Technological unemployment: Difference between revisions

One of the great modern {{t|dogma}}s.

The British invented all important sports. Even downhill skiing. (Americans: your “important sports” are all close derivatives of things the British invented years before: rounders, netball and rugby).  But this article is not about imperial bragging rights. There is a reason that the British invented all sports, and that is because the British invented the industrial revolution, and that changed the working dynamic for the ordinary stiff forever. It was humankind’s first brush with technological unemployment. Suddenly manual labour was not subsistence work. Machines could do it. Humans could attend to the machines, in shifts, and the great steampunk economy could schedule people’s labour and , importantly, ''give them time off''. When you have time off, you are not working: you have we official “leisure time” this is not just periods of rest, recovery, nutrition, washing and so on, but free time to do whatever you please.

This presented the sort of problem everyone wants to have: figuring out what to do with your free time. The British were the nation who, predominantly, had this problem, and just one thing they did was ''invent organised sport''.

====The theory====

As articulated by Keynes: “unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.”<ref>Keynes: ''Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren''</ref>