Economics in One Lesson

C
HAPTER
7
The Curse of Machinery
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A
mong the most viable of all economic delusions is the belief that
machines on net balance create unemployment. Destroyed a
thousand times, it has risen a thousand times out of its own ashes as
hardy and vigorous as ever. Whenever there is long-continued mass
unemployment, machines get the blame anew. This fallacy is still the
basis of many labor union practices. The public tolerates these prac-
tices because it either believes at bottom that the unions are right, or
is too confused to see just why they are wrong.
The belief that machines cause unemployment, when held with
any logical consistency, leads to preposterous conclusions. Not only
must we be causing unemployment with every technological improve-
ment we make today, but primitive man must have started causing it
with the first efforts he made to save himself from needless toil and
sweat.
To go no further back, let us turn to Adam Smith’s 
The Wealth of
Nations,
published in 1776. The first chapter of this remarkable book is
called “Of the Division of Labor,” and on the second page of this first
chapter the author tells us that a workman unacquainted with the use of
machinery employed in pin making “could scarce make one pin a day,
and certainly could not make twenty,” but that with the use of this
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machinery he can make 4,800 pins a day. So already, alas, in Adam
Smith’s time, machinery had thrown from 240 to 4,800 pin makers out
of work for every one it kept. In the pin-making industry there was
already, if machines merely throw men out of jobs, 99.98 percent unem-
ployment. Could things be blacker?
Things could be blacker, for the Industrial Revolution was just in
its infancy. Let us look at some of the incidents and aspects of that
revolution. Let us see, for example, what happened in the stocking
industry. New stocking frames as they were introduced were destroyed
by the handicraft workmen (over 1,000 in a single riot), houses were
burned, the inventors were threatened and obliged to fly for their
lives, and order was not finally restored until the military had been
called out and the leading rioters had been either transported or
hanged.
Now it is important to bear in mind that insofar as the rioters were
thinking of their own immediate or even longer futures their opposi-
tion to the machine was rational. For William Felkin, in his 
History of the
Machine-Wrought Hosiery Manufactures
(1867), tells us that the larger part of
the 50,000 English stocking knitters and their families did not fully
emerge from the hunger and misery entailed by the introduction of the
machine for the next forty years. But in so far as the rioters believed,
as most of them undoubtedly did, that the machine was permanently
displacing men, they were mistaken, for before the end of the nine-
teenth century the stocking industry was employing at least 100 men
for every man it employed at the beginning of the century.
Arkwright invented his cotton-spinning machinery in 1760. At
that time it was estimated that there were in England 5,200 spinners
using spinning wheels, and 2,700 weavers—in all, 7,900 persons
engaged in the production of cotton textiles. The introduction of
Arkwright’s invention was opposed on the ground that it threatened
the livelihood of the workers, and the opposition had to be put down
by force. Yet in 1787—twenty-seven years after the invention
appeared—a parliamentary inquiry showed that the number of per-
sons actually engaged in the spinning and weaving of cotton had
risen from 7,900 to 320,000, an increase of 4,400 percent.
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