Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees
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I can accept the premise that condiitions have improved, but not that it was consistent. It seems to me that it was anything but; more like extremely spiky. great depression, postwar economic miracle. Massive labor movements rose and fell, general strikes... Plus most countries have had several wars + revolutions in the last 200 years, including two world wars. Not all of those are to do with technology, but I also dont think technology wasnt indirectly responsible for the conditions that created some of them
American Capital: +++++++++ money
America: ------- industry
Behold the responsible economic management.
Certainly, many people still lack access to those things. But also, the median person essentially lives better than the monarchs did 400 years ago when it comes to some of the more important things in life.
Sometimes, whether or not your power distance from your employer is high is less relevant than all the other important stuff in your life.
They've improved, but not consistently on human timescales.
Being a worker in the pre-labor-movement industrial revolution was by all accounts horrendous. Things have, so far, trended better over time but they can be bad for whole generations and also past results do not guarantee future results.
> The cases where it didn't were generally offset by the rest of society benefiting from increased automation and productivity.
I don't think we can sweep the worst parts of it under the rug because the bad impacts are only happening to "the poors". And anyway when it comes to the current tech revolution, it is likely that almost all of us are going to be "the poors".
We can and we will.
If you read HN for any period of time, you'll probably read at least 5 apologia for the harms caused by prior technological change for every one critique or expression of sympathy. After all, we're well-indoctrinated software engineers, and most of the rest are temporarily embarrassed billionaires. We know what we're supposed to think.
> And anyway when it comes to the current tech revolution, it is likely that almost all of us are going to be "the poors".
Not me! I'm 100x AI engineer who will certainly remain comfy an secure. LLMs are awesome! It's all those luddite doomer jerks who cling to their old ways of understanding how things work and manual coding that are going to be poor, and they deserve it.
We will see in 5 years ! I think you highly overestimate llms
Average height and life expectancy improved steadily in the US throughout the 19th century.
The pre-Revolutionary Americans tended to live short and backbreaking lives.
Take a tour through Fort Williams. There is a collection of clothing from the Revolutionary War. The baby clothes look like doll clothes, and the adult clothes look like they were for boys. Then look at the clothing in the Gettysburg museums. The people were taller then, but still about the size of boys.
I don't think that's a correct interpretation, see the explanation here [0]. Not quite the same situation, but likely a similar case. Are you sure the "adult" clothes weren't made for young boys or teens, or women?
[0] https://dyckmanfarmhouse.org/people-were-shorter-back-then-r...
I don't think your statement about short lives in colonial America is correct either, they had a low life expectancy like everyone else, but mostly due to a lot of childbirth deaths and young infant deaths. Surviving childhood gave you a good shot at making it to your 70s, which has been true for a long time pretty much everywhere.
Yes. I read the informative cards at the display. Some were for officers. George Washington was a giant in his day. Look at the short beds and low ceilings. Watch your head walking through a doorway!
Tour a navy ship of the time.
If you like, look up historical US statistics on height.
BTW, I saw Henry VIII's armor in London. Looked like a boy's armor.
As for the short colonial lives, I read an account by bone archaeologists who examined the bones of colonials and noted that they suffered much damage from overloading the bones and their age at death was usually under 40.
Just think about the hard work in making your cabin with a saw and an axe. Then a barn. Then fences. Then about the endless amount of firewood you have to chop every day. Then using a horse-drawn plow. And dig a well by hand. And so on.
> If you like, look up historical US statistics on height.
Yeah, people in the 1700s were, on average, 2 inches shorter. Not the tiny dwarves you're describing.
> BTW, I saw Henry VIII's armor in London. Looked like a boy's armor.
This? [0]
Dimensions: H. 72 1/2 in. (184.2 cm); W. 33 in. (83.8 cm); D. 14 1/2 in. (36.8 cm); Wt. 50 lb. 8 oz. (22.91 kg)
Apparently a six foot tall man is a boy?
The armor you cited is not the one I saw in London. It's possible that the one I saw was not actually his.
