Engels' pause

Engels' pause is a term coined by economic historian Robert C. Allen to describe the period from 1790 to 1840, when British working-class wages stagnated and per-capita gross domestic product expanded rapidly during a technological upheaval. Allen named the period after German philosopher Friedrich Engels, who describes it in The Condition of the Working Class in England. Economists have analyzed its causes and effects since the nineteenth century, with some questioning its existence. Twenty-first-century technological upheaval and wage stagnation have led economists and academics to draw parallels between the two periods.

Engels' pause is a term coined by economic historian Robert C. Allen to describe the period from 1790 to 1840, when British working-class wages stagnated and per-capita gross domestic product expanded rapidly during a technological upheaval. Allen named the period after German philosopher Friedrich Engels, who describes it in The Condition of the Working Class in England. Economists have analyzed its causes and effects since the nineteenth century, with some questioning its existence. Twenty-first-century technological upheaval and wage stagnation have led economists and academics to draw parallels between the two periods.

21st century

The 19th-century Industrial Revolution was an all-encompassing societal transformation, from technology and culture to the economy. The changes caused by industrialisation required the principles of society to be redesigned. Engels' pause was accompanied by major changes in the social security and party systems, elementary schools, urban planning, public transport and many other areas of society. It has been argued that a similar transformation is underway in industrialised Western nations, where digitisation and robotisation are transforming society. In the Western world, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom, the 2010s may be seen as the beginning of a similar "pause" in which the position of workers and the capacity of current systems to maintain the development of society are (at least temporarily) weakened. Economists and businesspeople have associated the trends observed in Engels' pause with present-day conditions such as the role of technology and its continuous development, inequality in the global distribution of wealth and the changing nature of the workforce. According to the Demos Helsinki think tank, society and the economy is changing as it did during the Industrial Revolution. During industrialisation, productivity began to increase as society and business were designed in accordance with the new modes of operation; this eventually led to an unprecedented period of prosperity. Two social classes were born: the working class (whose living conditions were that which a large part of 20th-century politics revolved around improving) and the middle class, whose expansion was an important result of increased in prosperity triggered by industrialisation and political reform. The birth of political parties and urban planning can be dated to the beginning of industrialisation. Digitisation and robotisation may have begun a decades-long period of transformation comparable to the Industrial Revolution during which the basic structures of society and forms of livelihood may change and wealth may be radically redistributed. Bank of England Governor Mark Carney spoke at the April 2018 Public Policy Forum testimonial dinner in Toronto about his concern that rapidly-increasing technology in blue- and white-collar jobs would result in poor wage growth, worker redundancy and excessive capital accrual for owners of the machines. The economic reporter Cardiff Garcia presents a similar view by correlating the stagnation in real wage growth seen during Engels' pause to the present unequal distribution of wealth. Robert C. Allen has also reflected on similarities between 19th-century industrialisation and today. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee have examined a similar phenomenon in their 2014 book, The Second Machine Age. In The Technology Trap, Carl Benedikt Frey argues that advanced economies are in a new Engels' pause and compares the experience of the Industrial Revolution in England to the post-1980 Computer Revolution.

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1362285837 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.