
The Loss of Skill in the Industrial Revolution - stang
http://growthecon.wordpress.com/2014/08/19/the-loss-of-skill-in-the-industrial-revolution/
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calibraxis
One problem with deskilling is loss of bargaining power. Because you become a
cog in the machine, easily replaced. Good if you own/rent people, sucks if
you're the "human capital".

(Companies often reject profit-improving innovations which empower skilled
workers. On the flipside, unions — to the extent they exist — also have the
incentive to reject improvements which damage bargaining power. That's one
problem with capitalism's built in boss/worker antagonism.)

Another is mind-numbing work. Adam Smith rants about how division of labor
makes people _" stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to
become... But in every improved and civilised society this is the state into
which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must
necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it."_
([http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN20.html#V.1.178](http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN20.html#V.1.178))

Another (since the last century) is the rise of managerialism, with its
bureaucracies. David Noble points out that tech can deskill workers and
strengthen management, or empower workers and peel away management layers.

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baddox
Do you have any examples of companies rejecting profit-improving innovations
which empower skilled workers?

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hessenwolf
I was told last week not to create any macros whatsoever. Everything must be
either completely manual, or outsourced to India. I work in one of the largest
financial institutions in the world.

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RealityVoid
What the hell? I belive this might just be gross incompetence and not a
deliberate manouver.

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jerf
As a libertarian, my personal philosophy leads me to be suspicious of _all_
large organizations, and one of the reasons why is that once you become large
enough to stop being rigidly held to a standard such as the market's demand
for efficiency (there are other possible standards, but that's a popular one;
small local governing organizations can also be effectively held to account by
their constituents, for instance), you become free to do things like start
playing turf games internally without regard to whether it impacts the bottom
line. Government, company, non-profit, club, union, NGO, sports organization
like the MLB, doesn't matter, as soon as you are free to engage in human
politics without restraint you get too many people who begin playing games
that destroy societal value for their own local political gains. In this case,
doing everything manually is a net loss for society, and a net loss to the
company in question, but a local gain for the person making that dictate (or
at least perceived to be a local gain, which is good enough), and so the trade
is made.

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sfk
"If we were talking about innovations that got more output from less energy,
then holding output constant while lowering energy consumption would be what
everyone hoped to see. Why should human capital be different?"

Wow. I'm not a Marxist, but perhaps _this person_ may want to start by reading
Marx' view about de-humanization in industrial production.

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TeMPOraL
Well, to the dismay of people who like throwing labels like "marxist" around,
Karl Marx was right about many things (also wrong about many, like every
human), and his ideas seem to be more applicable nowadays than they were in
his time.

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jerf
Marx identified some problems. This is fairly underwhelming... one need merely
step outside, point, and one can probably find a problem. Stepping outside is
optional, in fact.

Marx was _mindblowingly wrong_ about the solutions. This is also, frankly,
underwhelming... solutions are _really hard_. He got unlucky though... people
took him seriously, and a lot of people died as a result. Whoops. May we all
never have the curse of being taken serious at such a scale given to us.

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virmundi
First, I've never seen Marxism implemented in the real world. At the time of
its writing, only the UK, Germany and perhaps Holland fit the required
industrialization level. Attempting to implement it in an agrarian society was
doomed from the being by the theory. Now I know that many (myself included)
take issue with what we now call a living wage, but so far it is the only
humane response to dealing with poor people and their growing population due
to industrialization. A living wage is essentially Marxism.

Think about the present situation. Technology is making more and more jobs
unnecessary. Soon trucking will probably go the way of the buggy whip. That
entire industry will shrink. Capitalist will own the trucks, and pay a select
few to manage a fleet. The drivers and some of the mechanics are no longer
needed to maintain routes. That's a lost of many good jobs.

Now, not to disrespect every trucker, but many are average intelligence or
below average. If jobs that survive technology require above average
intelligence, the aforementioned truckers won't have a job, even with
retraining. Now what should we do with them? Pure capitalism would either have
the poor die of starvation/exposure, private charities, poor jails or
extermination. Private charities haven't scaled in the past. Poor jails didn't
work either. I don't see anyone killing the poor either. I also don't think
you'll get mass extinction in a modern society. Thus you're pretty much left
with a Marxist endgame. Eventually enough of the means of production is owned
by the government, either directly or taxation on the producers, that you have
a Marxist state.

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ZenoArrow
"Now, not to disrespect every trucker, but many are average intelligence or
below average" You underestimate the adaptability of your fellow human. There
may be truckers that performed less well academically than you, but perhaps
they didn't need to perform academically in order to survive, and preferred a
different route. Give me anyone from any background with motivation to learn
the skills I can share and I'd guarantee I could get them to a decent level.