The Cantillon Pump is only one of several major "rich get richer" mechanisms in the economy. It is not the most important, and it does not consistently run in the same direction (wages can inflate faster than assets).
It can be caused by deficit spending. It can also be caused by supply shocks. For example, if you restrict building new housing, the price of housing will increase, both rents and house prices. If you tariff imports, a basket including those goods will rise in price to the degree those imports are not substituable. If you start a war in the Middle East, oil prices will rise, and increased energy costs can feed into lots of different things, raising prices.
Bob earns $20 every day. He buys 5 eggs $2/ea and 5 apples $2/ea every day. Now, due to supply shocks, egg prices double. He still has only $20, and so he now buys fewer eggs and fewer apples.
What happens when he buys fewer apples? The price of apples goes down, due to the Law of Supply and Demand. There is no inflation.
What happens when this economy is flooded with dollars? The Law of Supply and Demand again, meaning the value of each dollar drops. That means the dollar price of eggs and apples rise, as well as his wages.
Oil prices rising means people have less money to spend meaning prices of other things drop.
Another way to look at it is the US had zero net inflation from 1800-1914. From 1914 to today a dollar is worth 3 cents of a 1914 dollar. That isn't due to supply shocks, and there certainly were plenty of supply shocks before 1914.
1914 is when the Fed was created and empowered to print money with no backing.
It delivers plenty of things we don't care for, though. History provides the most lurid examples, but we have modern ones too. In the US, Clinton balanced the budget and the macroeconomic consequences broke something very important (audience participation: what was it? Hint: we call them "dual deficits" for a reason). We quickly took our finger off the stove, though, so it was only a lesson for the observant. Germany on the other hand kept its debt brake in place, which mechanically suppressed investment (macro 101 quiz time again: why?) with staggering consequences, leading to one of the most underinvested economies in Europe and almost completely shutting them out of the digital revolution, in which I privately suspect they'd have otherwise participated fabulously. In any case, had Clinton installed a debt brake, that would have been us. HackerNews, YCombinator, and all the ZIRP babies around these parts would have been among the most affected. The Magnificent 7 would not have all been in the US.
So no, deficits aren't the root of all evil and the appropriate deficit is considerably north of 0. That said, it's south of where we have it. Interest rates are the gauge. Is money being pushed in (low rates) or pulled in (high rates)? We are transitioning from the former regime to the latter regime, partly due to imperial retreat, partly due to crisis-level spending in a time of no crisis which is wildly irresponsible. The US is clearly headed for a debt crisis. But the answer is belt-tightening and either gentle-repression-over-time like we did after WWII (fat chance) or an inflation spike followed by a rate hike (probably several) until the bond market is happy again. It's going to be bumpy, but not as bumpy as the hard money counterfactual.
I didn't say it was. I said it was the root of inflation.
> robber barons built their empires all the same
Kerosene prices dropped 70% while Standard Oil prospered. Rockefeller was benefiting people, not robbing them.
More importantly, after Ronald Reagan and Robert Bork brought us back to robber-baron era antitrust policy, we've seen robber-baron level corporate consolidation and corporate profits. We've exceeded them in most regards, in fact. It has been terrible for consumers and excellent for shareholders.
Do you have any evidence that corporate profit margins have increased?
We're all well aware of the money supply, M1 / M2 / M3, velocity of money, etc. It's important for money to not get tight when the economy slows down, and it's important to tighten up the amount of money when the velocity increases again. But this is neither deficit spending nor printing money without backing!
Inflation is can come from a social psychological phenomenon around expectations. If the cost of living goes up in a surprising way, you feel the pinch. You want more money. Maybe your employer gives you a raise, and raises prices to compensate, reasoning that other things are also going up in price. The risk is this creates a self-propagating loop (which in turn does to a degree depend on accommodating institutions that don't restrict monetary supply).
You can trigger inflation through loose monetary policy, sure, and you can dampen the cycle by restricting the supply of money, and that's been the main function of independent central banks for most of the latter 20th and 21st century.
