Learning by Doing: The Real Connection Between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth - Hardcover

Bessen, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300195664 ISBN 13: 9780300195668

Verlag: Yale University Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

An important study of the relationship between technology, skills, and economic inequality that answers some of the most pressing economic questions of our time

Today’s great paradox is that we feel the impact of technology everywhere—in our cars, our phones, the supermarket, the doctor’s office—but not in our paychecks. In the past, technological advancements dramatically increased wages, but for three decades now, the median wage has remained stagnant. Machines have taken over much of the work of humans, destroying old jobs while increasing profits for business owners. The threat of ever-widening economic inequality looms, but in Learning by Doing, James Bessen argues that increased inequality is not inevitable.
 
Workers can benefit by acquiring the knowledge and skills necessary to implement rapidly evolving technologies; unfortunately, this can take years, even decades. Technical knowledge is mostly unstandardized and difficult to acquire, learned through job experience rather than in the classroom. As Bessen explains, the right policies are necessary to provide strong incentives for learning on the job. Politically influential interests have moved policy in the wrong direction recently. Based on economic history as well as analysis of today’s labor markets, his book shows a way to restore broadly shared prosperity.

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James Bessen, an economist, is a lecturer at Boston University Law School. He was founder and CEO of a software company that developed the first desktop publishing program.

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Learning by Doing

The Real Connection Between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth

By James Bessen

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2015 James Bessen
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-300-19566-8

Contents

Acknowledgments, ix, 
Introduction, 1, 
PART I. TECHNOLOGY, 
1 More Than Inventions, 9, 
2 The Skills of the Unskilled, 23, 
3 Revolutions in Slow Motion, 37, 
4 Standard Knowledge, 51, 
PART II. WAGES, 
5 When Does Technology Raise Wages?, 71, 
6 How the Weavers Got Good Wages, 84, 
7 The Transition Today: Scarce Skills, Not Scarce Jobs, 101, 
PART III. TECHNOLOGY POLICY, 
8 Does Technology Require More College Diplomas?, 137, 
9 Whose Knowledge Economy?, 150, 
10 Procuring New Knowledge, 162, 
11 The Forgotten History of Knowledge Sharing, 175, 
12 Patents and Early-Stage Knowledge, 192, 
13 The Political Economy of Technical Knowledge, 204, 
14 The Skills of the Many and the Prosperity of Nations, 222, 
Notes, 229, 
Bibliography, 263, 
Index, 287, 

CHAPTER 1

More Than Inventions

IN THE EARLY 1840s, LUCY LARCOM BLOSSOMED as a poet. She took courses in German and botany; attended lectures by such leading thinkers as John Quincy Adams, Edward Everett, John Pierpont, and Ralph Waldo Emerson; and avidly read books from the circulating library on a variety of subjects. Still, it was as a poet—reading, writing, and discussing—that she excelled. She published dozens of poems in the Lowell Offering, one of several girls' literary magazines. Some of them were reprinted in national periodicals and in collections edited by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and other leading American poets. She attracted the attention and support of John Greenleaf Whittier, who became her mentor and friend. These years launched her career as a writer and teacher.

Lucy Larcom was not a college student. She was a factory worker in Lowell, Massachusetts, the home of some of the first integrated textile mills in the United States. The Merrimack River Valley, where Lowell is located, was a center of the U.S. Industrial Revolution, a nineteenth-century Silicon Valley.

Most mill girls came from farming families from across northern New England, and they stayed in boardinghouses in Lowell during their time in the mills, which often lasted only a year or so. Lucy's family was different in that they lived in Lowell. Lucy was born in nearby Beverly, Massachusetts, the daughter of a sea captain and one of nine siblings. Her father died when Lucy was eight, and her mother moved the family to Lowell to run one of those boardinghouses. At eleven, Lucy left school and went to work in a mill to help out her family.

But she did not want to abandon her education. She resolved to "learn all I could, so that I should be fit to teach or to write, as the way opened. And it turned out that fifteen or twenty of my best years were given to teaching." She taught in Illinois and at Wheaton Seminary in Massachusetts, now known as Wheaton College, where a dormitory is named after her.

Yet, although Lucy was an outstanding poet and writer, her efforts to learn were not exceptional. As she wrote in 1889,

For twenty years or so, Lowell might have been looked upon as a rather select industrial school for young people. The girls there were just such girls as are knocking at the doors of young women's colleges to-day. They had come to work with their hands, but they could not hinder the working of their minds also. Their mental activity was overflowing at every possible outlet.... They were improving themselves and preparing for their future in every possible way, by purchasing and reading standard books, by attending lectures, and evening classes of their own getting up, and by meeting each other for reading and conversation.

This was not an accident. The mill owners had expressly designed the city of Lowell to be the kind of place where, in the words of one investor, "the daughters of respectable farmers were readily induced to come into these mills for a temporary period" through the lure of a rich educational, cultural, and religious environment.

In 1816, Francis Cabot Lowell established a very successful cotton mill in Waltham, Massachusetts, using Yankee farm girls to operate power looms, an invention he had copied from British models. Following his death the next year, his investors sought to build a new city, named in Lowell's honor, on the site of a small farm village that had an excellent source of water power to run new mills. But the mill owners built more than factories. They also built boardinghouses for the mill girls, to be run by moral women. They made sure that every major Protestant denomination had provisions for worship. And they encouraged and supported a variety of other institutions, including twenty-three schools, the Lowell Institute, a Lyceum for lectures, a circulating library, a savings bank, and a hospital.

The owners did all this because they wanted intelligent and morally disciplined workers to run the looms. The girls they hired were not poor women desperate for work; they were the daughters of "respectable" farmers, most of whom had modest wealth or better. Although Irish immigrants built the mills and canals and Irish women did domestic service in Lowell's better-off homes, the girls hired to work the looms during the 1820s and 1830s were almost exclusively of Yankee origin. They were almost all literate, at least to the level of being able to sign their names.

The mill owners' motives were not purely philanthropic. They needed bright, able workers who could learn how to use this strange new technology efficiently. Mills in other towns had failed because they had not recruited enough high-quality hands. By the 1840s, the weavers in Lowell's mills were more productive than those in English mills, which hired relatively fewer literate workers, or those in American mills that did not use such a select labor supply. It would appear that the skills, knowledge, and intelligence of ordinary production workers were critical to the adoption of this new technology.

Implementation

The behavior of the mill owners seems surprising, but it should not be unfamiliar. For similar reasons today, Google offers employees gourmet meals, on-site medical care, and a whole variety of amenities in order to attract talented people and keep them intellectually engaged. Yet the mill owners' behavior seems surprising because we often forget how difficult it was to implement technologies in the past; we forget that implementation required new skills and knowledge that took time to develop and time to learn, even for mechanical inventions. We tend to focus instead on the original act of invention.

The distinction between invention and implementation is critical and too often ignored. The key invention central to the dramatic rise of textile mills in Lowell and other towns was the power loom, a machine that partially automated the work of weaving, greatly reducing the labor required to produce a yard of cloth. The first commercially successful power looms were operated in the United Kingdom. American inventors began developing power looms around 1810, influenced by British designs. The design that eventually dominated the U.S. textile industry was developed by William Gilmour, an immigrant mechanic who had experience with textile equipment in Scotland. After Gilmour built his first loom in 1817 for Judge Daniel Lyman in Rhode Island, he shared his drawings with other mechanics, and this design...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Yale University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0300195664
• ISBN 13: 9780300195668
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 295
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar