An Old Job-Killing Technology

Derek Thompson:

Technology can kill jobs. Or, to put things more softly, it can replace certain jobs. Robot arms replace human arms in our factories. TurboTax does the work of tax preparers. We mourn the disappearance of these position even as we enjoy the most important consequence of the technologies, themselves: more useful goods and services at a lower price.
This is an article about an old job-killing technology. But the job that it made most obsolete wasn't the worker -- at least, not the kind of worker you're probably thinking of, nor the kind that the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts. This is an article about how the mighty tractor killed the farm horse. But it's also a story about how innovation replaces us, and how the economy can get bigger, faster, and stronger, while also making us feel obsolete.
In 1910, 25 million horses and mules -- one for every four U.S. citizens -- could roam the nation's farmland mostly free from technological competition. The tractor had been invented decades earlier, but the contemporary models were either ridiculously big or ridiculously expensive. The first commercial gas-powered units, sold in 1902, weighed more than a male elephant ... and they weren't much more affordable, either.
But this is how innovation works. First, we make new things, and then we make those things cheaper. The price and size of tractors fell rapidly over the next decade. Introduced in 1917, Henry Ford's smaller, cheaper "Fordson" was the iPad of tractors: the definitive, consumer-friendly genre-busting technology that immediately dominated a formerly desolate market. Round after round of new technologies -- power lifts, rubber tires, diesel engines -- eventually established a dominant model that made the 1940s the decade of the tractor.
That decade spelled the end of the farm horse.

 I remember my old neighbor telling me about when his family traded in their team of horses on an Allis-Chalmers tractor. He was still pretty emotional about it.  For a second there, I was puzzled, why would a dealer take horses on trade for a tractor.  Then I remembered that farmers always have to trade in equipment, because then they think they are getting a deal.  Plus, the dealers didn't want to break it to the folks that the horses were worthless.  Better to take $20 off the price of the tractor than to break the farmer's heart.

That reminds me, I still need to write a post or two about that old neighbor.  In the next couple of weeks, I will.