But inflation is literally just increase in the cost of living. It's a symptom, not a disease. It admits multiple explanations.
Really depends on the group of people you are including. In the US the middle class has been eviscerated to the point where raising a family on a single income is not a realistic goal for most people.
You can argue that housing is too much or that inflation hasn't benefited the right things, but to say that the middle class is shrining just doesn't match reality.
I love BLS, they do a lot of thankless work very well, but if you give someone else control of the inflation basket you are letting them pick any slope for these graphs that they want. Don't do that. It's the economic equivalent of handing your passport to an employer, talking about your net worth in public, or signing a blank check. Just don't. Yeah, we're all busy, you probably don't have time to construct a basket more sophisticated than "gold" or "housing" -- but even though those both have big problems, they still aren't as bad long-term as CPI. Or maybe you disagree and think the CPI basket and hedonic adjustment methodology compounds better for your purposes, but if so you should be able to roughly account for the dramatic difference and articulate why.
In 1950, the median household could buy a house with 2 years of income. That is, 50% of households could do this.
Today, the median house costs $400k. Only the top 12-14% of households make 200k per year.
So proportionally, the % of households that have the same buying power as a median 1950s household has shrunk roughly 4x.
If you lock it in any way to something like “home ownership and simple vacations once a year” (which was absolutely possible in the 90s), it has plummeted.
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
It's housing prices.
Was this ever true? During the 1950s, (the perceived heyday of American middle class wealth) the female labor force participation rate was 35%[1], which was close half of the male labor force participation rate.
2) That 35% number was likely even lower for married women.
3) Racism was still a systemic problem and was bad. Black men were excluded from the GI bill for example.
4) In spite of that, the median American household needed only 2x their salary to buy the median house. That number is 5x today, and after taxes the ratios are 2.2x then vs 6x today, when two adults are often working rather than one.
5) In short, Americans are working much harder today.
But it's pretty clear that over time the homes were remodeled, gut remodeled, extended, garages added, and so on, so they are significantly improved over the original. I've been in a couple, and the hallways are pretty narrow and everything is very cheaply built.
If you want to see what they were like originally, see the old Bob Hope movie "Bachelor in Paradise", filmed at a just-built suburban community.
I assume a crack den with busted utilities would go for less.
I've lived in this area my adult life. Pretty much all the open spaces and lots have been infilled with houses over time. Prices go down the further away from the business core. Being within commuting distance to Microsoft comes with a big boost in price.
Sources for these numbers? Also, housing is only a fraction of your costs.
Median house $7300 https://better.com/content/how-much-home-prices-have-risen-s...
Today ratio is 5.1 https://housingalmanac.com/affordability
You can get a 500sqft in podunk small town for quite cheap.
They weren't living in modern glass skyscrapers.
1. working conditions before 200 years ago
2. working conditions under feudalism and communism
3. explain why ships laden with scores of millions of people came to the US, and went back empty
200 years is nothing. It's nothing, unless that is, we try to think about what the mess we're currently making will look like 200 years from now. Then 200 years from now is a terrifying prospect. It has to be sustainable. If it isn't sustainable it's a joke.
Agriculture ended that thousands of years ago. Even the Indians practiced farming. So did the Pilgrims, and the first settlement, Jamestown.
Hunter gathering can only sustain a small population.
Neither clause in this sentence is true.
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.
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.
Yeah no. It's only since 1950 that conditions improved for everyone. Before then everything from sewage, to coal smoke, to chronically low wages made life worse for everyone involved. The most miserable people to live in history were the British working class in the mid/late 19th century.
I find this topic very interesting, do you have any reading you could recomment on this?
You can see some of this repeating in China. Migrant workers move to the cities because, while what they can earn is low, it is a lot higher than subsistence farming in the countryside. "The Last Train Home" (documentary) follows such a family, although to understand the tragedy in the documentary you need to understand that Mao created the hukou system to prevent exactly this, which means that their children can only receive state education in the countryside.
