Reddit mentions of The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America's First Superhighway

> While the long-run outcome is that jobs shifted from agriculture to other sectors, the transition period cannot be labelled as wholly painless or without conflict.

Of course not. Who said it was wholly painless? Neither was the buggy industry being put out of business by the auto makers.

But did it "cause long-term structural unemployment" or anything like it? Or was it part of the continual creative destruction of increasing productivity and thus societal wealth and income?

"Conflict" is another subject. Economic history is rife with conflict, violent conflict. Nobody under 40 today can imagine the truly bloody level of political-economic-business conflict and corruption that was the norm say, 70 years ago. Within one lifetime of today. And you don't need people being forced out of jobs for that -- being attracted to new job opportunities and fighting over who gets them will do just as well.

As one little example of such real economic history consider, oh, The Last Three Miles, the story of building the first bridge to connect NYC and NJ (the Pulaski Skyway) and the various political machines, business bosses and labor groups wielding intimidation and dealing lethal violence against each other to maximize their gains from the project. This is a sample of real American political-business-labor history. That was pretty dang far from painless, and it was fighting over who got the job and wealth expansion resulting from new technology. Such conflict is endemic in every part of economic history and the further back one goes the worse it gets in all dimensions.

But it's never resulted in anything like the predictions of the automation doom-and-gloomers. Which is a whole 'nother thing.

Contrary to them, automation can increase employment in an industry. ATMs plus the Internet's online banking, which enables people do do more for themselves today than any teller could ever do for them in the old days, has been accompanied an increase in the number of bank tellers.

When Henry Ford automated automobile production to increase the product of hourly labor by 20x, did employment on auto production lines plunge or explode upward?

There's no reason at all to assume automation reduces employment even as to the job being automated. It depends on the case. After all, 150+ years of accelerating automation, 5% unemployment.

>The migration from agricultural/pastoral life to urban life has a long literature of alienation, displacement, suffering and death.

Pre-mechanized subsistence agriculture, digging your living out of the ground with your own gnarly hands, weather permitting, with a life expectancy at birth of ~30 was "pastoral"? (And non-"alienated"?)

http://www.amazon.com/The-Last-Three-Miles-Construction/dp/1595580980

The Last Three Miles is a great book on the construction of the Pulaski Skyway and all the politics and nastiness that went on behind the scenes. Some great Hague anecdotes.