alt Hacker News> the industrial revolution took 80 years to start benefiting workers
Come on. This is dishonesty and isn't the reality. We may agree that the Industrial Revolution may have taken decades (certainly not 80 years) for its benefits to be *clearly and widely* felt by workers, but anything further is an abusive claim. So what, because the progress doesn't benefit to workers instantly, we shouldn't do it ?
In the end, whatever your position, industrialization eventually raised living standards. So what's wrong with that ?
> The continued impact of automation at least contributed to the rise of right wing extremism and an erosion of democracy all over the west
This is oversimplifying and correlation at the best, not causation
Replies
You asked where the danger was, the response told you that disrupting the status quo can be dangerous.
"Carl Benedikt Frey at Oxford has documented that the Industrial Revolution took seventy years before wages and employment recovered for the workers it displaced. In the interim, wages stagnated, the labor share of income collapsed, profits surged, inequality skyrocketed, and the political consequences included the Chartist movement and widespread social upheaval."
From half way through this (meandering) blog post:
https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory
As for the populism link, that is well established empirically:
https://academic.oup.com/oxrep/article-abstract/34/3/418/504...
https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/12485/we-were-the-robots...
Etc...
Edit: Just found this when looking up sources, I haven't had time to look at it but just dumping it here:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...