The industrial revolution took many of the countryside jobs to the city. You cannot stay in a place that no longer has jobs
Workers now work more hours pee year to try to catch up to what they made back then, so working conditions are worse now as well.
> the hourly wage
This is a misleading statistic. The actual statistic is "total employee compensation", which includes the benefits packages, the (so-called) employer contribution to SS, 401k employer contributions, etc.
The TEC is often worth up to 150% of the wages.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S
Meanwhile here's employee compensation* over GDP (both seasonally adjusted)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XO2h
Any chance you can share the sources for your assertions?
* includes benefits as per https://www.bea.gov/resources/methodologies/nipa-handbook/pd...
So that compensation covers less.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XOcj
This is obviously some strange usage of the word 'up' that I wasn't previously aware of
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252881600A
The original parent claim was:
> The US Department of Labor measures wages, and adjusted for inflation the hourly wage is below what it was in 1973. It is even lower if you are only counting non-management roles then and now. Wages have not gotten better over the past half century they have gotten worse.
This is a flat out lie. Comp/GDP is a side note that does not negate the fact that inflation adjusted wages are up.
> https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252881600A
That graph does not represent Comp over GDP so it does not show it "is still increasing overall"
> The original parent claim was:...
Maybe so, but my post is a direct response to
> ...the increasing share of the economy consumed by the government...
> [the hourly wage] is a misleading statistic. The actual statistic is "total employee compensation"
Show me on one of these graphs:
Income up after inflation:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252881600A
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
Hours down:
This is just blatantly untrue according to your source.
Hourly wages have been consistently growing since the 90s, after the big retraction in the 70s/80s. They exceeded 1973 in 2019 and are higher now.
Two hundred years ago meant widespread child labor, harsh factory conditions, little worker protection, and slavery or serfdom. Add to it the onset of Industrial Revolution.
Modern studies indicate people in the dark ages worked 6 hours a day: Ironically a better baseline!
There have been indications that there were approximately 150 days per year which were most active for medieval farmers, but if I had a time machine I wouldn't stay there very long if my desire was to experience good working conditions.
It is probably a safe case that most tech revolutions reduced the number of needed employees for most things. But even then, it would be great if this would provide evidence of that!
Notably, it isn't like people strongly missed this work! Yes, there are fewer secretaries. But there aren't none, and the ones that were responsible for being a scribe to bad bosses almost certainly don't miss that work.
There was a paternal element of duty-of-care-and-welfare to factory/business ownership in the UK - patchy, but very real - which flared briefly in the US but is completely absent now.
It's still present in Europe, to varying degrees.
Anyone who has ever worked a physical labor job will be rolling their eyes at this.
There are more dimensions to labor than the number of hours worked. Imagine doing a construction job without power tools or searching through folders of documents instead of using the search function on your computer. Labor saving devices are everywhere and they’ve reduced the amount of labor required during the workday by a huge amount.
EDIT: I guess I wasn’t clear because the replies are still focusing on hours. The point I’m trying to make is labor isn’t only measured in hours. An 8 hour workday of writing code, checking Slack, and sending emails is vastly easier than 8 hours of construction work in terms of physical labor. If you can only see “labor” as number of hours worked, you probably haven’t had a difficult manual labor job ever.
Number of hours worked has actually been trending down for a very long time.
Working with my head is a heluva lot easier.
it was great for workers around the world who now can afford clothes
It probably feels that way to someone who got comfortable doing their job the old way wishes the world could go back to when they had it all comfortably figured out.
If this does happen, it’s a second order effect from reducing the barrier to entry. Now that anyone can make some code with enough prompts, it’s no longer impressive to be able to make simple apps. You have to bring something different and better to the table. Good developers still do this on top of what AI can do by itself, but I also think there were a lot of relatively easy programming jobs where you didn’t have to be particularly good at anything. You had to know how to follow the rules, get easy tickets from the tracker, make enough changes that you could call it done, and then go on through the dog and pony show of getting the PR approved and getting those story points to count for your standup report. Repeat 5 days per week.
