Responding to Professional Disruption

In Chapter 24 on "The Luddites," The Industrial Revolution Podcast recounts an episode when entrepreneur John Bell began producing textiles that drove out local small-scale competitors and putting many workers out of work. In 1799, Bell received a letter, reading:

“I send you this to inform you that we – the cloth workers of Trowbridge, Bradford, Chippinham, and Melkshom – are almost (or the greatest part of us) out of work and we are fully convinced that the greatest of the cause is your dressing work by machinery. And we are determined, if you follow this practice any longer, that we will keep some people to watch you about with loaded blunderbuss or pistols, and will certainly blow your brains out. It is no use to destroy the factories but put you damned villains to death.”

Contrast this with the demise of the retail video rental business in this century. The dramatic drop in employment rivals the most precipitous job loss in any industry. Where was the hue and cry? Where the death threats? Where the Luddite armies sabotaging the competition?

First, is the historical, sociological explanation. Job loss due to industrialization had never been seen before. The disruption of ancient jobs, norms, and entire ways of subsisting within a generation was new and frightening. Today, we are used to hearing of yet another radical disruption in some industry, e.g., music streaming, EVs, ebooks, big data, cloud computing, and AI. This has become regularized. Workers expect their profession to look much different at the end of their career than at the beginning.

Second though, is a not unrelated economic explanation. What were the options available to an out-of-work textile worker in 1799 versus the options of a displaced Blockbuster clerk exactly two centuries later? Textiles were among the first industries to benefit from mechanization. Textile workers had left the farm and now saw few other options in the cities. Blockbuster was able to hire clerks because clerking was so similar to clerking of other retail products. These workers took these jobs because the skills were transferable. They had outside opportunities. The supply curve for textile workers was steep meaning that a drop in worker demand would seriously lower wages. The supply curve for Blockbuster clerks was flat meaning that a drop in demand for video rental clerks would hardly affect the wages of the displaced workers.