evidence from the late 19th century in American production”

Published last week by the US National Bureau of Economic Research, NBER, the history of economics, Skill Loss: Evidence from the Late 19th Century in American Manufacturing, is interesting in its own right because it deals with “anti-progress” in industrialization.

The authors, Jeremy Etack, Robert Margo and Paul Rhode, have spent a lot of effort to digitize the data and use them to prove the very hypothesis of the loss of skills in the process of technological development of mankind. For this purpose, an array of primary data from the US censuses of the second half of the 19th century and an extensive annual report of the Department of Labor of the US Administration “Manual and Machine Labor” published in 1910, a two-volume 1600-page book, were subjected to cross-analysis. It is based on tables of the use of labor, including manual and machine labor, in various industries (more than 600 types) – data for it have been collected since the end of the 19th century.

The main conclusion of the authors is that the appearance of steam engines in industrial production is really responsible for the loss by workers of some of the skills and abilities that they possessed while each unit of production was produced in a handicraft manner, and for the appearance in factories and plants of an insignificant number of “blue collars” with the massive hiring of unskilled workers. Replacing steam with electricity somewhat slowed down the loss of skills due to the demand for trained personnel and the possibility of laying off the low-skilled. But in general, a detailed study of the production of comparable goods over half a century showed a loss of 15% of skills, which the authors describe as a “not very significant, but direct effect” of progress, stipulating that the process was significantly intensified later as a result of the division of labor in the development of transport and globalization.

It would seem that the reader is up to what has been happening in the United States over the past century – especially in the context of discussing the military mutiny in the Russian Federation. But fixing the status quo following the results of all the upheavals so far says that the development of the Russian Federation will continue in the same direction – including technological. This means that the authorities will continue to implement the concept of technological development – and we recall that it orders the Russian Federation to de facto learn how to produce much of what has been bought so far, be it aircraft, electronics, high-tech equipment and a host of other useful things.

And here the work of American economists is in place: it allows you to estimate what national technological sovereignty will cost those who will forge, polish and solder it with their own hands. Simply put, this is at least the restoration of 15% of the skills lost over the years of participation in the global economy for every working hand.