Every mid-size and larger company I worked for had a collection of developers like this: Not really trustworthy or skilled enough to handle big tickets, but you could assign all the loose ends and easy tickets to them. They’d get done eventually while the other devs could focus on bigger efforts.
Now, it’s hard to justify having a lot of those easy ticket solver developers around. An experienced developer can take 10 easy tickets, use their codebase knowledge to write targeted prompts with Opus or Fable, quickly review the code, and have all the easy work done in an afternoon. Then back to the hard tickets.
If you were one of those developers coasting on the easy work, this revolution probably feels like it increased expectations unfairly. If you were one of those devs doing the hard work, you have another tool to use but you’re still grinding away at the hard problems with an extra tool to make some of the parts easier.
In practice businesses above a certain size accrete layers of make-work and bureaucracy, which is how you end up with "It takes three weeks to change a button" friction.
AI will make it easier to change the button, but it won't necessarily - yet - cut through the processes around it.
sounds like a trillion dollar idea were one to actually solve this
This is such a flawed, but common take. Are you seriously going to claim you were never a junior dev that nobody trusted with "hard tickets"?
Note that I am not making a statement about what your skills were like when you started getting paid for dev work.
I'm saying that the "easy ticket solver" devs are an illusion. When they really fail to perform, you should ask yourself whether it's because many years of bad management undermined the motivation they may have once had. Yes it would suck to be one of those unlucky people, and I'm not saying they shouldn't get fired, but you still need to recognize the bias there. I won't comment on why they weren't given opportunities. There are so many.
Choosing dev work while lacking the necessary skills over other career paths that often pay more, whether back then or even now, is so irrational that it breaks your premise.
No I was talking about the older devs who got comfortable not progressing, just taking those tickets that should have been going to the juniors.
If the easy stuff is going to older workers who don't want to rise to the level of seniors, you should replace them with juniors who are interesting in growing.
something less positive i noticed, in offices, is that technology is not there to help you, management get sold something shiny to replace the old and dusty, the supplier assembles a bad team, implement crappy network, install new web stuff that is sluggish and requires new machines, and employees are left holding the bag. the new tech is often way more limited than the old junk (feature dropped, bad ergonomics for prolonged work, no more scripting options), the integrations are lacking, the people are not trained .. it's often a slow mess full of redundant steps and missed opportunities.
Even during the early industrial revolution, notorious for poor working conditions, people overlook why there was such high demand for those shitty jobs. The reason is because people were literally starving in the countryside. A family's survival was dependent on a good harvest.
I think there was something else going on that might explain that.
In 1913 Ford had to hire over 52,000 workers just to maintain an active factory workforce of 14,000.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/04/the-stor...
> The reason is because people were literally starving in the countryside.
Because their land was stolen during enclosure.
At the same time, technology makes it easier to do one thing or another. And I think that’s the right framing for new technologies like AI: what does it make it easier to do? (It might be easier to answer that question by teasing apart the different technologies lumped together as “AI”.)
"Thus the effect of the machine of this sort in intellectual work may be to decrease the number of first class brains needed but to increase, and greatly increase, the demands made on these brains."
I used to be a scrum master who helped manage the team JIRA ticket board. When running into the inevitable problem during a meeting, I would sarcastically make a comment about "JIRA's monthly downgrade". By the time I stopped using JIRA in early 2025, it had become noticeably slower and had a bunch of UI clutter that made it difficult to do basic tasks.
I checked the homepage for Atlassian, which owns JIRA, and it has a headline saying: "Unleash your teams and their agents"
Then we all had to move to cars. The fire man, stations, engineers, and conductors all lost their jobs, and the commute got 10 times more intense. Now we had to drive our own cars, follow road rules, maintain our cars, and find parking
The most interesting point here is relating machine speed to intensity. Plenty of tech folks are both working longer hours and overseeing more responsibilities thanks to AI. There are other factors at play though (interest rates and AI-addiction, for two).
You still had to hire people to do work and tech was good enough to help them out. As tech advanced, people started trusting what the systems said even if blatantly wrong and people started loosing work.