Mar 22, 2026 Bloomberg This Weekend

As the debate about our AI future continues to rage, Yale Budget Lab's Executive Director and Co-Founder, Martha Gimbel, joined 'Bloomberg This Weekend' to discuss how documentation of the industrial revolution via 19th century novels can inform how this evolution could impact our lives. As the debate about our AI future continues to rage, I find myself wondering if we’re all going to become like the main character in my favorite 19th century novel, North and South. The heroine is a young woman during the Industrial Revolution who has to adjust to a whole new way of thinking and living and a host of new societal norms. Sound familiar?

Every day we read about the potentially huge effects AI will have on the labor market, the economy and society. Although many people speak about the future with certainty, we don’t really know what’s to come. People thought the invention of the cotton gin would finally help end slavery. In fact, it massively increased it. On the other hand, weavers on the eve of the Industrial Revolution were right that their livelihood would be decimated by the introduction of “the new machinery.”

It’s too soon to say with any confidence what effect AI will have on the labor market (or the economy or society). Many people claim it’s already leading to job losses, but the best evidence we have suggests that hasn’t started yet. That doesn’t mean we should ignore it or look away — but it does suggest we might be better served examining lessons from the past than merely speculating about the future. As Winston Churchill once said, “The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.”

If you want to feel what living through a massive technological shock and its aftermath looked like, it’s time to take a step back from the large language models and read some of the great novels of the Industrial Revolution.

The White-Collar Weavers

Today’s conversation about the labor markets and AI often proceeds as if we’ve never seen this sort of shift before. In particular, people focus on the effect the AI boom may have on higher-wage workers, rather than the lower- or middle-wage jobs that were most affected by the earlier disruptions of computers and automation. However, that dynamic isn’t new. Technological change has altered “high-quality” jobs before.

During the Industrial Revolution, the invention of steam power, the power loom and other machines made manufacturing more efficient — particularly the manufacture of textiles. These machines absolutely upended the economy and labor markets. In the long run, the transformation was good for workers and economic growth, but it was incredibly painful. (I’m grateful the Industrial Revolution happened: I now get to have a career pontificating about economics. I’m also grateful I didn’t have to live through it.)

At the time, weavers enjoyed a relatively high standard of living. They were certainly not in the 1%, but they were in some ways the white-collar workers of their day, enjoying flexible work hours and relatively high pay and social status. In fact, the Luddites became a political force partly because their high status allowed them to organize and fight back. They ultimately lost, but they had the social capital to mount a resistance.

How big was the shock? We didn’t have a Bureau of Labor Statistics in the 19th century, but real wages for handloom weavers seem to have fallen by half between 1806 and 1820, and it took decades for the workforce to experience broad benefits from all that machine-induced productivity. In 1806 handloom weavers earned about double what factory workers were paid; by 1820 they earned more than 25% less.