A few weeks ago, UCal Berkeley Economics Professor Brad DeLong ran a post, The Vibe-Horsing Coal-&-Steam Revolution of the 1700s,1 remarking on the “Jevons paradox”—the observation of 19th century2 British economist William Jevons that technological improvements in the efficiency of steam engines increased their use to the extent that the demand for coal increased as well, instead of declining. Brad remarks that
Computer programming, so far, is a Jevons’s Paradox story. Each wave of tooling makes the marginal unit of “useful software” cheaper to produce. But instead of eliminating programmers, it widens the range of things we can feasibly build and deploy. Demand for software, and for people who can wrangle it, keeps going up—at least so far. AI is not replacing the human; it is shifting what the valuable human knows and does.
Taking a look at the “big picture”, Brad tells us, we have been Jevon’s paradoxing our asses off for the past 5,000 years (starting, I guess back with the Sumerians, more or less)—improving the efficiency of just about every human activity we can come up with and never running into the “law” of diminishing returns—old “not so great” jobs, or even “not so bad” jobs, disappear or at least shrink rapidly in terms of the number of people performing them but are replaced by “something elses” that pay better and require less physical effort. Sweat less, enjoy more! What’s not to like?
But, says Brad, since 1980 or so Jevon’s paradox is starting to bite us in the ass:
We have, however, had trouble ensuring that all of those “something elses” pay decently and come bundled with status and security. And so the big question is: what is the income distribution in the resulting “attention–bio–infotech” economy? Does it look more like Kodak in mid-20th-century Rochester, producing broad middle-class prosperity for engineers and skilled workers? Or does it look more like Apple, producing a handful of multi-billionaires in Cupertino and a long tail of precarious gig work elsewhere.
That is less a technological question than a political-economic one.
So, if you’ve been following all of this, here is where my beef with Brad begins. Why does he, in typical “horseshoe populist” fashion, make common cause with both the Notorious AOC and Cousin Porkchop, aka J. D. Vance, and insist on believing that the 1950s-1960s were the good old days, whose like, it increasingly seems, we’ll never see again? What the fuck, to coin a phrase, was so great about Rochester, New York, that workers' paradise on the Eire Canal (pictured above), the fabled home of Kodak, versus modern day Cupertino, aka Appletown, USA? And why is it “less a technological question than a political-economic one.”
Let’s look at, you know, data, which is something I think an economist dude like Brad ought to be interested in. Relying on both Wikipedia and ChatGPT, the Kodak story shapes up as something like this. According to the Chat folks, in 1930, when the Great Depression was just starting to happen, Kodak had about 50,000 employees; by 1960, about 95,000; by 1990, about 140,000—almost all in the U.S., and very largely in, yes, Rochester. Currently, Apple has about 147,000 “direct employees”, about 90,000 in U.S. and the rest overseas. Apple’s “indirect” employees, very largely in Asia, number close to one million according to ChatGPT, but Copilot only says “more than half a million”. First question for Dr. D: Is it “bad” for a company to supply employment to over half a million human beings?
When it comes to cash, Kodak folks had a famously good deal. Wikipedia goes into great detail about the numerous benefits that Kodak employs enjoyed that most of their quasi peers did not, including profit sharing and an annual bonus worth 15% of salary. For simple salary comparisons, Chat says that circa 1930 Kodak employees—most of them in blue-collar positions—earned about $22,000 to $30,000 in 2025 dollars, rising to about $50-$70,000 in 1960 and about $70-$95,000 in 1990.
As for Apple, well, it varies, according to Chat. “Retail/Support” employees range from about $40-$80,000, which is almost comparable to Kodak folks in 1990, but “corporate/engineering” can run from $120,000 (newbies) up to $500,000, far above Kodak money. Contrary to Brad’s fantasy, the “big money” at Apple isn’t all going to a few billionaires.
But what about the hundreds of thousands of overseas Apple assemblers in Asia? Well, they get something around $3,000 to $4,000. Good money? No. Good working conditions? No. conditions in Apple assembly plants across Asia sound a lot like those prevailing in southern cotton mills in the 1930s. But does working in an Apple assembly plant beat spending your life wading knee-deep in rice paddies fertilized with human feces, surrounded by a cloud of mosquitoes at every step?3 I think so. According to Wikipedia, mosquitoes cause 700 million human infections a year, and one million deaths. That sweatshop is starting to look—well, “not as bad”.
From the early days of Kodak (the company started business in 1901), the benefits for working there were considerable, for the favored few who could work there. According to Wikipedia, Kodak refused to hire Catholics, Jews, and blacks for most of its history, though this (probably) started to change after World War II (for Catholics and Jews), but not for blacks until the late 1960s at the earliest. And a good of Kodak’s generosity was specifically intended to ward off unions, which management detested, and successfully warded off until the company collapse in the early oughties made the whole union issue a moot question.
