CONCEPT
The Engels Pause
The roughly sixty-year period during the early Industrial Revolution when aggregate productivity rose while working-class living standards stagnated or declined — the canonical demonstration that technological gains do not distribute automatically.
The Engels Pause, named for Friedrich Engels's 1845 documentation of industrial conditions in Manchester, refers to the sixty-year gap between the beginning of sustained productivity growth in Britain (roughly 1780) and the eventual translation of that growth into improved living standards for working people (roughly 1840). During this period, aggregate output per capita rose substantially, profits accumulated among factory owners and merchants, but wages stagnated, working conditions deteriorated, inequality widened, and the social costs of industrialization fell disproportionately on the people least equipped to bear them. The pause is the historical demonstration that Mokyr's framework insists on: technology creates the possibility of shared prosperity, but institutions determine whether the possibility becomes reality.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Engels Pause is not a mysterious or unexplained phenomenon. Its mechanisms are well documented. Factory owners captured productivity gains because they owned the means of production and workers had no institutional means to claim a share. Labor markets favored employers because