{"text":[[{"start":6.75,"text":"Arguments about the past are often used as proxies for arguments about the future. It is no surprise, then, that a long-running debate about the Industrial Revolution has flared up as we begin another phase of rapid technological change."}],[{"start":20.25,"text":"The argument concerns whether the industrial revolution was good or bad for workers in the short run (and, by extension, which the AI revolution will be). The discourse in tech circles can be boiled down to this: “Relax: the industrial revolution led to higher real wages and more jobs”. “But don’t you know about ‘Engels’ pause’? Between 1790 and 1840, profits rose but real wages barely budged.” “Ah, but don’t you know that a different measure of real wages tells a different story?” And so on."}],[{"start":50.15,"text":"I find this argument perplexing — not because there are no lessons to be learnt from the industrial revolution, but because I don’t think these databases are the right place to look for them. "}],[{"start":59.849999999999994,"text":"For one thing, the data on that era is patchy and unreliable. For another, the industrial revolution in Britain took place against a very different institutional backdrop. There was no universal suffrage, no legal trade unions and no modern welfare state. Indeed, you could argue these were eventual social responses to the industrial revolution. It is hard to see why we should expect the wage-setting dynamics of the past (even if we could agree on what they actually were) to repeat themselves today."}],[{"start":88.5,"text":"But most importantly, these quantitative metrics do not capture how profoundly the industrial revolution changed the nature of work for many people, in ways both good and bad. As the historian EP Thompson puts it in The Making of the English Working Class, “some of the most bitter conflicts of these years turned on issues which are not encompassed by cost-of-living series”: health, working hours, child labour, security and independence. "}],[{"start":117.55,"text":"The same is already true today, where fights are beginning to break out over issues beyond the economic realm: environmental costs, intellectual property, chatbots and child safety. When Anthropic interviewed 80,000 users of its Claude chatbot across 159 countries, it found that people were indeed worried about jobs and the economy, but they were also worried about reliability, autonomy, agency, cognitive atrophy and governance."}],[{"start":145.05,"text":"While the macroeconomic data does not offer much insight about how our predecessors navigated such profound change, the good news is that other sources are available. The economist Martha Gimbel, executive director of the Yale Budget Lab, argued recently in favour of reading the great novels of the era. Books like Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now can help us to understand “what drove people to invest in technology, what it felt like for workers at the time, how society changed and how it responded (or didn’t) to those who lost out,” she wrote. "}],[{"start":181.65,"text":"Aggregate employment data, on the other hand, tends to obscure the question of who gains and who loses. Many of these stories from the industrial revolution have been forgotten, with the exception of the Luddites. A recent paper by historical social scientist Benjamin Schneider excavates what happened to a group of often overlooked workers: the mostly female workforce of hand-spinners. "}],[{"start":204.85,"text":"In a little more than fifty years, he writes, “innovations eliminated an occupation that had provided work for nearly one in six women and children, 8 per cent of the whole population.” And though the new inventions generated different jobs, they did not necessarily go to the same people. “Many [displaced] women could only find seasonal and insecure employment in agriculture, and some had no work at all,” he found."}],[{"start":230.29999999999998,"text":"One man from the 19th century would be dispirited but not surprised, I think, that people in 2026 were still arguing about his era through the lens of statistical averages. In his novel Hard Times, Charles Dickens described a girl called Sissy, who was having a terrible time in her lessons. Her schoolmaster told her to imagine that her schoolroom was a nation in possession of “fifty millions of money”. Wouldn’t that mean it was a prosperous and thriving state? "}],[{"start":258,"text":"“I said I didn’t know,” she relayed afterwards to a friend. “I thought I couldn’t know whether it was a prosperous nation or not, and whether I was in a thriving state or not, unless I knew who had got the money, and whether any of it was mine. But that had nothing to do with it. It was not in the figures at all.”"}],[{"start":281.29999999999995,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1781249725_7678.mp3"}