"A techie is more than an updated assembly-line worker, but putting those two numbers side by side acts as a poignant reminder that today’s new technology-intensive businesses do not generate jobs in the numbers that the old manufacturers used to do. 

"It’s also worth adding that past technological transformations sometimes led to more lasting collateral damage than we now remember.  We comfort ourselves with the knowledge that the Luddites were proven wrong, but we forget that proof of that was quite a while in coming.  

"Economic historian Robert C. Allen refers to the decades that it took for real wages to rise in Britain after the technological changes of the early 19th century as “Engels’ Pause.”  That’s the same Engels who argued in 'The Condition of the Working Class in England' (1845) that the industrial revolution had made workers worse off. -- con't below.