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Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

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Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#41

Post by bunderbunder »

heylook wrote: post #39
briga wrote: post #21

The central premise of this post is basically not true: working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years. The cases where it didn't were generally offset by the rest of society benefiting from increased automation and productivity. Where the current revolution will lead remains unclear, but if the past is any indication things will probably continue to improve for most people.

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…

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.

Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#43

Post by BigTTYGothGF »

aeternum wrote: post #24

This seems obviously wrong as there are many counter examples. Employees in Ford's plants for instance saw huge wage increases and an additional day off. Mining mechanization made mines far less deadly and greatly reduced the human exertion required. I'd much rather harvest corn in an air conditioned combine vs. with an ox. Even during the early industrial revolution, notorious for poor working conditions, people ove…

> Employees in Ford's plants for instance saw huge wage increases and an additional day off

I think there was something else going on that might explain that.

Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#44

Post by mplewis »

heylook wrote: post #39
briga wrote: post #21

The central premise of this post is basically not true: working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years. The cases where it didn't were generally offset by the rest of society benefiting from increased automation and productivity. Where the current revolution will lead remains unclear, but if the past is any indication things will probably continue to improve for most people.

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…

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

Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#45

Post by aeternum »

Majora320 wrote: post #35
aeternum wrote: post #24

This seems obviously wrong as there are many counter examples. Employees in Ford's plants for instance saw huge wage increases and an additional day off. Mining mechanization made mines far less deadly and greatly reduced the human exertion required. I'd much rather harvest corn in an air conditioned combine vs. with an ox. Even during the early industrial revolution, notorious for poor working conditions, people ove…

During the early industrial revolution people were not starving in the countryside because of poor harvests. They were starving in the countryside because the UK at that time siezed land that was previously held in common and granted it to the nobility through the enclosure acts. Now to survive as a peasant you could not subsist off of common land, you had to pay rent to a lord and work their land, and as agricultura…

Yes agreed, but the net result is that living in the countryside was far from romanticized agrarian life people often picture it as. Lords owning land was a very old idea, it's a bit of a leap to say that was due to mechanization.

Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#46

Post by jreynar »

taeric wrote: post #5

This feels wrong. Did the vacuum make cleaning worse for employees? What about sewing machines? Modern looms? 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…

[dead]

Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#47

Post by noosphr »

briga wrote: post #21

The central premise of this post is basically not true: working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years. The cases where it didn't were generally offset by the rest of society benefiting from increased automation and productivity. Where the current revolution will lead remains unclear, but if the past is any indication things will probably continue to improve for most people.

2026 - 200 = 1826

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.

Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#48

Post by appreciatorBus »

maxbendick wrote: post #19

Marx actually has a bit about this: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm... 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).

[flagged]

Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#49

Post by janalsncm »

gruez wrote: post #37
janalsncm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years 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.

>to the point where raising a family on a single income is not a realistic goal for most people. 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. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002 [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001

1) Based on your numbers, 65% of women were not working at that time.

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.

Re: Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

#50

Post by smallmancontrov »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #33
janalsncm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years 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.

The reason the 'middle class' is smaller is because more families have become "upper middle class". All the data shows this. 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.

The data that deflate with CPI? The metric notorious for laundering forced substitution into voluntary substitution? The American Dream is to Owner's Imputed Rent a house?

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.

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