How did Kodak do it for as long as it did—supply the sort of high wages and high benefits that so few blue-collar workers enjoy today? Easy. They had a monopoly. Kodak dominated the film industry has few companies have ever done, selling at least 80% of the film sold in the U.S. for almost a century, not meeting any real competition until Fujifilm entered the U.S. market in the 1990s. Kodak nickel and dimed the U.S. consumer to death, so to speak, for decades and used the extra nickel or two on each sale to purchase “union protection” from its employees.
Apple, despite its enormous brand recognition and cachet, is anything but a monopoly, having about 20% of the smartphone market, while Samsung has 19%. Or is it Samsung on top with 19%, Apple maybe 17%, and Xiaomi with maybe 15% (this is Copilot). Apple’s share of the computer market is about 9%. A monopoly it isn’t.
“Model” employers are invariably companies that enjoy at least a quasi-monopoly of one kind or another. In the 1950s, there were two leading “newsmagazines” in the U.S., Time and Newsweek. Their circulations in 1960 stood at about 3 million and 2.5 million respectively. Time was published by “Time/Life”. “Life”, heavily featuring photography, had a circulation of over 6.5 million, while its closest competitor, “Look”, not published by the same company as Newsweek, had a circulation of about 3.5 million. Years ago, I read an article by writer John Gregory Dunne, an editor at Time in the 1950s, explaining what life was like in the Big Apple with a Time expense account.
Every week, on “deadline” night, Time would cover meals and cabfare for editors like Dunne, as though they didn’t take a cab home every night anyway. But you didn’t have to take a cab. Any kind of transportation would do, as long as you had the receipt. How about a limo? Dunne found a limousine company that only carried Rolls-Royces. Of course, you can’t hire a Rolls for a half-hour ride across town. You have to have it for at least four hours. So John and his pals would ride around Manhattan for four hours once a week on Time’s dime, stopping off for expense account drinks and meals along the way. Nice!
Brad “obviously” doesn’t realize how ridiculous his Apple/Kodak comparison is. Nor was the “sweet” deal that Kodak workers enjoyed that Apple workers supposedly don’t due to some sort of “politico-economic” policy jujitsu that we somehow have lost the art of, unless you mean the failure of the federal government to break up Kodak’s massive monopoly. Is that what Brad wants to do?
Kodak maintained its monopoly for almost 90 years, under both Democratic and Republican administrations alike. It was not a product of any specific set of government policies, and in any event Brad is, I assume, an enemy of monopolies on principle. As an economic historian, Brad ought to be aware of the fact that the unique levels of prosperity enjoyed by western nations—the United States in particular—in the 20th century were due to the concatenation of large series of contingent circumstances—societies based on citizenship rather than status, a “scientific” (quantitative rather than qualitative) understanding of the outside world, a superior technological plant, and a largely literate working class—circumstances that have been largely duplicated in many areas of the non-western world, most spectacularly, of course, in China.
Brad is sadly joining hands with the ninnies on the right in believing that the 1950-60s really were the “good old days”. These are the good old days, except that the old “industrial heartland”, based largely on the Great Lakes waterways, including in particular the Eire Canal, which runs through Rochester and was still of some economic significance until the 1950s, no longer serve as the “armature” of the American economy. The big economic action in the U.S. these days has moved largely to the “coasts”—all three of them. Rochester is about an hour (I guess) east of Buffalo and gets the same “Lake Effect” winters. One of my aunts used to live in Syracuse, another hour or so east of Rochester, and she said in the winter the snow would often accumulate to a depth of eight feet. Who needs it? How ya gonna keep ‘em neck-deep in snowdrifts once they’ve seen Cupertino?
If you really want to blame Apple for anything, blame them for creating so goddamn many well-heeled upper-middle class Californians who care so much about “the environment” (aka “property values”) that they make almost any sort of development (aka “progress”) in Silicon Valley and environs utterly impossible, driving up the cost of living in California so high that it’s almost impossible for “ordinary” folks to afford to live there. Not only that, the Coastal elites work off their upper-middle-class guilt, not by encouraging development, as they do in red states like Texas and Florida, but by lavishing resources on “the oppressed”, none of whom seem to be white, unless perchance they’re a member of the LGBQRSTUVWXYZ community.
We shouldn’t romanticize the past, and we can’t go back to it. The enormous benefits that automation and digitalization have given us should be recognized and not disdained. Apple has changed for more lives and far more ways than Kodak ever did, and moaning about the good old days on the Eire Canal will benefit no one.
1. Dunno why Brad feels to hyphenate an ampersand. Never seen that before.
2. Okay, Brad’s a century off. No biggie.
3. When I was in Vietnam, in the artillery, an infantry soldier told me “When the first man in a patrol steps into a rice paddy, you can see the mosquitoes lift off the water in a layer.”
