Latter Day Luddites Are Wrong On Technology

The robust jobs reports in recent months should help tamp down talk that technology is putting people out of work. These type of dire predictions have been around for at least 200 years, when the followers of Ned Ludd were smashing the mechanical weaving looms in England because they feared that the machines would put people out of work. They were wrong. The Industrial Revolution made England richer. There were four times as many jobs in England's cloth industry in 1900 as there were in 1830.