 Hi, Professor Gerald Friedman, Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts. Today we're going to talk about workers and economic growth in the early American Republic, the years before the Civil War. And when we talk about workers, we're talking about wage workers, not slaves. Slaves will be in a couple more lectures. Now, there's an orthodox approach to labor. Including Paul David, economic historian at Stanford, and most or all neoclassical economists. In their approach, capital and labor are interchangeable. Workers are two-legged machines. You have production functions relating inputs to outputs. And the workers' contribution is analytically identical to the contribution made by machinery. Meaning that there are no issues of morale, there are no issues of motivation. Workers and machinery are the same. Capital in the neoclassical economic system could hire labor, or labor could hire capital. All the same. Now, Paul David, while he works within this framework, he does introduce something new. Which is the idea of learning by doing. Where workers become more productive through practice. Now it doesn't have to be that way. Workers could become more productive, but not produce more. They could just finish their week's work on Tuesday instead of Wednesday, and have an extra day for drinking. That is actually kind of the way most workers behaved in the 18th and 19th centuries. Many of them would behave that way in the 20th century. Why work more just to get more stuff? If I can get stuff produced faster, I'll have more time to party. In fact, there's a period in the 18th century Britain after the war of Spanish succession. When the war ended, the British government repealed the taxes on alcohol that had been imposed during the war. That plus general rise in productivity and wages created what was called the 30 year gin age. It shows up as an uptick in mortality and a down tick in men's heights during a period of economic growth because people just spent their time drinking. Why not? They were happy. Paul David doesn't deal with labor in that way. He's thinking about labor as just another machine. A machine that's notable because it's a machine that learns. His concern here in talking about early 19th century manufacturing is with the way workers became more productive and their productivity. Greater productivity was turned into greater output. He's looking at why did the economy expand? From why the economy expanded, he goes to why did workers become more productive? And from why did workers become more productive? He could have asked why did people start working harder? Instead he asked why they became more proficient? His answer is that they became more proficient because of practice, learning by doing. Note if you get into the data that David used for the Mills and Lowell Massachusetts in the 1830s and 40s and 50s, learning isn't something that just happened all the time and didn't happen to everybody. Learning actually didn't happen to native born workers. It happened mostly to immigrant workers, which raises an issue because the native born workers were citizens, voters. They didn't want to work harder. They wouldn't work harder. If they became more productive, they would start taking more time off. It's the immigrant workers who couldn't take the time off. They weren't citizens. They were more vulnerable. And when learning happened for them, that learning turned into greater productivity. Learning and productivity growth depend on being able to discipline workers. Turning learning into higher output rather than leisure, management needs to be able to punish workers who want to take leisure. This is a problem in a democracy and we remember we had a war. We rebelled against an empire. We overthrew the king and throughout the Tories so that we would all be equal. And as equal citizens, citizen workers, we insisted on the right to take more leisure, not just work harder. The problem of leisure in American industrialization is the problem of America as a democratic capitalist society. Citizens on their own as citizens won't always work hard. Do you work hard? Do you always work hard? Most college students in my experience work very hard sometimes and other times take time off. You know, you have exams coming up. You study a lot. Exams over. You go out with your buddies. You go dancing. You go drinking. You party. You listen to music. You know, then the next day you sleep late and you get up, you know, maybe you sweep the floor. Maybe you do a laundry. Maybe you get up and then go back to sleep, you know, whatever. That's the way normal workers behave. People behave. That's the way they are. As independent craftsmen, as employees, workers who are citizens insist on a right to have leisure. As free men, they insist that we're not slaves. We have the right to control our lives, including our work. The sense of independent citizenship came out of the American Revolution, led to the spread of suffrage, we had universal male suffrage, the breakup of property ownership, the spread of land ownership. All this contributed to Native American workers insisting on the right to leisure, to get control over the production process so that they could turn learning into output. Capitalists eventually found they needed new workers. They needed a different type of workers. They needed workers who did not have democratic rights, were not citizens, and therefore would be willing to put up with hard work. They did find those workers. In the South they found them as slaves. In the North they found them as immigrants. And we'll talk about that next time. Till then, thank you and have a nice, relaxing day.