Arms Race
If we gloss over all the (not so) epic battles, arduous sieges and politicking, military history from the Neolithic (10 000 BC) all the way to the beginning of the 20th century (1900 AD) can be summed up as a constant arms-race between weapons and armour.
New armour was invented to protect against existing weaponry with mixed success, only to be followed by new armour-piercing weaponry made with the explicit intent of penetrating the aforementioned armour - and the cycle repeated endlessly until armour eventually, gradually gave up: first, full body armour was gradually replaced by breastplates and cuirasses in the 16th century, which was abandoned by the infantry by the 18th century, but still used by cavalry all the way to WW1. Full body armour never came back (thought it might in the future), but the breastplate was revived in the form of the bulletproof vest after WW2.
Why am I talking about military history and armour in an article about economics? Because, fundamentally, the same story has an analogy to economics as well.
We could argue, that since a certain date - possibly the 18th century, but even before - economical history has been one giant arms-race between (labour-saving) technology, and the ability of human society and the economical system to adapt to it.
The results of these two worlds clashing were just as violent as before. First, manufactories phased out the old guild system (a holdover from feudal times) in the early 18th century and ushered in the transition to free-market capitalism. This wasn't an entirely peaceful process - early Capitalists like Adam Smith were closeted statists, who supported the government in its quest to enclose the commons, supported calling the national guard when it turned out that previously self-sufficient peasants were unwilling to give up their ancient rights and become wageslaves paid below-subsistence level wages.
Then, in the late 18th century and early 19th century, with the Industrial Revolution in full swing, machines appeared to replace human labour, and we saw the rise of the luddites, high unemployment, there were massive strikes, etc. In the end, a compromise was reached: capitalism was here to stay, but with some regulations that favored the worker, at least on paper.
In the mid-20th century, technological innovation further reduced the need for human labour - society and the economical system coped with it by transitioning to a service-based economy and vastly expanding business administration (which is to say - by inventing bullsh!t jobs, as David Graeber wrote in his book).
In the 2010s, we started another Industrial Revolution, Industry 4, which comes with smart devices connecting to each other, AI that drives cars and trucks, and so on and so forth. The question is, how will society and the economical system cope?
Self-driving trucks, general-purpose robots that can make your coffee, etc. are not the future, they're not science-fiction - they're the present-day reality, and have been here since 2014. In my first article ever written on this site, I explored one possible way society might cope with increased automation - however, I did so before reading Graeber's very illuminating work.
I made the assumption, that when Terminator comes to take our jobs, our only way to cope as a society will be to implement a Universal Basic Income. I'm not the only one who is of this opinion: several big-name Capitalists, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Tim Draper, Götz Werner, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are of the exact same opinion. Are we right though?
If David Graeber - may he rest in peace - is to be believed, then no matter the amount of technological innovation, the 40-hour workweek will remain a constant. For every job that is automated away, two fake bullsh!t jobs will be invented just to prevent you from having extra free time. Why? Because the political elite doesn't want you to have too much free time, as they don't want you to have time to think. Could it be that technology lost, and the political establishment won?
Two Steps Forward, One Step Backwards?
Before I got suckered into wageslavery, I used to be an avid gamer and movie fan, so I am going to bring up an analogy from gaming and cinema related technology.
When a new technology comes out, it's always two steps forward, one step backwards. Not just because the most optimal way to utilize this new technology takes years to learn (and for the knowledge to spread), but also because this new technology is often abused. When 3D acceleration became mainstream, first-person shooters released at the time - like Unreal and Quake 2 - looked like an LSD trip with all the excessive coloured lighting. When Dolby Surround first appeared, movies were plastered with exaggerated surround effects. With real-time ray-tracing being a thing, all I see is screenshots with exaggerated reflections and unrealistic shininess - no doubt that when the novelty of the technology will wear off, developers will moderate the effect.
The same can be said about the evolution of technology and society.
Our Paleolithic hunter-gatherer ancestors spent less than four hours every day working, and the rest was almost pure leisure. Sure, they were almost consistently one meal away from starvation, mortality was high and life expectancy was low, but they lived relatively happy lives that were mostly spent dancing around the fire and listening to stories of their elders. Even their job - hunting - wasn't much of a job, as it was something that humans biologically programmed to enjoy doing. The further away your job is from hunting, the more miserable you will feel.
