"In the 19th century, the maturation and standardization of weaving technology finally brought long-overdue raises to textile workers."<p>Wow. Way to completely write out of the story the PEOPLE who fought tooth-and-nail to get those raises, WaPo....<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_Mill_Girls" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_Mill_Girls</a><p>Of course, acknowledging the real struggle might seriously impact the whole "things will get better by themselves, just keep sleeping" argument of the piece...
On the other hand, the mechanization of agriculture had devastating social consequences when introduced to the UK in the 1700s, leading to mass unemployment, crimewaves and the introduction of the death penalty for stealing food. The industrial revolution eventualy created replacements but things got very ugly for a few generations.<p>There's no reason to assume that replacement forms of employment will automatically appear when needed.
> as the market for cotton cloth matured in the mid-20th century, further automation no longer generated such increases in demand and new technology slowly eliminated jobs in the textile industry.<p>This seems to be a counterpoint to his thesis: Technology does indeed create unemployment if all demand has already been satisfied.<p>His point should thus be stated with a caveat: Technology does not destroy jobs <i>as long as demand increases along with the increased supply</i>. In order to know whether robots will steal our jobs, we have to first determine whether human demands are already being met or not, and it seems plausible to me that they nearly are today (though the inverse also seems plausible).
The loom was an example of a technology that actually had a more egalitarian effect on wealth distribution: expensive skilled labor was replaced with greater numbers of cheap unskilled labor.<p>Given the right prices, this sort of technology can make sense even if it doesn't actually "save" labor at all -- replacing one efficient skilled person with two inefficient unskilled ones for the same output makes business sense if the skilled labor is more than double the price.<p>Today's market has a lot of disparity in labor prices like this, especially when you look at it globablly. So it's entirely possible for new tech that doesn't actually save labor in terms of output per worker to find a niche.<p>At the same time, it's also possible for tech to do the inverse, and replace three expensive unskilled workers with one skilled one who commands double the wage.<p>So in terms of income inequality, at least, it's not entirely clear where technology will take us.
To write an entire article using historical textile production as an example and not mention the impacts of contemporary globalization on the same industry is confusing at best and hopelessly optimistic at worst.
Richard Posner's view:<p><a href="http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2014/01/secular-stagnationposner.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2014/01/secular-stagnation...</a>
This is conveniently forgetting that demand (which eventually ends in consumer demand) isn't necessarily infinite. We have this thing called a planet we live on, that needs to remain intact (or Elon Musk needs to get a move on getting us to other planets :)
Could the inventors of the loom, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, have imagined the types of jobs most of have today, in the morning of the Information Revolution? I doubt it.<p>There will be industries and jobs enabled by today's technologies, that we can't picture today. My bet is on biotechnology. We know only a very small amount about the systems of life.