Seventeen Years

Seventeen years. The statistic appears in Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) and haunts Heilbroner's work as the most concrete measure of what the gap between technology and institution costs in human terms. Not an abstraction, not a percentage, but a life: the child born into Manchester's industrial slums could expect to live seventeen years—less than a quarter of the lifespan of the middle-class child born a few miles away, and less than half the lifespan of the agricultural laborer the industrial system had displaced. The gap between the steam engine's arrival (1770s) and the Factory Acts establishing minimum protections (1830s–1840s) was the space in which this life was lived and ended. Heilbroner returned to this statistic repeatedly as a moral reproach to the economists who celebrated industrialization's productivity gains without accounting for the costs borne by those the gains did not reach. The AI transition is reproducing the gap—technology arriving in months, institutions responding in years—and the cost, while not measured in reduced life expectancy, is being