Immediate Effects of Labor Saving.—Inventing a machine that can do the work of twenty men will cause some of the twenty to be discharged. They feel the burden of finding new places, and if they are skilled workmen and their trade is no longer worth practicing, they lose all the advantage they have enjoyed from special skill in their occupations. Do they themselves get any adequate offset for this, or does society as a whole divide the benefit in such a way that those who pay nearly the whole cost get only their minute part of the gain? Is there unfair dealing inherent in progress in the economic arts, and must we justify the movement only on the ground of utility, though knowing that a moralist would condemn it? These are some of the general questions that are to be decided by a study of this phase of economic dynamics. We need to know both what the movement will in the end do for humanity and what it will at once do for particular workmen.[2] In addition to ascertaining what the ultimate results of the movement will be, we need to trace, with as much accuracy as is possible, the effects of the disturbances that are involved in generally beneficent changes.
FOOTNOTES
[1] It is obvious that capital as well as population is distributed with uneven density over the territory occupied by society; but the movement of capital is less obstructed than that of a great body of people, and moreover it is chiefly the fact that the people are not dispersed over the area in a natural way which creates the chief obstacle to the moving of capital. It goes easily when it accompanies a migration of laborers.
[2] Our study may lead to a moral verdict without being itself an ethical study; we limit the inquiry to questions of fact, but perceive that some of the facts are of such a kind that they must lead a reader to condemn or approve the social economic system.
CHAPTER XVI
EFFECT OF IMPROVEMENTS IN METHODS OF PRODUCTION
Displacement of Labor and Capital by Inventions.—Inventions are "labor-saving." Employers are engaged in a race with each other in reducing the outlays involved in producing goods, and a common way of doing this is to devise machinery that will do what laborers have heretofore done. The same thing is accomplished by developing cheap sources of motive power or introducing new commodities which are good substitutes for dearer ones. Mechanical automata have at a thousand points taken labor out of human hands; electricity, which is "harnessing Niagara," may at some time harness waves and winds and make them turn the literal wheels of mechanical progress. Such things, by causing a given amount of labor to produce a larger amount of consumers' wealth, are product multipliers; but this is the same thing as saying that they yield a given product at the cost of less labor, and as we more commonly see their effect in this light, we call them labor savers.
Why Labor Saving is not always and everywhere Welcomed.—To an offhand view it would seem that product multiplying is the greatest blessing that, in an economic way, can come to humanity; and if general and permanent effects be considered, it is so. The solitary hunter who has to catch and club his game would get unqualified benefit from the possession of a bow and arrows; the fisherman would get the same benefit from a canoe, the cultivator of the soil from a spade, etc. Society in its entirety is an isolated being and derives similar gains from engines, looms, furnaces, steamships, railroads, telegraphs, etc. Yet there are persons within the great social organism to whom the benefit from one special improvement may be small and the cost great. There are none who are not better off because of all improvements past and present.