No, what actually happened is decades of declines in the safety and material condition of workers
The thing that came before the industrial revolution was feudalism. Life expectancy increased dramatically as a result of industrialization.
children forced into factories
They weren't being kidnapped, they were getting paid. This was a "problem" because it became more lucrative to work in a factory than go to school, so prohibitions on child labor and mandatory school attendance laws became widespread during the industrial revolution.
organization and violent rebellion by labor unions
This was mainly attributable to governments not enforcing antitrust laws or allowing employers to get away with violence themselves. It was basically gang violence by rival gangs when the real solution should have been trust busting.
the passage of labor laws
Most labor laws were retroactive legislative enactment of soon to be widespread employment conditions, because once employers had to compete with each other they had to provide competitive working conditions. Legislators opportunistically took credit for changes that were in the process of happening regardless.
It’s quite clear that you haven’t read anything about this and are arguing strictly from your ideological priors. For starters, the end of Feudalism led to workers being forced from rural settings into concentrated urban ones, which was accompanied by an increase in widespread disease outbreaks and malnutrition. In countries like England, this had an immediate disastrous impact on health and lifespans relative to fairly stable trend under feudalism. Likewise, having been dispossessed of lands they were previously free to exist and work on for many generations, many adult and child were, in effect, kidnapped, as the only other choice was starvation and death. The rest of your comment is more of the “draw the rest of the owl” history that I alluded to in my comment, unless you somehow think the formation of the Labour Party in England was unrelated to these developments.
Likewise, having been dispossessed of lands they were previously free to exist and work on for many generations, many adult and child were, in effect, kidnapped, as the only other choice was starvation and death.
Dispossessed of the lands? The peasants didn't own the land. They were serfs who genuinely didn't have a choice because the alternative was to be executed or left to "starvation and death."
Industrialization was the first time they actually had a choice. There were still agricultural workers -- somebody was growing the food -- but now you could go into the city, which generally paid better. Or paid at all, contrary to historical norms. And you had a choice of what you did. Working long hours in a factory wasn't as easy as working for a grocer, but it paid better, and people chose it willingly.
This was the thing that truly ended slavery in the first world -- before if you were a slave or a serf and you ran off, you would be left to die alone in the wilderness. Now you could run off to the city and get a job in a factory, and live, and make money. The old system was defunct because the plantation owners were never going to keep people there by force once escape meant profit rather than death.
unless you somehow think the formation of the Labour Party in England was unrelated to these developments.
This was obviously the period during which unions entered the scene, but notice that unions have significantly declined in the US since then and "labor laws" like the minimum wage haven't kept up with inflation, and yet minimum wage jobs are uncommon because employers still have to compete for labor even in the absence of unions or labor laws.
The place where this falls down is when they don't, i.e. when you have a monopoly or a company town which is the only employer for some occupation or region. Which is a legitimate problem if you have a regulatory environment that allows that to happen, but the solution to it isn't "labor laws" or unions, because a monopoly is a problem for more than just workers. You have to bust them up and prevent them from forming.
At which point the rest of that stuff is just inefficient ways to mitigate the consequences a problem that should be solved properly instead.
Honestly, you should just go read Acemoglu’s “Power and Progress” as the other comment suggested. It’s written for a popular audience. Many of these assertions are wrong and intentionally elide huge swathes of the actual history. I dunno who would bother to engage with these wall text posts you make on here.
You're complaining about less than a dozen paragraphs while telling me to read a 560-page book?
This seems like the money quote:
the broad-based prosperity of the past was not the result of any automatic, guaranteed gains of technological progress… Most people around the globe today are better off than our ancestors because citizens and workers in earlier industrial societies organised, challenged elite-dominated choices about technology and work conditions, and forced ways of sharing the gains from technical improvements more equitably
But this is just the same point I've been making: If you have competitive markets, this is what happens naturally because customers will prefer to patronize businesses that share the gains of technological progress with customers and employees will prefer to work for the ones that share the gains of technological progress with workers. The ones that try to keep all the gains for themselves get outcompeted -- as long as there is competition.
The problem -- which they largely recognize -- is that if you don't have competition, which has been the case in many instances throughout history, the incumbents become abusive. But since this is only possible when they have insufficient competition, that is the problem we have to solve.
Well, if that’s your point, then you’re largely wrong, misinterpreting that paragraph, and again should read this book and more about this history in general. I’m complaining, again, about you arguing from your ideological priors without any real engagement with the scholarship or history.
The consequence of industrialization was creating new social and political formations (primarily the classes called Labor and Capital and their corresponding representation in nascent democracies vs. prior feudal dynamics). While market economies, really more the birth of Capitalism in general, was necessary for creating those classes and competing interests, it was not sufficient for creating the progress you cite. That had more to do with worker organization against exploitation, specifically in the energy economy, which gave them massive leverage over the emergent political formations (see Timothy Mitchell’s work Carbon Democracy). That’s why the blurb explicitly states: workers in earlier industrial societies organised, challenged elite-dominated choices about technology and work conditions, and forced ways of sharing the gains from technical improvements more equitably.
