, gets compared to the printing press. "The printing press broke the monopoly on knowledge and brought Europe out of the Dark Ages!" Yeah, but first it killed millions of people in a century of warfare. Do the people in an equivalent position now get a vote, or are they acceptable casualties for the glorious hypothetical future?

> Yeah, but first it killed millions of people in a century of warfare. Do the people in an equivalent position now get a vote, or are they acceptable casualties for the glorious hypothetical future?

The answer seems to be we get no vote

I'm not happy about it

Can you present a proposal for how should we adopt technology with less chaos?

Are you accounting for the lives saved through better technology?

Yes. We compensate disrupted industries and make long term plans to adjust around the technologies. The advent of the PC exposed it early to kids, it advertised its usefulness to the public, and it offered digital trainings to adjust to a new workflow. In the worst case, we help any redundant roles get a new job in the indystry or offer other benefits like early pensions.

As we see here, this tech is only taking and not giving much back.

You only want this because it is tech that is getting disrupted - the compensation would be provided to you now

Not really. I don't think I "need" it myself. My sector will be much more resistant to the advent of AI compared to others anyway, so I'm not worried of being displaced short term. My industry didn't need AI as an excuse to lay off a bunch of people every year.

I'm just demonstrating that advancing technology and throwing a whole job sector out with nowhere to go is not mutually exclusive. And that the lack of any such conversation means we'll just go down the same bloody path as last time in history.

Chaos can be avoided if we start talks to facilitate this "AI age". But are we talking seriously about UBI? Nope (we can't even fund healthcare). What about training? Training in-job has been on the decline for decades, no one's helping with transitions. Are people's lives at least getting better? The sentiment in surveys say no thus far.

As usual it seems like there's only one box left when a new technology tries to strongarm its way into society. The invention of the personal computer avoided a lot of chaos by doing all of the above.

In one of my economic classes at my university introduced me to the book Shafted: Free Trade & America's Working Poor. I think this qualifies as an advancement and one that is oft argued as a net good for global trade.

The author contends that free trade has become a tool favoring corporate interests at the expense of workers’ dignity, community, and fair participation in economic decision-making.

Beyond that, they illustrate that net economic gains _should_ be able to also lift those same workers, providing enough surplus for re-training, but it doesn't. The gains flow to the top and the workers left in a worse position.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/310362.Shafted

You can't take these things in a vacuum. Labor has gotten weaker over time. AI just gives more power to employers.

Take Klarna. They laid off 700 people, realized it was a mistake, but they are hiring people back as gig workers [0]. Not proper employees with a salary and benefits. The thing about the US in particular is that a job is not just a job. It's your social safety net, as too many welfare programs have onerous work requirements. Employers know this. They have way too much power, probably more than ever before in our lifetimes. AI gives them that much more power.

0 - https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/klarnas-ai-replaced-...

This is a relatively easy fix - separate benefits from specific jobs.

There's a strong social element to jobs - it's not just money, it's your friends. But that's an easy fix too - forming social units not based on employers. Unions used to fill this role, as did guilds, and just plain clubs.

These aren't huge problems.

> One of my favorite counterintuitive examples: The biggest economic gains from the 1800s Industrial Revolution actually came from the humble washer/dryer. By making routine homeware 100x more efficient, this (along with other home appliances) allowed more women to enter the labor force, nearly doubling labor force participation within a couple generations. Though, at the beginning, lots of people were opining about homemakers losing a sense of purpose or relaxing all the time.

What exactly did your professors mean by "economic gain"? It'd probably take an entire thesis to unpack what that means and all the ambiguities that anyone could drive a train through.

The only way I can square that circle is if they meant that women's economic prospects declined so much with the automation of textiles that they had nothing left but small efficiency gains. Maintenance tasks like clothes washing don't produce any economic value outside the household, whereas spinning/weaving/sewing produces something the household can sell, trade, or gift. Early textile mechanization took place decades before washing machines were even a novelty so sure, "biggest economic gain" as long as you're measuring from a local maxima.

