[larsiusprime]

Required reading anytime someone invokes the word "Luddite": http://www.amazon.com/Rebels-Against-The-Future-Industrial/d...

Enclosure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure) is suspiciously never mentioned whenever the Luddites are invoked. It's not as simple as "technology took muh job, rar!" -- it's more like "hey, this common land that used to belong to all of us has been forcibly taken away and given to this guy with a factory who now gets to be super productive and take away our livelihoods, but he doesn't have to share any of the increased wealth he now enjoys."

Technology undoubtedly increases productivity and wealth. The question is, WHO gets to own that wealth and what gives them a right to it.

[arethuza]

Good point - here in Scotland there were the Clearances in the 18th and 19th centuries forcing peoples off lands - either to the cities or to emigrate or to simply starve:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances

There is a lot of very murky history to land ownership in Scotland - one of the reasons I'm so pleased with the "right to roam" that we have now as well as Scottish Government policies favouring community land ownership.

[Sulfolobus]

If you haven't already read it I highly recommend "The Poor Had No Lawyers" by Andy Wightman [1]. It can be a struggle to convince people to read a book on the history of Scots property law but it is a really fantastic book. Manages to balance detail without ending up stultified and provides a lot of context behind the current state of land reform in Scotland.

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Poor-Had-No-Lawyers/dp/178027114...

[xorcist]

Luddites may be the best example ever that history is written by the winners.

Suffice to say, early industrialization was abysmal for the workers, who really had no choice but to take whatever bad deals they were given. Corporal punishments were used to inflict respect and security didn't exist.

So Luddites were bascially revolts, and in several ways a precursor to the worker's movement that came later. It nearly escalated into civil war (at one point more soldiers were occupied with fighting Luddites than Napoleon). Leaders were tortured and killed.

In propaganda, they were bascically pictured as lazy and/or against technology itself, which carried over to the modern meaning of the word. Well worth a read.

[digi_owl]

Another take is that people went from being largely self-sufficient (a few animals, some vegetables), to being largely dependent on the factory owners.

Never mind that it may well be that early factory products were of poorer quality, and potentially harder to repair, than the stuff made rurally.

After all, when you make something for your own use, you put effort into it in the hopes you don't have to do it again any time soon.

[kungfooguru]

Even when it is as simply as technology putting someone out of work it is a joke to then tell them, "It is ok, you and your fellow workers may be out of work but ultimately the unemployment level won't rise, so chill out."

This is especially condescending before the creation of unemployment insurance and the welfare state. You can't feed your family with without your job.

Those ease the pain, ultimately a democratic economy is needed so technology cuts the amount of work we all have to do.

[cwb]

Indeed, that is the question. The post tries to show that "cut your hair and get a job" will disappear as an answer to "how do I get to partake in this wealth creation" for a large number of people and we'll thus probably want to come up with an answer that scales better than today's social security for example and works for all those who live in countries without social security.

[bgilroy26]

Great book that covers the English economy through the time of Enclosure:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Transformation_(book...