The One Percent Rule
Imagine a time traveler, let's call him Ned, who leaps into the future from the year 1750. The first thing he sees when he lands in a bustling 21st-century city is a factory, humming with smartphones and machinery. His eyes widen as he watches people seemingly speaking to themselves wearing headphones, gears spin, robotic arms weld, and cars drive their passengers without anyone at the wheel. He's horrified, convinced that every single machine is an unfeeling saboteur, snatching bread from the mouths of honest workers. Poor Ned, struck by what we might call the Curse of Machinery, immediately concludes that these miraculous innovations are the enemies of labor, a conclusion shared by many even today.
But Ned is wrong, as were many Luddites who threw wrenches (sometimes literally) into the gears of progress. The belief that machines destroy jobs has been shattered again and again, only to rise each time, phoenix-like, from the ashes. Let’s take a closer look at why this fear refuses to die, and why it deserves to.
One reason the fear of machines persists is that people often fail to see beyond immediate consequences. Imagine, for instance, a clothing manufacturer who installs a machine that can sew jackets at twice the speed of a human worker. Half the labor force is laid off, and the immediate reaction is to point a blaming finger at the machine. But what happens next? The machine itself had to be manufactured, and someone had to design it. Beyond that, now that the production cost has dropped, the manufacturer has extra profits, profits that can be used to expand operations, invest in new industries, or simply be spent on a new yacht. In all these cases, the money reenters the economy, and jobs are created elsewhere.
