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- There's a classic book on this, "Chapters on Machinery and Labor" (1926). [1]
They show three cases of what happened when a process was mechanized.
The "good case" was the Linotype. Typesetting became cheaper and the number of works printed went up, so printers did better.
The "medium case" was glassblowing of bottles. Bottle making was a skilled trade, with about five people working as a practiced team to make bottles. Once bottle-making was mechanized, there was no longer a need for such teams. But bottles became cheaper, so there were still a lot of bottlemakers. But they were lower paid, because tending a bottle-making machine is not a high skill job.
The "bad case" was the stone planer. The big application for planed stone was door and window lintels for brick buildings. This had been done by lots of big guys with hammers and chisels. Steam powered stone planers replaced them. Because lintels are a minor part of buildings, this didn't cause more buildings to be built, so employment in stone planing went way down.
Those are still the three basic cases. If the market size is limited by a non-price factor, higher productivity makes wages go down.
- There's a classic book from almost a century ago, "Chapters on Machinery and Labor", which lists the three usual outcomes from mechanization. It's still relevant.
The "good case" was typesetting. The introduction of the Linotype enormously increased the volume of material printed and created more printing and typesetting jobs.
The "medium case" was bottle making. Hand-made bottles were expensive, taking a trained group of about five people to blow a bottle. Machine-made made bottles were cheaper, and required far fewer people to make. Cheaper bottles increased demand for bottles, but, overall, employment in bottle making was about the same or less. Also, much of the labor was now low-skill machine tending - putting in sand, taking out bottles. Only a small number of bottle-making machine experts were needed.
The "bad case" was the stone planer. Brick buildings used to have stone lintels over doors and windows, and there was an industry of big guys with chisels hammering out those things. The stone planer was simply a big steam powered planer for stone slabs. This required far fewer people. But it didn't increase demand for stone lintels, because they were a minor building component, not significant enough in cost to increase demand for brick buildings.
- There's a 90-year old book on this, "Chapters on machinery and labor".[1] This analyzes three industries drastically changed by new machinery - printing, glass bottle making, and stone planing.
- Printing was the "good case". Before the Linotype, typesetting was a very slow process, with people picking type slugs from a case one letter at a time. The Linotype had a keyboard and ran as fast as the operator could type. This made shorter-run print jobs and thicker newspapers practical. Printing, and employment in the printing trades increased substantially.
- Glass bottle making was the "production way up, wages down" case. Bottle making by hand glassblowing required a skilled team of about six people working in close coordination, manipulating molten glass and molds. It took years to get good at this. Bottles were expensive. Once an automatic bottle making machine was developed, it took a semi-skilled machine tender to feed the machine and take the bottles away. The skilled trade was destroyed. Bottle cost went down, production went up, and wages went down.
- Stone planing was the "almost everybody gets fired" case. Brick houses used to have stone lintels over doors and windows. These were chiseled flat by people with big hammers, big chisels, and big muscles. Then a machine for planing stone flat was developed. This was much faster and cheaper. But the size of the stone lintel market was determined by the rate of house construction, and cheaper lintels didn't affect that much. So almost all workers lost their jobs.
Those are still the ways automation plays out.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Chapters-Machinery-Labor-George-Barne...
- Link: Chapters on Machinery and Labor George E. Barnett
- As I've mentioned before, there's a book from 1926, "Chapters on Machinery and Labor", which outlines the three basic cases of what happens when new technology is introduced. Their examples are the Linotype, the glass-bottle blowing machine, and the stone planer.
The Linotype was a win for printing workers. Typesetting had been bottlenecking the process, and with fast typesetting, book and newspaper prices came down, and the volume of printed material increased enormously. That's the good case.
The glass-bottle blowing machine is the not-so-good case. Bottle-blowing used to take a team of five people trained to work together and manipulate molten glass, blowpipe, and mold with tight coordination. This was a skilled trade and paid well, but bottles were expensive. Automatic bottle-making machines could make bottles rapidly with minimal labor. Bottle sales went up, and the bottle business grew, but the skilled trade was dead. Most of the workers were shoveling sand in one end or taking bottles out the other. This didn't take much skill. Operating the machines was not too hard. You probably needed a maintenance guy who really understood them, but only one for many machines. So most of the skilled jobs went away, replaced by low-paid entry level jobs.
The worst case was the stone planer. Back when brick was the key building material, stone lintels were used over doors and windows to provide structural support for the bricks above. Stone was chipped by hand by big guys with big hammers and big chisels to make flat, rectangular stone beams. The stone planer was a powered machine for squaring off a block of stone. Like a wood planer, but heavier-duty. No more need for big guys with chisels. Huge increase in productivity. But the market didn't grow, because stone lintels were a minor building component and cheaper stone lintels didn't mean more demand for them. So most of the workers lost their jobs.
Those three outcomes still apply to many cases of computerization.
- Re "Jevons Paradox". That doesn't mean employment goes up. There's a little book, "Chapters on Machinery and Labor", from a century ago which outlines three ways this worked out.
The "good case" was mechanized typesetting, the Linotype. This produced a huge increase in print shop productivity and a huge increase in the amount of printed material. The result was an increase in printing employment (That lasted until the 1980s; printing today is almost dead as a trade, and print shops have few people in them.)
The "medium case" was glassblowing. The introduction of automatic bottle-making machines did automatically what used to take a skilled team of five men working closely together. Bottle consumption went up sharply, and but employment in bottlemaking did not. The skill level went down, since feeding a bottle-making machine isn't that hard, so wages dropped.
The "bad case" was the stone planer. This was a machine to make stone lintels for the tops of doors and windows in brick construction. The stone planer made it much cheaper to do this. But lintel consumption didn't go up, because lintels are a small fraction of building cost. Lots of men with hammers and chisels become unemployed.
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