Unemployment and Transformational Growth in the Long Run

The movement from ruralrural to urbanurban , from traditional agricultureagriculture to modern industry, is set in motion by capitalistcapitalist developmentdevelopment and is a central feature of the emergence of the modern world. But it rips apart the fabric of traditional life, creating uncertaintyuncertainty , while rendering many traditional skills, and a great deal of knowledgeknowledge , obsolete. It creates a new world, where the traditional morals and manners may no longer be appropriate. But not only will the new world generally not absorb all those displaced from the old; it will itself discard the moderately stabilizing market mechanisms of the older Craft-based capitalismcapitalism , and, moving into mass productionmass production (and later the information economyinformation economy ), come to work in a new and more unstable way. This long-term pattern of development provides, perhaps, the basic perspective for understanding unemploymentunemployment in the modern era.