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The relentless upwards march of the accountant and hairdresser, at the expense of the downtrodden (but presumably better-coiffed) farmer, is one of the lesser-known societal power struggles of the post-Industrial Revolution period. But transition on this scale is not costless, with complex shifts in the pattern of skilled employment and wages. In its first phase, the Industrial Revolution appears to have led to a shift towards unskilled employment as “the artisan shop was replaced by the factory and later by the assembly line” (Acemoglu (2008)). The share of unskilled UK workers doubled between 1700 and 1850, from around 20% to 40% (Chart 19). The same was true, somewhat later, in the US (Katz and Margo (2013)). 6  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Later in the 19th and into the 20th centuries, the demand for high-skilled workers also began to rise. Rising incomes created a demand for new goods and new, more complex and technical, ways of producing them. That increased the demand for operatives, engineers, mechanics and managers, in addition to hairdressers and accountants. Between 1850 and 1910, the share of skilled workers in US manufacturing rose from 3% to around 12% (Katz and Margo (2013). The share of low-skilled jobs also increased, from around 58% to 65%. Over the same period, the share of mid-skilled workers shrank from 40% to 23% (Chart 20). In other words, there was a “hollowing out”, or U-shape, in the pattern of employment – the hollowing-out, in effect, of the artisan.