Name: Forces of production
ISBN: 9781412818285

What Hacker News says

carefree-bobAug 2026

You may be interested in David Noble's work on this, see "Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation".

People do indeed slur the luddites, and I have to say, emotionally they are very sympathetic.

At the same time, they slur the industrialists, who are also caricatured. What we need to acknowledge, is that the cheaper mass produced goods allow more people to have those goods, even if they are not as good as the artisanal goods.

That is why, for example, when you have projects like trying to create a laptop for the third world, they use cheap components and make a lot of sacrifices, because a shitty laptop that you can use is better than a nice laptop you can't afford.

But it is absolutely true, that progress is not just an arrow pointing up. Progress generally means a reduction in quality and durability and often it means a reduction in beauty as well. And progress also often means replacing artisinal work with mind numbing drudgery or even unhealthy office work that humans were not meant to do, physically and psychologically. There is a real cost to progress, and people on both sides of this debate understand this cost and come to different conclusions. There is no villain here.

Another work I'd recommend is "On the Nature of the Gothic" by Ruskin. It is part of a series on Venetian Architecture Ruskin wrote, called "The Stones of Venice", and he focuses on the amazing variety, gratuitousness, and somewhat poor execution of the countless gargoyles and other flourishes that he saw when visiting Venice: https://archive.org/details/natureofgothicch00rusk/page/n9/m...

It's hard to say what the optimum is. We have cheap disposable clothes when in the past, people might own only a single suit, but it was a beautiful, handmade suit that fit them well and they could even pass onto their children. We have cheap Ikea furniture but in the past people had handmade gorgeous heirlooms they could have as family inheritances. But those were heavy and hard to move around and you were stuck with them. There are real trade offs. And when most people choose the mass produced stuff, the artisanal stuff gets more expensive also. At the same time, it can truly be soulless to be surrounded by cheap junk that you feel was made in a hostile manner to human nature. Where you fall on this depends a lot on your disposable income.

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ughitsaaronJul 2023

“America By Design” and “Forces of Production” by the historian David Noble[1] discuss the relationship between capitalism, management, and the development of technology.

From Wikipedia,

> “America by Design”…was published to unusually prominent reviews. Robert Heilbroner hailed it as a work that "makes us see technology as a force that shapes management in an industrial capitalist society.”

> “Forces of Production”…recounts the history of machine tool automation in the United States. [Noble] argues that CNC (computerized numerical control) machines were introduced both to increase efficiency and to discipline unions…[and] argues that management wanted to take the programming of machine tools…out of the hands of union members and transfer their control, by means of primitive programming, to non-union, college-educated white-collar employees working physically separate from the shop floor.

- [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_F._Noble

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philipkglassNov 2018

This article reads a lot like one of the best frustrating books I have read: David F. Noble's Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation. Noble's book is about the introduction of computer numerically controlled machine tools in American manufacturing after WW II, covering the technology but focusing on CNC's effect on the balance of power between skilled workers and management. The technology was very expensive and fragile when first introduced, and was more effective at cowing workers than at quickly making high precision parts. American makers of CNC machines started with defense industry applications and couldn't manage to make machines competitively priced for civilian use even after they had stopped making wholly defective ones. The chronology ends in the late 1970s; the book was published in 1984.

Management forces crazy process changes into a business, and is forced to backtrack after wasting years and huge sums of money -- a familiar story, right? Except that's not how it ended. There was no backtracking. The optimistic early claims about CNC became, after much time and money, realistic claims. German and Japanese machine tool manufacturers eventually produced the priced-for-civilian-work machines that American tool manufacturers couldn't or wouldn't. Nowadays, no American manufacturer would pay high wages for someone to precisely guide the motions of a lathe by coordinated hand-eye movements. They wouldn't even pay low wages for that particular task; human performance is too inconsistent.

What of this vignette from the article, that also takes place between the immediate postwar and the 1970s?

In 1946, some 550,000 auto workers had produced a little more than three million vehicles, but in 1970 some 750,000 auto workers had produced a little more than eight million vehicles.” The rapid pace took a devastating toll of people’s health and lives, leaving millions of workers disabled or dead; one study from the period estimated “sixty-five on-the-job deaths per day among autoworkers.” Auto industry executives credited the industry’s productivity boom to advances in machinery, but the predominantly black workforce knew it was in fact due to old-fashioned exploitation, not automation: heavier workloads and unsafe, unhealthy conditions.

Today, General Motors employs 180,000 people and sells 9.6 million vehicles per year. Simultaneously, injury rates in manufacturing are down a lot since the 1970s.

I think that both Noble's book and this article would be more persuasive if they committed to one major rhetorical thrust. Either "management is bluffing about how labor can be substituted by machines, so workers shouldn't be intimidated" or "machines can substitute for labor, so workers shouldn't expect the market economy to always provide paid work", but not both.

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sedachvMay 2018

> I cant understand why anyone would put up with a lot of this, but I can guess its probably some smug "white collar" manager who thinks production or revenue are down because people who didnt go to $college are inherently lazier than he is.

That is literally exactly what happens, and how too many people in management think. David Noble's Forces of Production is about machine tool shops in the 1960s and 1970s, and is full of accounts just like yours (with details right down to management accusing workers of sabotage), with sources from both the worker and management sides.

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davidgouldApr 2018

I know in the case of CNC manufacturing, the devices were essentially programmable lathes and one can talk of a "CNC programmer" but the system was designed to leverage the existing knowledge and population of manual lathe operators and there's no relation to computer programmers and instead the "touch stone" is ordinary lath operation

There is a fascinating book "Forces of Production" [0] that analyzes the history of the development of numerical control in the 1960s that argues exactly the opposite. I read it many years ago, but I will try to summarize it TLDR style below:

Before software ate the world there were two competing approaches to automating machine tools:

- Record and Playback: a skilled machinist makes the part and the motions and operations are recorded. Subsequent parts can be made by playing back the recording on a machine with the assistance of a less skilled worker.

- Numerical Control: A white collar worker in an office writes a script (in G Code [1]) to control the tool which is then played on the machine attended by a less skilled worker.

This was a hard problem at the time and technically Record and Playback was easier and worked better. However management, particularly at GE, resented the power of the skilled machinists who had effective unions and were not replaceable in the event of a strike. So despite the advantages of Record/Playback they persisted for years to create the NC technology as it let them replace highly skilled union labor with coding monkeys. The parallels with the present day seem obvious but oddly underappreciated.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/625055.Forces_of_Product...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-code

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