My siblings, cousins, and I were talking about our paternal grandfather recently. He was very bright, but uneducated (immigrated to the U.S. at age 10). He worked in the garment industry, his best job being as a cutter — figuring out how to waste the least amount of cloth in creating a garment.
This was highly skilled work in its time, as it required substantial mathematical/spatial ability. The skill was made completely obsolete by a technological improvement — the use of computers to minimize wastage of cloth. While economists talk at length about skill-biased technical change, here was a case of unskilled-biased technical change. There are many others. The shipping industry a century ago, for example, when steam replaced sail. There is no reason to expect skilled workers always to be the main beneficiaries of technical improvements — to have demand for their labor, and their wages, rising compared to unskilled workers. Nor do unskilled workers always suffer lost jobs and lower wages from technical progress.
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Another example is the last couple of decades’ development in food service (particularly fast food). Multitude machines have been invented to make the food easier to make so that lower-skilled workers can be hired to do it.
It is all about scarity power. New technologies usually reduce the demand of scare goods – either material or skill or just manpower. Whoever offers this goods will lose money.
How would your grandfather have benefitted from this change? Sounds to me like he would have lost the best job he had, and as an unskilled worker, have had no alternate career path. With a wife and a number of children to support, at that.
J.Ja
I think the struggling journalism industry would agree!
But you can bet that technological improvement is always good for the ownership class!
Your father’s skill became obsolete, but the new technology created the demand for engineers to design the computer hardware and write the software for the machine replacement. The innovation could be either skill-saving or skill-using.
Another example is supermarket checkout clerks. Before bar code scanners this was a skilled position and often fairly well paid. Now days even the unskilled position are at risk because of self check out stations. It usually takes one employee to monitor 4 self checkout lanes.
It seems that you’re confusing uneducated with unskilled.
The reason that economists talk at length about skill-biased technical change is that it’s far easier for an unskilled worker to move from one unskilled job to another completely unrelated unskilled job than it is for a skilled worker to either move to an unrelated skilled job or downgrade signifiantly to an unskilled job.
Your article gives a great example of a very specialist skilled worker (who, just happens to be uneducated) displaced by technological progress.