The Industrial Revolution was a terrible period for workers up until the labor movement began fighting for putting basic protections in place. Lots of people got very wealthy though, that's for sure.

This view of history as immutable, with the ends always meeting the means is the sort of thinking that I believe is holding us back as a society. Researchers are still studying the impact that the industrial revolution had on not just the environment, but also the mental health of the descendants of the working class in Europe: https://hbr.org/2018/03/research-the-industrial-revolution-l....

We can and should do better.

Those seemingly horrible jobs were better than what they had before. You can tell because people voted with their feet. They left their farms to take those jobs, and didn't go back.

Something similar plays out with "sweatshop labor" these days. People talk about the abuses, but there's often the same flow of people from the countryside lining up for the openings.

That's not to say that stopping stupid abuses and unsafe conditions isn't important, it's just important to keep in mind how bad things often were. Simply having a job with a salary that guaranteed you wouldn't starve was a huge improvement for some people.

Compared to what? Sure, it was awful compared to working at Google with unlimited snacks and all of that. Compared to being a peasant subsistence farmer, it wasn't so bad.

it was literally misery on scales that hadn't been seen before. children were expected to work in horrible and abusive conditions. everyone was working very long and gruelling days for next to nothing and had no way to protect themselves from exploitation.

How is that different from subsistence farming?

It was just as bad only with industrial accidents and diseases on top.

Entire families working in the fields all day didn't have accidents or diseases in subsistence farming?

In the UK industrial accidents were commonplace until the passing of The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. The very many maimings and deaths it has (belatedly) prevented are less common in subsidence farming.

Of course farmers get sick, but they don't get the diseases created by industry. There are a great many respiratory conditions and cancers that don't occur naturally.

Not sure if you're talking about industrial revolution or present day labor conditions...? Okay, we have child labor outsourced to poorer countries, but still confusing.

>Compared to being a peasant subsistence farmer, it wasn't so bad.

the life expectancy in Liverpool and some other parts of England during the peak of industrialisation fell to 25 years, the average height fell by almost 10cm, so actually it was pretty bad and it took decades for the situation to improve. I would have very much preferred to be a self-sufficient farmer during that time. Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens goes through a pretty big amount of data that shows that traditional communities and even hunter-gatherers lived much better and longer lifes than people that had to endure the human meatgrinder that was industrialisation.

https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2013/09/13/did-livin...

also, "it wasn't so bad?" were you there? suffering is suffering.

> were you there?

Not being Nicolas Cage, I was not. However, there are many, many countries today who are similar to 19th century UK/US. Would you like to go to rural China and compare the peasant subsistence farming still happening there with urban China and its sweatshops?

> suffering is suffering.

Sure. People suffered. They suffered horribly as peasant farmers living on less than $2/day, or they suffered as laborers making possibly a bit more. Work was universally hard.

It's possible (likely) that future people will see what we went through - disease, hunger, unemployment, bad management, personal suffering/alienation and a host of other problems - and say literally the same thing about us. But although I think all of us can think of a few tweaks at the margins, we'd all utterly fail fully to replace the status quo most people accept, many try to change, a few succeed at changing and a precious few improve.

We should give the past the same courtesy we expect from future generations. And we should be willing to make some of the sacrifices today to ensure that future generations will endure. (And this includes things like ensuring the effects of climate change or nuclear weapons don't wipe us out.) The past is and forever shall be a foreign country.

> The Industrial Revolution was a terrible period for workers up until the labor movement began fighting for putting basic protections in place.

Yes, and that's why the labor movement is important (I'd like it to be much stronger than it is still today). Is your view that neither the Industrial Revolution nor the labor movement should have happened?

The information revolution appears to be having the opposite effect, with massive productivity gains resulting in fewer employees needed.

One of the outcomes of this is that parts of the country have been 'left behind' economically. This isn't only in England, but happening in other countries too (e.g. the USA). The surge in 'nostalgic'[0] voting (Brexit and MAGA spring to mind, respectively) is one of the outcomes of that occurring.

I'm hoping I'm wrong, and I'm hoping there's something around the corner that changes the situation specific to the information revolution, rather than an outside force (like say, a virus causing a massive shift in demographics), but the way things look right now, that's not a given.

[0] I'm deliberately ignoring the more controversial and/or negative aspects to those voting choices, as that would derail the conversation

I think in the short term, the information revolution appears similar to the industrial revolution: a category of jobs become obsolete, but long term, the economy grows, and adds many more categories of jobs.

The possibility that it won't merits consideration. It's entirely possible that new industries will spring up, but it would be dangerous to rely on that and plan as if it were certain. Even the "long tail" that people predicted for artists to make a living in a widely-connected economy has thus far largely failed to materialize.

The fact that I can't imagine it is no proof that it won't happen, of course. But I feel that we've gotten lucky in the past, and I hate depending on my luck.

i guess if you take this idea to its logical conclusion, we will end up in a post-scarcity economy where nobody "needs" to work, yet all their needs are met. So far, it's unclear whether this outcome will occur, and I do agree it's unclear what the outcomes of the information revolution will be, in terms of overall economic comfort of individuals.

This doesn't seem to be guaranteed by any law of economics, though. Despite the massive economic growth since the 19th century, the absolute number of job openings for horses has decreased substantially.

> but long term, the economy grows, and adds many more categories of jobs.

Perhaps, but if history is any guide, that "long term" will span over multiple generations. That is of no help to those being hurt now.

The logic seems to be:

B followed A once before, therefore B always follows A.

>One of the outcomes of this is that parts of the country have been 'left behind' economically.

That's the whole point of the comment you're replying to. This isn't new or unique to recent technological advancements. This is always the case when new technology displaces existing structures.

> England went on to be far wealthier and provide far more opportunities to its people after the industrial revolution

To compare this to the Industrial Revolution is just wrong. Period. Just as comparing today to the Gilded Age is wrong. Those were period of massive productivity growth (and also wage growth) despite being periods of high inequality.

On the contrary, we are in an age of tiny productivity growth and almost no wage growth. We have been through a decade with basically zero interest rates (or negative interest rates in parts of the world). To say, we've been through this before and we are all going to be better off for it, is just not true.

I see this all the time as the response to the argument that people rely on these jobs. The difference will be if, like England, the replacement jobs are more valuable by having greater leverage and impact. Or, as I suspect, the replacement jobs are fewer with similar or less value. I suspect we will see the latter pushing our lower classes into a tighter and lower band of incomes.

As far as I can see many of the jobs we do these days don't provide any real value. In this case cashier doesn't provide real value so good riddance. But I'm not confident we'll find ourselves in a better place in the future.

Also, somehow we undervalue manual labor with some skill and unions don't seem to work as well for non-factory/hospital/plant jobs.

On the whole, I agree with your sentiment.

I think the one difference is that despite the 1850s UK having (some) protectionism and (loads of) imperialism, they didn't have massive bureaucracies forbidding everyone from doing everything without permission.

This is not actually a problem of technology but of governance. And we should keep in mind that this kind of improvement would make retail workers much more productive as well as the industry more sustainable.

...and a century or so of civil unrest, bomb-throwing anarchists, communism, and other entertaining side-effects.