It’s honestly bizarre to debate someone about the contents of a book they haven’t read, nor seem to even engage with a basic summary of. There are lots of compliant chatbots you can talk to if you only want to be in dialogue with whatever you already believe to be true.
Comments
The thing that came before the industrial revolution was feudalism. Life expectancy increased dramatically as a result of industrialization.
They weren't being kidnapped, they were getting paid. This was a "problem" because it became more lucrative to work in a factory than go to school, so prohibitions on child labor and mandatory school attendance laws became widespread during the industrial revolution.
This was mainly attributable to governments not enforcing antitrust laws or allowing employers to get away with violence themselves. It was basically gang violence by rival gangs when the real solution should have been trust busting.
Most labor laws were retroactive legislative enactment of soon to be widespread employment conditions, because once employers had to compete with each other they had to provide competitive working conditions. Legislators opportunistically took credit for changes that were in the process of happening regardless.
It’s quite clear that you haven’t read anything about this and are arguing strictly from your ideological priors. For starters, the end of Feudalism led to workers being forced from rural settings into concentrated urban ones, which was accompanied by an increase in widespread disease outbreaks and malnutrition. In countries like England, this had an immediate disastrous impact on health and lifespans relative to fairly stable trend under feudalism. Likewise, having been dispossessed of lands they were previously free to exist and work on for many generations, many adult and child were, in effect, kidnapped, as the only other choice was starvation and death. The rest of your comment is more of the “draw the rest of the owl” history that I alluded to in my comment, unless you somehow think the formation of the Labour Party in England was unrelated to these developments.
Forced.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
And yet average lifespans went up, because what came before was even worse.
And then the world gained the germ theory of disease and penicillin and they went up even more.
You can clearly see the start of the industrial revolution on this life expectancy chart, and the consequences:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#/media/File:Li...
Dispossessed of the lands? The peasants didn't own the land. They were serfs who genuinely didn't have a choice because the alternative was to be executed or left to "starvation and death."
Industrialization was the first time they actually had a choice. There were still agricultural workers -- somebody was growing the food -- but now you could go into the city, which generally paid better. Or paid at all, contrary to historical norms. And you had a choice of what you did. Working long hours in a factory wasn't as easy as working for a grocer, but it paid better, and people chose it willingly.
This was the thing that truly ended slavery in the first world -- before if you were a slave or a serf and you ran off, you would be left to die alone in the wilderness. Now you could run off to the city and get a job in a factory, and live, and make money. The old system was defunct because the plantation owners were never going to keep people there by force once escape meant profit rather than death.
This was obviously the period during which unions entered the scene, but notice that unions have significantly declined in the US since then and "labor laws" like the minimum wage haven't kept up with inflation, and yet minimum wage jobs are uncommon because employers still have to compete for labor even in the absence of unions or labor laws.
The place where this falls down is when they don't, i.e. when you have a monopoly or a company town which is the only employer for some occupation or region. Which is a legitimate problem if you have a regulatory environment that allows that to happen, but the solution to it isn't "labor laws" or unions, because a monopoly is a problem for more than just workers. You have to bust them up and prevent them from forming.
At which point the rest of that stuff is just inefficient ways to mitigate the consequences a problem that should be solved properly instead.
Honestly, you should just go read Acemoglu’s “Power and Progress” as the other comment suggested. It’s written for a popular audience. Many of these assertions are wrong and intentionally elide huge swathes of the actual history. I dunno who would bother to engage with these wall text posts you make on here.
You're complaining about less than a dozen paragraphs while telling me to read a 560-page book?
This seems like the money quote:
But this is just the same point I've been making: If you have competitive markets, this is what happens naturally because customers will prefer to patronize businesses that share the gains of technological progress with customers and employees will prefer to work for the ones that share the gains of technological progress with workers. The ones that try to keep all the gains for themselves get outcompeted -- as long as there is competition.
The problem -- which they largely recognize -- is that if you don't have competition, which has been the case in many instances throughout history, the incumbents become abusive. But since this is only possible when they have insufficient competition, that is the problem we have to solve.
Well, if that’s your point, then you’re largely wrong, misinterpreting that paragraph, and again should read this book and more about this history in general. I’m complaining, again, about you arguing from your ideological priors without any real engagement with the scholarship or history.
The consequence of industrialization was creating new social and political formations (primarily the classes called Labor and Capital and their corresponding representation in nascent democracies vs. prior feudal dynamics). While market economies, really more the birth of Capitalism in general, was necessary for creating those classes and competing interests, it was not sufficient for creating the progress you cite. That had more to do with worker organization against exploitation, specifically in the energy economy, which gave them massive leverage over the emergent political formations (see Timothy Mitchell’s work Carbon Democracy). That’s why the blurb explicitly states: workers in earlier industrial societies organised, challenged elite-dominated choices about technology and work conditions, and forced ways of sharing the gains from technical improvements more equitably.
It’s honestly bizarre to debate someone about the contents of a book they haven’t read, nor seem to even engage with a basic summary of. There are lots of compliant chatbots you can talk to if you only want to be in dialogue with whatever you already believe to be true.