Writing in the Guardian , here’s Larry Elliott on automation. The whole article is well worth a read, even if it’s too simplistic to argue (as he does) that the Luddites were wrong. Over the longish term they most certainly were. The industrial revolution paved the way for an immense improvement in living standards. But what that happy history omits is the fact that it took a while to do so, a phenomenon known as the ‘Engels pause’: In the first half of the nineteenth century, the real wage [in Britain] stagnated while output per worker expanded. The profit […]
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