| ▲ | danans 2 hours ago | |
> Can you think of a mass labor displacement that resulted in an overall erosion of living standards? I cannot. The mass evictions of the Scottish Highlands [1] in which peasants were driven at the point of bayonets to the lowland city slums to make way for the British government to transform Scotland into a mass sheep/wool production monoculture economy. The use of kidnapped Africans as slaves in the Americas was also an example of a labor displacement - by introducing a source of mass human labor with absolutely no human rights - to scale the agricultural commodity economy (cotton, tobacco, sugar), which resulted in horrendous living standards for the enslaved, and an erosion for the poor paid peasants whose labor they replaced. Slavery was a very "efficient" way to use labor. | ||