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TeMPOraL
The thing is, the goalpost is moving. First of all, not everyone has enough of
"motivation to learn" (along with things like time; the general case is, the
poorer you are, the less time you have available to learn; this also applies
to unstable situations like losing a job). Secondly, the "decent level" is the
moving goalpost. At some point "decent level" is not decent enough to get the
bread.

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ZenoArrow
My main point is "motivation to learn" is key. Give me someone with motivation
to learn, even if their free time is limited, and I can get them to a decent
level in the fields I have knowledge of. As for what "decent level" means, to
me in this case it means good enough to be employed based on those skills
based on current requirements, and with all the mental tools to further their
own education in the future.

Perhaps it's because I recognise my own aptitude is very little to do with
being "intelligent" (whatever that means), and much more to do with having an
interest in what I do.

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dmix
Ayn Rand would love the questions near the end.

Although most markets have historically had a high concentration of output
from the top percentile, so its not exactly a far fetched proposition to say
that 5% of the workforce led development during the IR.

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jerf
If the vast bulk of technological output amplifications are additive, then
we'd expect to need broad distribution of the skills and experience a broad
distribution of results.

If even a few technological output amplifications are multiplicative, and
especially if they are independent (one can freely choose the 3x and the 4x
and the 5x advantage and obtain something like a 60x advantage), then we would
expect the skills to end up concentrated and the optimal strategy to be to
load up as many multiplicative advantages as possible in one place.

(Note carefully the first few words of each paragraph. It only takes a handful
of multiplicative advantages for them to dominate.)

You can obtain this result by playing lots of strategy video games, especially
Civilization which has both. Additive results like the simple Granary, which
adds a constant amount of resources to the containing town, need to be built
in every city to be effective. But things that have a multiplicative advantage
need only be built where they are necessary, and if you have certain unique
things that can only be built in one place that are also multiplicative, the
optimal strategy is to build them all in one place so they reinforce each
other, not scatter them about.

So far, none of this has a moral dimension. This is all just simple
optimization. Now we bring it back down to reality, where morality intrudes.
It should be so obvious that a great deal of technology in the real world has
a multiplicative effect rather than an additive effect that I should not have
to justify that statement. IMHO, the question is what to do about this rather
than whether this is true. And one of the dangers is that it is _very_ easy to
end up giving answers that actually destroy the technological advantage in the
process, because for as mighty as it all appears to be, it's a lot more
fragile than it looks, as you can see once you start seeing it this way. The
humans involved in the tech aren't irreplaceable (or it would be _really_
fragile), but there's still limits involved, and destroying or impeding their
effectiveness can have non-linear impacts on total productivity. A lot of
people model the technological advantages we've obtained for ourselves as a
constant; we can do whatever we want and it will always be there, no matter
how we impede or help it. It's scary how untrue that is.

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VLM
Could also be phrased "the rise of under-employment" rather than loss of
skill. Hundreds of years ago my direct ancestors were making coo coo clocks in
the black forest, and on paper that carpentry skillset is completely lost
after a couple generations of job titles, although I am actually a modestly
skilled wood butcher, I am beyond your average handyman or roofer or maybe
even average rougher, but I am good enough to know I'm at least one step,
maybe two, beneath the true masters of the craft. I might be a higher skilled
carpenter than some of my less competent ancestors, despite it merely being a
hobby.

As a close to the heart analogy, everyone here knows that if you graduated
with a BSCS and didn't do the IT/accounting or the graphics arts/web design
track then the student probably did the stereotypical academic track with all
manner of highly skilled senior year classes like automata theory, compiler
design, maybe some control theory (although thats more EE). I did well in
those classes and like many (most?) people I'm highly underemployed. I would
guess that well over half, maybe 90 percent, of my fellow students in automata
class and compiler class are just doing CRUD web apps or mobile apps, which
hardly require those skill levels / skill sets.

I'd be slightly interested in sociological commentary on societies where
underemployment increases. Does it always increase infinitely, or crash after
awhile, or just not matter much?

A better proxy for carpentry skill level of a society might be the total sales
of tools and supplies. I think the total economic size of the "at least
somewhat skilled woodworker" is larger today than in the olden days.

Another interesting aspect is expansion of titles. Everyone in a skilled craft
no matter if its programming or carpentry knows some are more equal that
others, in carpentry no matter if you all have the same job title, or hobby
name, some guys can barely be trusted with material handling and rough
carcasses while other guys can be trusted to trim the finest kitchen cabinets,
despite all having the same title. And obvious IT/CS analogies.

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fiatmoney
This is particularly interesting in combination with Gregory Clark's ("The Son
Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility") research into social
mobility and relative fecundity by social strata.

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InclinedPlane
I think the modern wave of industrialization (post invention of the micro-
computer) is starting to reverse the trend, especially as leisure time is
potentially increasing.

