Callum Williams

speaker

83 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 14 May

Callum Williams’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Okay, so there's a few planks to this.

One is was it the case that these new technologies destroyed jobs?

That quite clearly did not happen.

Or to the extent that technology did destroy jobs, it created plenty more.

If you look in the century after 1760, the number of Britons who were actually in work nearly tripled.

And then you can look at how much job churn there was, how quickly were jobs.

being created and destroyed.

And really, you can measure this quantitatively.

There was an increase in job disruption from about the 1850s, so almost a century into the Industrial Revolution.

But before then, it was pretty low.

And then we look at wage growth, which really is the crux of the Engels Poor's argument.

Yes, wage growth was slow, but it wasn't obviously slower than before the Industrial Revolution.

And this actually reflects the fact that in the early part of the Industrial Revolution, productivity growth was actually pretty weak.

And that was basically because the new steam powered technology took a long time to spread over the British economy.

So it's not that surprising, given that.

And then another important thing to bear in mind is that during this period, population growth was pretty rapid.

Now, in a pre industrial world, population growth almost always meant declining real wages.

So the fact that real wages held steady is actually a pretty good outcome given rapid population growth.

Absolutely.

And to say that it's not gonna happen overnight is really understating it.

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