Blog You Should Read: Growth Economics: Tuesday Focus for November 4, 2014
Blog You Should read: The Growth Economics Blog Thinking About the Loss of Skill in the Industrial Revolution
Remember my six-part classification of things people do to add economic value?:
- Backs.
- Fingers.
- Brains as (white collar and blue collar) cybernetic-control loops.
- Mouths (and fingers) as information-communication devices.
- Smiles (to provide personal services and keep us all pulling roughly in the same direction).
- Minds (to think up genuinely new ideas and things we can do.
And remember my claims that the classic British Industrial Revolution greatly decreased (1) while greatly boosting (3) and boosting (2), (4), (5), and (6); that the Second Industrial Revolution further decreased (1) and greatly decreased (2) while further greatly increased (3) and increased (4), (5), and (6); and that the current cybernetic Information-Processing Revolution is going to greatly decrease our ability to make money by providing (3) and (4), reducing us to earning our money by providing (5) and (6) or by somehow figuring out how to own a share of the robots and computers that actually make and control stuff?
Now we have the estimable Dietrich Vollrath sending us to de Pleijt and Weisdorf saying that the classic British Industrial Revolution actually decreased (2) and decreased the amount of skill one needed to successfully perform (3). And the Growth Economics blog has some clever and interesting things to say:
…looks at skill composition of the English workforce from 1550 through 1850…. The big upshot to their paper is that there was substantial de-skilling over this period, driven mainly by a shift in the composition of manual laborers. In 1550, only about 25% of all manual laborers are unskilled (think ditch-diggers), while 75% are either low- or medium-skilled (weavers or tailors)… [But] manual laborers [rise], reaching 45% by 1850, while the low- and medium-skilled fall to 55%…. This shift really starts to take place by 1650, while before the traditional start of the Industrial Revolution…. ‘High-quality workmen’–carpenters, joiners, wrights, turners–rose only from 3.9% to 4.9% of the workforce between 1550 and 1850. These are precisely the kinds of workers that Joel Mokyr claims are the crux of the Industrial Revolution in England. They built, improved, adapted, and micro-innovated all the classic inventions…. It’s a really interesting paper, and it’s neat to see how much information you can keep sucking out of these parish records from England…. Does industrialization depend on a concentrated core of skills, rather than a broad distribution of skills? That is, if Mokyr is right about the source of English industrialization, then it’s those extra 650K high-skilled workers that really made all the difference…. Second, should we care about de-skilling?… Could this just mean that the economy was getting more efficient at using the human capital at hand? England didn’t need to waste all that time and effort skilling-up a big mass of workers. They could be used immediately, without much training…. Doesn’t that imply that England was getting more (output) from less (human capital)? That’s a good thing, right?…
You should be reading Dietrich–not just for this piece, but in general…