Here is Nassau Senior’s work on wages. The introductory part is very insightful about how slavery stopped making economic sense. He also covers the problems of using food resources to provide fuel for machinery, basically warning against just precisely what is happening now, although of course he approaches it from the other end, showing that machinery of his day did not do that and so did not cause those problems the way some of his contemporaries feared they might. Some of his insights don’t apply today, since he doesn’t allow for a rate of change faster and/or on a larger scale than people can take advantage of new opportunities as they lose the old; his corkscrew maker example only works out properly for circumstances like those of his own day when that wasn’t so. (Plus, of course, we have even more distorted labour markets today that also hinder employment.)

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