Opposing Innovation

The Luddite Lesson

The Luddites were part of one of the most transitory labor movements in history, but they taught us an important lesson that is still valid: the cure for problems caused by innovation is not revolution, but more innovation.

The group is believed to have taken its name and inspiration from Ned Ludd, an English youngster who, in 1779, secured a spot in history by smashing a labor-saving innovation — two frames on which even unskilled workers could produce more stockings than skilled workers could do by hand. 

In the late 18th Century, thousands of English textile workers came to share Ludd’s fear that the introduction of mechanized equipment would make their skills worthless, and that they would lose their jobs as a result. By the turn of the century, as the Napoleonic wars depressed the English economy and inventors kept developing increasingly improved tools and machinery, this anxiety turned into anger and a destructive force.

The Luddite workers gave vent to it by forming a militia that launched a rebellion, ransacked textile plants, and severely damaged the industry in northern England. To borrow from William F. Buckley’s, Jr., description of his own conservative credo, the Luddites tried to “stand in front of history, and shout ‘Stop!’”

Of course, history did no such thing. It took thousands of British troops to put down the rebellion, but by the 1820s, it was done. The British parliament passed two laws — the Frame Breaking Act and the Malicious Damage Act — that made “machine breaking” and other forms of industrial sabotage capital crimes. But those who really buried the Luddite movement were English engineers and inventors. Without skipping a beat, they went on developing new labor-saving tools and technological marvels, such as the steam engine, chemical manufacturing, and more efficient iron production processes.

By the 1860s, England had launched the historical Industrial Revolution, which brought unprecedented economic, technological, and social progress. The new and fast-coming inventions gave the world the first steam-powered railways, boats, and ocean-going ships; large-scale manufacture of machine tools; and novel machinery in steam-powered plants.

The new factories, which vastly outperformed the traditional, manual production process, lowered the prices of consumer goods and other products, multiplied their variety, and made them available to far more people than ever before. Mass production and industrialization caused, and was fueled by, a major exodus of farm workers to blue-color jobs in the cities.

It also replaced thousands of skilled artisans with machinery. But above all, in many parts of the world, foremost in Europe and the United States, the Industrial Revolution energized and modernized economies. This resulted in the creation of millions of new jobs for industrial workers, who enjoyed history’s first substantial, sustained rise in the standard of living.

Despite periodic slow-downs and recessions, this system has continued to work well. In the United States, the economy’s most serious episode of dysfunction — the Great Depression of the 1930s —  ended only at the onset of World War II, but it prompted the greatest legislative reforms in our history.

 The administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt enacted the Social Security Act and other frequently strengthened social welfare measures, collectively referred to as “The New Deal.” To this day, they continue to protect millions of Americans against the most grievous effects of disease and unemployment.

And these safeguards have served us well when our economic system took a dramatic, and potentially dislocating, leap forward. That development took place in 1956, when George Devol, an American inventor, was granted the patent for Unimate, the first industrial robot.

The Age of Robotics

Devol’s invention of a digitally operated programmable robotic arm triggered an explosive change in the manufacturing industry — a change that, like the introduction of mechanized spindle rods and textile frames of the 1800s, has replaced tens of thousands of workers. Ever-new and more accomplished robots have taken over the jobs of assembly line operators, welders, and others who used to perform skilled and semi-skilled jobs in factories.

This sea change, which started 60 years ago, continues to generate a whirlwind of still more labor- and cost-saving innovations. New robots now entering into use can not only perform the functions of personal servants, but an increasing number are smart enough to command and operate other robots. The old industrial system, in which unskilled laborers fulfilled had some roles in factories, is on its way out for good.

Economists warn that this trend poses a threat to the millions of young people who may plan to follow in the footsteps of their fathers: get factory jobs with only a high school degree, and work their way up to middle positions and wages. Statistics show that those low-level starting jobs of yesteryear are increasingly performed by robots.

Moreover, a similar trend is also setting in outside the factories. In the offices of businesses from coast to coast, increasingly intelligent devices have begun replacing white-collar “knowledge workers” — people whose main salary-earning skill is knowledge, and whose jobs were traditionally regarded as secure.

For example, according to an Associated Press analysis of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the first decade of the current century has seen the elimination of the jobs of 1.1 million secretaries. They were replaced by Internet firms that provide, more cheaply, a wide variety of services that range from maintaining calendars to planning foreign travel.

In the same period, the number of telephone operators dropped by 64%, travel agents by 46%, and bookkeepers by 26%. And the U.S. was not a special case. According to the AP, “two-thirds of the 7.6 million middle-class jobs that vanished during that period in Europe were the victims of technology.”

A prominent student of these changes, Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, says that this technological progress creates several significant problems. One of them is that it tends to exacerbate income inequality by making well-educated employees much more valuable and better paid than workers without the necessary skills.

Even more problematic, according to Brynjolfsson, is evidence that technological progress no longer creates enough jobs to compensate for the displacement of workers whose skills are no longer needed.

 He points out that, for decades after the Second World War, the increase in technology-enhanced productivity and wealth creation in the United States was paralleled by an increase in total employment. As automation and other industrial efficiencies generated more value, the country as a whole became richer. That fueled increased economic activity and created jobs for new and dislocated workers.

However, beginning in 2000, the two previously parallel developments — rising productivity and job creation — have begun to diverge. While innovation-driven productivity has continued to rise, employment statistics have started to lag behind. By 2011, the two sets of data were separated by a significant gap that Brynjolfsson attributes to the new technology. Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel prize-winning economist, agrees that “[e]conomies don’t make these [technological] transitions well.” 

The unsettling statistics have sparked some alarmed speculation that the U.S. may be approaching conditions that in other countries have led to social unrest reminiscent of the Luddite rebellion.

The American experience does not justify such fears. In the early 1800s, nine out of every ten Americans worked in agriculture; now, it’s around two in one hundred. At its peak, about a third of the U.S. population worked in manufacturing, and now it’s less than 10%. These vast transformations have taken place in relative harmony, thanks to uniquely American optimism, the undeniable benefits of innovation, and the social safety nets established in the 1930s.

There is no evidence that Americans fear or reject technological progress, which continues to be one of our honored values. But the unstoppable drive to innovate will no doubt bring dramatic changes and new challenges. We need to do all we can to be ready.