The Neolithic Revolution was a big step forwards, but also a huge step backwards at the same time. Though their numbers from the unprecedented population growth may have allowed them to overwhelm the hunter-gatherers by sheer numbers, the farmers actually had an inferior quality of life, at least earlier on. Research has shown that early agriculturalists were shorter and physically weaker than their hunter-gatherer ancestors, plague and famine were far more serious threats than before (animal husbandry and living in close proximity with said animals exposed humans to various new diseases), floods and droughts constantly decimated the food supply of farmers, etc. Yet, despite all the shortcomings of the farming life compared to being a hunter-gatherer, there was no going back.
Eventually, as farming and food processing technology improved, smaller and smaller portions of the population had to be involved directly in food production, which led to the creation of more specialized jobs and complex societies, like the one we are living in right now (in most developed countries, farmers make up less than 2% of the population). However, not all of these new, specialized jobs were cushy jobs in the entertainment industry or government/administration/finances - many were dangerous, low-paying and often humiliating jobs that involved painstakingly producing luxury products for the ruling class for minimal compensation. But you just had to do it, because you had to earn money to afford food - it didn't matter if one man could produce food for four (thus reducing the population share of farmers to 25%) - the remaining 75% had to have jobs too, for some reason.
Eventually, quality of life improved again. During the Middle Ages, medieval peasants worked at most 150 days a year (220~ church-mandated holidays), as opposed to the 230 I work on a yearly basis. Sure, during harvesting season, they literally worked from sunrise to sunset, but during the rest of the day, it was typically four-hour workdays at worst.
Then, in the 18th century, together with the great leap forwards in production technology came a huge leap backwards, at least in terms of quality of life.
As this article said: "See, English peasants didn’t want to give up their rural communal lifestyle, leave their land and go work for below-subsistence wages in shitty, dangerous factories being set up by a new, rich class of landowning capitalists. And for good reason, too. Using Adam Smith’s own estimates of factory wages being paid at the time in Scotland, a factory-peasant would have to toil for more than three days to buy a pair of commercially produced shoes. Or they could make their own traditional brogues using their own leather in a matter of hours, and spend the rest of the time getting wasted on ale. It’s really not much of a choice, is it?"
In 18th century Britain, factories as we know it first appeared, and the authorities did everything in their power to prevent peasants from being self-sufficient. Acting more like grotesque proto-Stalinists than the free-market Capitalists we think they were, they enclosed the commons and kicked the peasants off the land. Formerly self-sufficient peasants were herded into the factories like cattle, where they were paid but a pittance, working in highly dangerous conditions 10-14 hours a day, 6 days a week.
Quality of life gradually improved again, until workers were no longer angry by the 1920s in the West - you could say, that quality of life has climbed back up, but I'd say, that it never did. Yes, we no longer work 96 hours a week, just 40. Yes, there are some safety standards in place. Yes, there are some labour laws to prevent abuse, but overall, we still work far more than our medieval and paleolithic ancestors.
As David Graeber wrote in his book, in 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted, that by the 1960s, we'd be working just 15 hours a week instead of the usual 40, because labour-saving technology would simply increase our productivity that much. However, as the late Graeber lamented and I lament, that didn't happen. Instead, we invented fake jobs for paper-pushers to keep the weakly 40, the 9-to-5 constant.
We took many great leaps forward in productive technology and labour-saving technology in the last 50 years, yet we have also gone backwards at the same time - wages have stagnated, leisure time has stagnated, bosses have grown far more demanding than ever, and we are more at their mercy than ever. What went wrong?
To take a break from shilling for a dead man's amazing and illuminating book, I'll give the short answer: higher productivity per man-hour did not translate into more leisure time because all the increased profits were pocketed by the owners of the capital, who then spent the extra money on hiring flunkies to make themselves feel more important, goons who hurt people on their employers' behalf and useless taskmasters who just make life miserable for the actual workers.
In the 2010s, we started our journey on taking another great leap forwards: Industry 4, the Internet of Things, smart-this and smart-that, self-driving cars, AI that can compose music, etc. The question is - what kind of backwards step will we take at the same time? Or can we finally stop making things worse?
