cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/49663892
Does technology provide more jobs than it takes away? In the modern world where most industries are constantly changing, most jobs are completely unnecessary, many are unproductive and people can move countries to find work it can be difficult to judge this claim. But we can go back before benefits, government-funded useless jobs, international travel and chaotic job markets. If we do that we can see more clearly how technology has affected the availability of jobs.
The Second (or British) Agricultural Revolution provides one example of technological change. Did it lead to more jobs or less? Here’s what I learned about this today. Most of this information comes from here and the pages it links to.
This revolution wasn’t an overnight technological development which led to a temporary wave of unemployment that ended as new jobs were invented. This was a gradual change over hundreds of years which led to rising unemployment and poverty that didn’t go away.
The lead up to it began in the 1400s with enclosed farms that were able to make better use of the land and crop rotations. This became more common into the 1500s and meant that fewer people needed to work on the farms, causing some to slide into poverty. The government and nobles of the time were apparently unfamiliar with non-temporary unemployment except as a result of laziness or disability. It was a totally alien concept to them. In reaction to increasing numbers of beggars and vagrants the government passed laws to punish them. At the time making poverty harsh was seen as a way to motivate people to get jobs. This approach didn’t seem to work as by the end of the 1500s the government decided to change their approach and begin making Poor Laws. The first (Old) Poor Laws provided housing, money, food and clothing to those who were unable to work because of age or illness, but at the same time the able-bodied could be made to work in houses of correction as punishment for being a “persistent idler”.
The British Agricultural Revolution really started to take off in the mid-1600s and by the end of the century unemployment and poverty had increased further, leading to the workhouse movement. These gave housing and employment to the poor and reserved houses of correction for punishment. But put poverty didn’t end and around 1 million Britons may have relied on poor relief by the end of the 1700s. The number of able-bodied males taking poor relief was rising and again this has been attributed to the enclosure movement that increased agricultural productivity.
Because machines were taking people’s jobs, there were widespread riots that destroyed machines in 1830, known as the Swing Riots. The existing system of poor relief wasn’t able to handle all the poor people so in response to this and the riots the New Poor Law was passed in 1834. This made it harder for the able-bodied to get relief and made workhouses harsher to discourage leeching. The new system was a complete failure because the unemployed either went without any provisions or suffered in prison-like workhouses. There was no attempt to undo whatever had caused all the jobs to disappear in the first place.
In the end the Poor Laws gave way to country councils providing public housing, government pensions and eventually the full UK welfare state. The Poor Laws were an early example of a European welfare program that influenced the development of welfare states beyond the UK.
So considering all this, do we really think technology has helped or hurt the public’s ability to get jobs?
Before the 1500s it was unheard of to be unemployed unless it was temporary or you were too old or sick to work. Now find one developed country where that’s the case today. I’d wager you can’t. And what could possibly be responsible for that? Is it the increased population? Globalization? I don’t think so. More people means more mouths to feed and more jobs. Globalization didn’t take away the jobs in Britain between 1500-1900. The most reasonable explanation is that technology and efficiency improvements have caused the lack of jobs by taking over more and more of the productive work, leaving humans with pointless jobs or no work at all. And what good are efficient systems if they put us out of work so we can’t afford anything? Maybe efficiency can be bad and sometimes it’s good to do things the hard way?
I’m not saying everyone will be unproductive unless there is a necessity to be productive, although from experience it appears that most people will. But even if everyone will be productive without necessity, surely people still need motivation to be productive right? And how can there be motivation in a world where machines do everything faster and better than us and we could just get them to do all our projects? Even the self-improvement projects like losing weight or learning things are hard to motivate when you can just take a drug to lose weight and instantly look things up or rely on an AI brain chip instead of learning things.
Regarding my first paragraph not being what you said then you’ll need to clarify in order for me to understand what you meant, but I appreciate you don’t want to continue this discussion.
I don’t know for certain, but I don’t think so.
I think it’s quite obvious that for someone to do something that they know will take a lot of effort they will need some motivation to do it. Anybody who did anything did it out of necessity, some perceived benefit to someone or some personal interest in doing it. Nobody ever dug a hole for no reason unless they were extremely bored and had nothing else to keep them occupied but a shovel and some dirt.
Okay, but that’s not what you said in your previous comment. Many of the things I’ve done in my life have not been due to an external pressure. I’ve created a lot of things with no external motivating factor whatsoever.
Where did I say otherwise?
You may not need external pressure for some things but you still need motivation. And I think motivation would be very rare in a society where everything can be done by robots with a simple request.
…and I think otherwise. Humans like doing stuff. Whilst a subset of us are content to do almost nothing, I believe that’s a small minority.
I’m not trying to convince you, but I am trying to get you to understand that there is another position. I understand your take, even though I disagree with it. You are welcome to disagree with me but I want you to understand what you are disagreeing with.
I don’t see what the contradiction is in what I said there and my other comment.
In a world where everything is done better and easier by machines I have a hard time imagining people wanting to spend years of their life learning how to program, how to paint, how to make furniture, how to do science and so on. Hardly anyone makes complicated software in assembly code now that we have higher level programming languages. Hardly any farmers don’t use machinery. Hardly anyone mills grain by hand. People in developed countries don’t wash their clothes by hand. People don’t do things that we can now automate. Those things that everyone used to do now feel like way too much hard work. So I don’t understand why you would think people would still break their backs to do productive things when others are getting better results by asking a robot to do it.
You can keep re-iterating if you’d like, I am firm in my position.
But I don’t understand yours in light of what I have explained.