Learning From Ricardo and Thompson: Machinery and Labor in the Early Industrial Revolution and in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Daron Acemoğlu, Simon Johnson · Annual Review of Economics · 22 Aug 2024
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Where this sits in the debate
- Will AI destroy more jobs than it creates? · its finding: it depends (why studies differ)
- Will AI widen inequality? · its finding: it depends (why studies differ)
Direction of the finding as read from the abstract by an AI model (AI-written).
Abstract
David Ricardo initially believed machinery would help workers but revised his opinion, likely based on the impact of automation in the textile industry. Despite cotton textiles becoming one of the largest sectors in the British economy, real wages for cotton weavers did not rise for decades. As E.P. Thompson emphasized, automation forced workers into unhealthy factories with close surveillance and little autonomy. Automation can increase wages, but only when accompanied by new tasks that raise the marginal productivity of labor and/or when there is sufficient additional hiring in complementary sectors. Wages are unlikely to rise when workers cannot push for their share of productivity growth. Today, artificial intelligence may boost average productivity, but it also may replace many workers while degrading job quality for those who remain employed. As in Ricardo's time, the impact of automation on workers today is more complex than an automatic linkage from higher productivity to better wages.
About this publication
Leading field journal. A leading journal in economics or a neighbouring field (on the Tinbergen Institute’s A list or near the top of the RePEc ranking), or a top-rated computer-science venue.
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- Published
- 2024 (26 months ago)
- Citations
- 47 (OpenAlex)
Citations in context
47 citations — 52nd percentile among the 23 indexed papers from 2024 in this collection. Citation counts favor older papers; this compares only same-year papers here, not the whole literature.
□ added to this collection in 2026.
Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson signed the wemustactnow.ai letter · author affiliation matches seed institution massachusetts institute of technology — part of why this paper is in the collection.
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