[Yoric]

Just to clarify: the Luddites were being automated out of a job.

From what I understand of history, while industrial revolutions have generally increased living standards and employment in the long term, they have also caused massive unemployment/starvation in the short term. In the case of textile, I seem to recall that it took ~40 years for employment to return to its previous level.

I don't know about you guys, but I'm far from certain that I can survive 40 years without a job.

[seabass-labrax]

In addition, although the Luddite uprisings were themselves crushed, the political elite were not blind to the circumstances that led to them, and did eventually bring in the legislation that introduced modern workers rights, legalized unions and sowed the seeds of the modern secular welfare state in Britain. That is a pattern that appears throughout history and especially in Britain, where the government cannot be seen to yield to violent protest but quietly does so anyway.

[litam]

And among the few who found a job back, most of the time it was some coal mining job, to feed the machines who replaced them... Maybe the future of (some of) nowadays' office workers is to feed (train) the models replacing them?

[SideQuark]

I cannot find a place industrial revolutions caused massive starvation. Care to provide one?

The other things you state are not even close.

First, lowered employment for X years does not imply one cannot get a job in X years - that's simply fear mongering. Unemployment over that period seems to have fluctuated very little, and massive external economic issues were causes (wars with Napoleon, the US, changing international fortunes), not Luddites.

Next, there was inflation and unemployment during the TWO years surrounding the Luddites, in 1810-1812 (starting right before the Luddite movement) due to wars with Napoleon and the US [1]. Somehow attributing this to tech increases or Luddites is numerology of the worst sort.

If you look at academic literature about the economy of the era, such as [2] (read on scihub if you must), you'll find there was incredible population growth, and that wages grew even faster. While many academics at the at the time thought all this automation would displace workers, those academics were forced to admit they were wrong. There's plenty of literature on this. Simply dig through Google scholar.

As to starvation in this case, I can find no "massive starvation". [3] forExample points out that "Among the industrial and mining families, around 18 per cent of writers recollected having experienced hunger. In the agricultural families this figure was more than twice as large — 42 per cent".

So yes there was hunger, as there always had been, but it quickly reduced due to the industrial revolution and benefited those working in industry more quickly than those not in industry.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite#:~:text=The%20movement....

[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2599511

[3] https://academic.oup.com/past/article/239/1/71/4794719

[Yoric]

Thanks for your response.

My bad for "massive starvation", that's clearly a mistake, I meant to write something along the lines of "massive unemployment – and sometimes starvation". Sadly, too late to amend.

Now, I'll admit that I don't have my statistics at hand. I quoted them from memory from, if I recall correctly, _Good Economics for Hard Times_. I'm nearly certain about the ~40 years, but it's entirely possible that I confused several parts of the industrial revolution. I'll double-check when I have an opportunity.