  : A very interesting topic. Just to bring another vegetable to the stew, I read 3 to 6 months back about some challenging of the conventional wisdom on what drove the development in America of the American system and later automation. The conventional wisdom was that labor was too scarce, driving a demand for those developments. But someone challenged that idea by saying that it was actually labor turnover, not lack of laborers, that drove that demand. In other words, there were plenty of butts for the chairs, but the constant swapping of chairs, the musical-chairs aspect, was poisonous to production efficiency because half your people were new and untrained and the ones you'd just invested training in promptly left. Sadly I am forgetting already whether it was in Hounshell 1984 or Noble 1984 that I was reading this. One of those. Anyway, this is tangential to your point, but just more food for thought related to the same themes.  