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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Yes, #3, but he and everyone else benefit from cheaper clothing. You are of course free to support more expensive handmade clothing.
All of which is amounts to an argument for Keynesian economics. Innovation reduces the work required to make a product; this results in fewer workers needed to make the product; and this can lead to unemployment. Unemployment results in reduced demand and a cycle which can result in a depression. This was the pattern over and over in industrialized economies prior to about the 1930s — innovation and new technologies followed by a depression.
The solution, as Keynes discovered, is to take some of the profits created by the innovation and redistribute them downwards. This increases demand, so more goods are sold, and the same number of workers are needed. So the demand for people to run the computers increases, and your grandfather has a career path open.
The problem with this solution is that only the government can move the profits in this way, through taxation. And every business wants to avoid taxes. So even though keeping money moving through the economy in this way would benefit everyone, there is serious, well-funded opposition to it, and that is the situation we find ourselves in today.
Yes #9, but how much good does the new low-price apparel paradigm do for the worker when he has no job, and thus, no purchasing power to speak of. Society’s benefit from falling prices is realized only in the economies of scale that come from the pennies (and, yes, dollars) we save are multiplied over thousands of discretionary dollars and millions of people. If you’re in possession of zero discretionary dollars, unless the consumer goods are free, they’ll still be too expensive for you.
This is something that the 100%, unrestrained free-traders don’t understand. There is a law of diminishing returns on low taxes, capital flight, wage-reduction pressures, lax regulation and the rest. At some point, the economic benefits of these policies and norms stop accruing on society and start heaping on the very few. That’s when the successful start becoming the plutocracy.
My memory of HS US history classes were that they covered the industrial revolution, the automobile, and the Wright Brothers.
All of these are covered in an extremely positive light.
Those who knit or make horseshoes didn’t lose their jobs overnight – it was a gradual process. Those with skills that are becoming obsolete are generally smart enough to see this and slowly convert to similar but new occupations.
I don’t see any reason why government should get involved in this process.
Why on earth would anyone “expect skilled workers always to be the main beneficiaries of technical improvements.” I would automatically expect the opposite – most skilled workers get routinely screwed over by “advances” in technology. And most consumers get screwed over right along with them.
One more from the area I belong to …with the development of advanced planning tools there is no much demand for material planners like good old days ..
So are we supposed to impede progress just so that people can keep their jobs? Of course not. I feel horribly for people who lose their job, but the economy and the competitive environment are always changing. The premise of this article implies that some people are only capable of having one skill. Studies have shown that the average American undergoes multiple career changes over a life. If people want to avoid being unmarketable, they need to always strive to learn new things, stay educated, and continually learn about the shifting environment.
The assumption in that example is that the cloth quality such as thread count stays the same. If the textile supplier knows that no one is checking they will reduce thread count to the point where the cutting machine rips the fabric and the scrap rate soars. Then the clothing mfr has to hire incoming quality inspectors to assure that doesn’t happen. Meanwhile, the engineers have to know how to have the machine sense fabric strength so it doesn’t tear as they rachet up the speed of processing in order to recover the capital cost more quickly. I could go on forever on the hidden costs of innovation which is why the fabic cutter was not replaced by a machine, he was replaced by child labor in Bangla Desh.