Comment by clickety_clack
2 days ago
Were they wrong? Didn’t a lot of those people end up in tenements in factory towns and down in the mines? It was a few generations before things really started to get better. I’m all for progress, but I’m not really up for disposing of people lives with a “to make an omelet you have to break some eggs” mentality.
Removing automated looms means everyone has fewer textiles while a few workers benefit. I think most people like the current abundance vs. being forced to spend a large fraction of their household budget on clothing and only having a few outfits in total.
Company mines were because the extraction sites were remote and goods were expensive and so they got exploited as they had essentially no independent supply beyond what their employer would sell, since the employers weren't really interested in living wages and were all too happy to exploit a captive workforce. That sort of condition will become highly relevant again if we ever get space colonies, because air & food will be scarce.
But it absolutely is difficult and disruptive to people's lives when this all changes. I have a family history talking about my great grandpa losing his job to machines and a great uncle losing a finger to bread slicing machines back when sliced bread was new, showing what that meant for our family. Yet I can also see how the past couple of generations adapted to that to find new ways forward. None of them decided to stick with the idea of being a "master tinner" they all found other ways to produce things people actually wanted.
> the past couple generations adapted
That concedes the point. Their descendants adapting decades later means the generation that lived through it absorbed the full shock of the transition. For displaced labor in the 1810s, adapting meant overworking in factories with horrible conditions and a permanent collapse in their living standards across the board. The dispute was never about accepting or banning automation, they were identifying that capital would absorb all of the gains while labor would be forced to absorb all of the shocks.
The only constant has always been change. And that just raises the question of why should we preserve ditch digging for our children just so they have meaningless labor to cling to, when we have the option to make new and better things for people. Few of us here are 'labor' in any meaningful sense, to begin with. And while I have spent time working at a factory, and I don't begrudge the robots for taking it away.
The notion that there's some idyllic past to cling to is just wishful thinking to me. The days when one person working with their body alone could have meaningful impact are long gone. We'll have to find a new prosperity that doesn't rely on zero sum thinking from economists who divide by zero, too.
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> Didn’t a lot of those people end up in tenements in factory towns and down in the mines? It was a few generations before things really started to get better.
Obviously any individual can "end up in tenements or mines" and one can't disprove an assertion like that.
But broadly all social metrics were showing an inexorably upward trajectory in the Britain of the 19th century, cranking into a hockey stick toward the end of the century and into the 20th. It's just not true to argue that the Luddites were right as a matter of general policy.
> I’m not really up for disposing of people lives with a “to make an omelet you have to break some eggs” mentality.
To be only a tiny bit glib: that's a statement of thermodynamics, not social policy. Eggs break, period. Change is change. You can make specific arguments about things like backstopping sudden unemployment, but folding it into a discussion about Ludditism (or rather the Butlerian Jihad, I guess) isn't the right way to do that.
You’re talking about people with kids, wives, friends, hopes and dreams when you’re saying “Eggs break, period”. By reinforcing that view, you are helping to build the kind of society that just won’t care when you happen to be one of the eggs yourself.
People find it easy to be Utilitarians when they’re in the greatest number, don’t they?
Sigh. I'm just going to repeat verbatim the thing I said immediately after the bit you cherry picked to get upset about:
You can make specific arguments about things like backstopping sudden unemployment, but folding it into a discussion about Ludditism (or rather the Butlerian Jihad, I guess) isn't the right way to do that.
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