John Stuart Mill Quotes

The economy of human time is the next advantage of machinery in manufactures.

The great question, however, for the poor man is, or shortly will be, that of escape from competition with labor-saving machinery

Technology is probably the single biggest driver of productivity gains for the developed countries. For example, I think it's much more important than free trade.

We can go into no mechanic shop, into no manufactory of any description, upon no farm or plantation, or travel a mile on our railroads or in our steamboats, without seeing evidence of our originality and witnessing the fruits of our ingenuity and enterprise.

Every great invention takes a livelihood away from 50,000 men--& within ten years creates a livelihood for half a million.

Technology's always taken jobs out of the system, and what you hope is that technology's going to put those jobs back in, too. That's what we call productivity.

We adapt to technological progress by raising our minimum standards of living and working to stay above this rising threshold.

The mechanical loom and the calculator have shown us that technology is both disruptive and filled with opportunities. But it would be hard to find a decent argument that we would have been better off without these inventions.

Industrialization based on machinery, already referred to as a characteristic of our age, is but one aspect of the revolution that is being wrought by technology.

All the technology of our production was still pre-War. They were sort of '38, '39 and the War had been stable and so we were infinitely behind whatever had been going on in the United States for instance.

If you ask an economist what's driven economic growth, it's been major advances in things that mattered - the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that.

The United States as we know it today is largely the result of mechanical inventions, and in particular of agricultural machinery and the railroad.

Electricity is an example of a general purpose technology, like the steam engine before it. General purpose technologies drive most economic growth, because they unleash cascades of complementary innovations, like lightbulbs and, yes, factory redesign.

Without doubt, machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers.

Technology determines the possibilities of society. It doesn't matter whether you start out from a fascist state or a communist state or a free-market state.

If people really liked to work, we'd still be plowing the land with sticks and transporting goods on our backs.

One of the objections most frequently urged against machinery is, that it has a tendency to supersede much of the handlabour which was previously employed; and in fact unless a machine diminished the labour necessary to make an article, it could never come into use.

Any mechanical invention whatsoever has been more harmful to humanity than a century of war.

A completely industrialized society is of no consequence to me.

Every man must admit that by means of instruments and machines the labourer can execute tasks he could not possibly perform without them; that he can perform a greater quantity of work in a given time, and that he can perform the work with greater nicety and accuracy than he could possibly do had he no instruments and machines.

...industrialisation took centuries, rather than decades

So give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me, if not to you, signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among us, who cannot be your anarchic and destroying Devil, and therefore may be the Ordering and Creating God.

If the diligence of modern industry were replaced by the contemplative life of the past, unnumbered millions would be doomed to death by starvation.

Read the story of the new invention for picking cotton. It may not be perfect yet, it may not work so well in hilly country as on the plains, but it is just a question of time before it is improved. More men and women out of work. Unless we have sense enough to sit down and discuss how to use this new invention and many others, so as to bring happiness, comfort and leisure to human beings and not unemployment, starvation and despair, then we deserve the hard times which surely will come our way.

… industry is at present producing as much as it did in 1929. [before the Great Depression] Ordinarily this would mean work for everybody, but since the depression, ten million dollars have been spent in modernizing these particular plants with the result that they are now using ten thousand fewer men than in 1929. Two million dollars more is to be spent shortly on further modernization, and much of the heavy work done in the past by men and skilled men, many of them, will be done by machinery. College and high school boys, who stand on a balcony somewhere and press buttons are preferred for this work today, and four men will do the work of one hundred men before long!