We've Been Here Before: The Waves That Took Our Jobs, and What Came Next

Every generation has had its own version of the supersonic tsunami. Each time, people were right that the old jobs were going away, and wrong that work itself was ending. The pattern is worth knowing in detail, because it shows both why we can be hopeful and why hope alone isn't a plan.

The weavers, 1811

In the English Midlands, skilled textile workers who called themselves Luddites smashed the machines that were undercutting their wages. They have become a punchline, but they weren't confused. The machines really did destroy their livelihoods. What they couldn't see was that cheaper cloth would create vast new demand, and with it new work in factories, shipping, retail and fashion. The lesson cuts both ways: the industry grew, and many of the individual weavers never recovered.

The farmhands, 1900–2000

At the start of the twentieth century, 41 percent of the American workforce worked in agriculture. By 2000, it was 1.9 percent (USDA Economic Research Service). Tractors, combines, fertilizer and better seed replaced tens of millions of jobs, the biggest labor displacement in American history.

It wasn't a catastrophe, because it took most of a century. Children of farmers became machinists, clerks, teachers, engineers and nurses, in industries that barely existed in 1900. The transition ran across generations, and that slow pace is what made it survivable.

The ledger clerks, 1979

For centuries, keeping a company's books meant rows of clerks copying figures into ledgers and redoing the arithmetic by hand whenever one number changed. Then VisiCalc arrived in 1979, and Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel after it. A spreadsheet could recalculate a whole model in an instant.

Bookkeeping and accounting clerk jobs shrank. But businesses didn't stop doing math. They started doing far more of it. Once a forecast was nearly free to rerun, companies wanted scenarios, projections and analysis on everything, and the work moved up a level, from copying numbers to interpreting them. Financial analysis grew into a profession of its own.

The bank tellers, 1970s–2000s

When ATMs spread, everyone expected bank tellers to disappear. They didn't. Economist James Bessen found that teller employment held steady and even rose slightly as ATMs spread, because each branch needed fewer tellers, so banks opened many more branches, and the teller's job shifted from counting cash to helping customers with more complex needs (Conversable Economist, on Bessen's research).

Bessen's broader point matters most here: the real problem has rarely been "the end of work." It has been how hard it is for workers to get the new skills that let their work complement the new technology (Conversable Economist).

What every wave teaches

• The old jobs really do go. Comforting stories about "new jobs" don't help the specific people whose work disappears.
• New work shows up where things get cheaper. When a technology makes something abundant, demand grows, and new jobs form around it.
• Work moves up a level. From doing the task to directing, checking, interpreting and improving it.
• Speed decides how much it hurts. Change spread over a generation is absorbed. Change in a decade breaks people.

That last point is why this wave needs a closer look. Read on: [This Time Is Different](/pages/this-time-is-different).