Spinning and weaving had always been done by a relatively small portion of society. Hence by automating it you were not bringing time savings to the vast majority of people.

Instead the opposite may have occurred, when cloth became cheaper and the amount of clothing increased greatly increasing the amount of washing the masses had to do.

> Spinning and weaving had always been done by a relatively small portion of society.

This is very, very incorrect. Egregiously so. All evidence from antiquity to pre-modern Europe contradicts it.

Up until the mechanization of textiles, spinning and weaving took up the majority of women’s work time. Even noblewomen were painted doing the act. Annual labor hours were comparable to unskilled men in agriculture, even after mechanical innovations.

If you’d like I can give you academic citations but acoup.blog written by an actual historian just ran an entire series on this topic: https://acoup.blog/2025/09/26/collections-life-work-death-an...

Subsistence for a small family meant nearly 1800 hours a year of work on just textiles, accounting for a single woman’s labor over an entire year. That’s just 200 hours short of a modern 9-5 work year. On just textiles.

All women in a household spent their free time spinning, weaving, sewing, mending, and knitting. Even noblewomen. Clothing made by professionals was a niche product, probably only available to royalty.

I think the main fear is that AI is a companion that keeps getting better, rather than a tool that is nothing on it's own.

We've never had that before.

And really it's a whole bunch of things we've never had before at the same time.

Factories can scale to the point that a single factory for a lot of products can meet the needs of all of humanity. Add in economies of scale and the number of actual work on the actual product jobs decreases for any one product over time.

Information technology can scale to the point that any one company can manage vast oceans of data about processes and conditions in the business exercising large amounts of control over economies.

Shipping and transport are fast, cheap, and ubiquitous. That huge factory from above can make anything then ship it anywhere cheaper than you can make it right next door.

Robots and further AI automation can insure the investor class gets even wealthier by not having to pay things like the 16 hours a day you don't work in health insurance. More so there is never a labor shortage by pesky striking workers asking for more pay or better conditions.

All the above setup conditions for the consolidation of control of almost everything by a very small number of entities.

Another thing we never had before is the huge skill differential between the jobs that will be automated away and the jobs that replace them. In the past, automation created new jobs that were higher-skilled, but still relatively easy for any of the displaced workforce to upskill to. E.g. if a machine replaced the work you did manually, it was not too difficult to learn to operate that machine.

But with AI the skills gap is huge. Taking software engineering as an example, previously a motivated bootcamp graduate could start churning out basic CRUD apps and be useful. Now a motivated senior engineer with AI agents could churn out an app a day. So the minimum useful skill-level is now at the level of a senior engineer.

And this is possible because of yet another thing we never had before: A "universal" knowledge worker machine. Knowledge work was "safe" because it was a relatively high-skill category and automation was only possible through software, which was expensive and slow to build, largely due to a shortage of software developers.

Now we potentially don't even need software for a huge range of cognitive tasks! Of course, the stochastic nature of AI probably means we will be writing software for a long time yet, but as above, existing (senior) developers can scale themselves up much, much faster.

The list of advantages human labor holds over labor of machines is both finite and rapidly diminishing.

Tell me more, I'm long term unemployed so have plenty of time to read stuff like this.

Here's one free article covering a book about the washing machine example https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/aug/29/my-bright...

Washing machines are indeed super handy. I really appreciate it when I can use the one at my parent's place or the laundromat.

If AI takes a fraction α of jobs, for it to be employment increasing, elasticity of demand for labor needs to be 1/(1-α).

>Put another way, "“One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up. It’s human nature. You cannot rest on your laurels in this world. Customers won’t have it.” -- one of Bezos's Amazon shareholder letters.

Nowadays, the new strategy is "you will own nothing, have worse more expensive services, and like it". The mood has completely shifted as of late. It feels more like the shareholder's demands are never static.