The sexist undercurrent of the article was thick, but it didn't ripple the surface until about half way though.
The mere idea of the 'pink collar' is silly. Hair cuts are a highly elastic service, and nursing and teaching are seeing a huge downward pressure in wages are are only being protected by unions.
> Nurses may be more valued than surgeons; kindergarten teachers paid better than university professors.
Dogs and cats living together, human sacrifice, mass hysteria!
This article completely misses the point - 2000 years ago, machines did the work of 1000 men through pulleys and levers. 500 years ago, machines did the work of 1000 men through gears and belts. 100 years ago, machines did the work of 1000 men through steam and rail. 50 years ago, machines did the work of 1000 men through internal combustion. Ten years go, machines did the work of 1000 men through the transistor, and today machines do the work of 1000 men through advanced heuristic systems, statistical analysis, etc.
We will continue to automate processes so that we can all, collectively, lead better lives.
I'm not quite as sanguine on what technological change will do to employment, though I'm not sure what precisely it will do, either. I don't think the smooth progression you paint is quite accurate; there have been really major upheavals that had significant social impacts, not a slow transition with a constant ratio. The industrial revolution led to a large proportion of the population rushing to cities, and a whole host of urban problems (tenement housing, large-scale homelessness, urban crime, hygiene problems) that produced backlashes such as, at one extreme, Marxism, and at the moderate middle-ground, the modern welfare state and trade unionism.
In particular, there was a large, relatively short-term shift in employment, from "almost everyone" working in agriculture to a majority of people working in factories. It's not 100% clear to me what today's version of "factories" will be in that analogy, the mass employment sink that people can migrate to, the way they migrated agriculture->factories. I guess "the service industry" is as good a guess as any, which is roughly what this article is proposing a more specific version of (essentially, the high-touch, hard-to-automate subset of the service industry).
On Mayday of all days such a characterization of Marxism as the extreme on a 1D number line of political responses to urbanization feels simplistic.
Of the infinitude of academic distinctions of Marx's writing to be raised here, the distinction between "political Marxism" and "analytical Marxism" seems fruitful. For the purposes of this distinction, political Marxism would be the set of writings embedded in the political climate of Marx's age, The Manifesto, etc. The politics that resulted from these writings bloomed initially, but as the mantle was passed through Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky the politics became increasingly fraught with problems (being gentle here.)
Analytical Marxism for me is limited to _Capital_. Marx proceeds analytically, taking the rich tradition of political economy to heart. Ricardo and Adam Smith are addressed directly. Marx attempts no emotional arguments here, no appeals for solidarity or revolution. Instead, the ideals of capitalism (e.g. exchanges between individuals are mutually beneficial) are taken as true, and Marx attempts to create a framework for analyzing the structural forces that result from this economic mode.
_Capital_ provides a set of analytical tools that are timeless and non-dogmatic. A great example is the exploration of how the relative prices of various commodities are set (Marx suggests it is emergent behavior). _Capital_ also takes on such problems such as the contradiction between exchange value and use value, and how the investor's and producer's perspective on exchanging commodities and money differs. These are problems many writers wave away as non-problems by maintaining a myopic focus on individual exchanges.
Another text you might be particularly interested in is _The Making of the English Working Class_ by E.P. Thompson, which expounds a humanist perspective on the migration from farm to factory in England.
Oh that part I don't really disagree with. I was meaning to point to revolutionary uprisings as a fairly extreme reaction, which I associated with Marxism, but I suppose I meant the revolutionary left in general. Perhaps I should've used a less loaded word than "extreme"; I was just looking for a way to characterize the strength of the backlash that was stronger than the milder backlash that produced the reformist social-democratic parties. I do think that the urban discontent and associated political ferment from the mid-19th through early 20th centuries was at least largely in response to industrialization (if I recall, even Marx says something like that, which is why he didn't think a communist revolution in a pre-industrial country like Russia was likely or sensible).
In a certain methodological sense a lot of people are Marxist, I suppose, even who don't use the term, so I agree he's been very influential. For example, Jared Diamond is sometimes called a neo-Marxist in the non-political sense, because that materialist way of looking at history (as the product of broad structural forces) is traced back to Marx.
In that case, it's not clear to me how we'll "all, collectively, lead better lives", unless we transition to a much stronger welfare state, like in one of those sci-fi utopias where everyone's basic needs (food/shelter/healthcare) are taken care of by robots, and you only need to work if you want luxuries or feel a particular inner drive to do so.
If, on the other hand, we have a proportion of people doing quite well, and a large number of people unemployed in slums, that seems not too good as a collective outcome.
Lets also consider that there is no such thing as "uneducated" Everyone has different forms of education they may just not materialize into having capital letters after their name.
What we need to be thinking about is how to mend the system to better prepare and incentive people to work on whatever problems society deems to be worthy. That may be through formal education programs or it may be through something completely different.
2000 years ago, machines did the work of 1000 mules through pulleys and levers. 500 years ago, machines did the work of 1000 mules through gears and belts. 100 years ago, machines did the work of 50 mules through steam and rail. 50 years ago, machines did the work of no mules through internal combustion.
Some people's marginal product just isn't enough to make employing them more useful than turning them into glue. In a metaphorical sense.
The mere idea of the 'pink collar' is silly. Hair cuts are a highly elastic service, and nursing and teaching are seeing a huge downward pressure in wages are are only being protected by unions.
> Nurses may be more valued than surgeons; kindergarten teachers paid better than university professors.
Dogs and cats living together, human sacrifice, mass hysteria!
This article completely misses the point - 2000 years ago, machines did the work of 1000 men through pulleys and levers. 500 years ago, machines did the work of 1000 men through gears and belts. 100 years ago, machines did the work of 1000 men through steam and rail. 50 years ago, machines did the work of 1000 men through internal combustion. Ten years go, machines did the work of 1000 men through the transistor, and today machines do the work of 1000 men through advanced heuristic systems, statistical analysis, etc.
We will continue to automate processes so that we can all, collectively, lead better lives.