Paul Krugman's Sympathy for the Luddites

Paul Krugman finally catches up with the Sandwichman:

Mechanization eventually — that is, after a couple of generations — led to a broad rise in British living standards.

But it’s far from clear whether typical workers reaped any benefits during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution; many workers were clearly hurt. And often the workers hurt most were those who had, with effort, acquired valuable skills — only to find those skills suddenly devalued.

As the Sandwichman wrote a little over two years ago (May 7, 2011) in an Open Letter to Paul Krugman:

One of the favorite unintended-consequences stories in economics is the idea that 'technology creates more jobs than it destroys.' This was a standard rebuke to Luddites in the early 19th century, who were portrayed as fearing that machines would create chronic unemployment. It closely resembles the case argued against the mercantilism of the early 18th century by Henri Martyn in Considerations on the East India Trade. The lump-of-labor fallacy appears as the negative version of this story. In fact, the fallacy is sometimes called the Mercantalist or Luddite fallacy.

There is a crucial difference between the two sides of the story, though. The technology creates jobs story is openly embraced by economists and triumphantly played as the trump card in debates over employment policy. The fixed-amount-of-work story, though, is only attributed by economists to Luddites, shorter work time advocates and other 'naive populists' they wish to discredit. In both cases it is the economist (not infrequently, The Economist) speaking, telling the uninitiated to sit down and shut up.