There was a time when 90% of the labour force worked in agriculture. If I lived in the 1600s I'd be terribly concerned that mass unemployment would coincide with large increases in agricultural productivity.
However, when the agricultural sector became more productive the 'winners' wanted bigger houses, travel, education, healthcare etc and this provided enough opportunity for the displaced workers to find jobs. These new sectors, over time, even offered more wealth and better working conditions to their workers than the old agricultural sector.
This is a common trope, but the reality is that the winners bought the farms from folks who couldn't compete. The ex-farmers did not go on to find better compensation, they just became poor. Their children perhaps found a larger salary in the information economy, but ask them how many acres they can pass on to their grandchildren.
It’s important to distinguish between the farmers pushed out of agriculture and those pulled towards the industrial/service sector.
Some of the farmers pushed out of agriculture were in a truly terrible position. Some effectively exiled into other countries (e.g highland clearances in Scotland) or left with no choice beyond military service in poor conditions.
Other ex-farmers were pulled into the high wage new economy sectors. I imagine this was a comparatively happier experience, although not without its difficulties. For example, the shipbuilding or railway workers. In a more modern example, the Chinese factory worker.
Yeah, I've been trying to figure out how to feel about china "lifting a billion people out of poverty" for a long while, because if I squint it kinda looks like land owners getting displaced by a government that would rather work then to death in cities than allow them a meek existence in the countryside. For young people, having a wage and the agency to spend it how they choose is worth a lot, but I still wonder how much choice they really have. I suppose it's a matter of whether you see a future for yourself down on the farm vs where all the economic growth and excitement lies.
But even given that the kids will be alright, my point was that the breadwinners displaced by progress do not find an alternate income - they rely on the next generation to adapt.
Outside of North America, it was relatively rare for farmers to own their land. Tenant farming and serfdom were more common in Europe/Japan. In China, as a general principle, the government itself owned all land during the Mao era.
Farmer-landowners are much more financially resilient to technological change because (generally) the same technologies which reduced the value of their labour increased the value of their property.
I suspect this difference in historic land ownership had a big impact on subsequent politics and it's something I'm looking to read more about.
now that I think of it, if farmers had already owned their farms, Mao & co wouldn't have gone through the trouble of redistributing it via Land Reform.
I might suggest that drawing boundaries around a plot of land and calling it "owned" was the beginning of politics, as it represents collective agreements and mechanisms to arrive at them. Have you dug into Elinor Ostrom's work around the tragedy of the commons being an unrealistic model given that people don't just let other people's cows overgraze? We create rules and sanctions before the resource collapses (or rather, we try to; and that attempt to prevent collapse could be called government).
However, when the agricultural sector became more productive the 'winners' wanted bigger houses, travel, education, healthcare etc and this provided enough opportunity for the displaced workers to find jobs. These new sectors, over time, even offered more wealth and better working conditions to their workers than the old agricultural sector.