What Bootmakers Can Teach Us About AI - by Justin Wolfers

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What Victorian Bootmakers Can Teach Us About The Future of Work<br>Anthropic's CEO warns AI could erase half of entry-level jobs. Victorian England suggests a different possibility.

Justin Wolfers<br>Aug 05, 2026

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Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, has warned that artificial intelligence could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, possibly pushing unemployment to 10% or 20%.<br>And yet, today I want to talk about bootmakers in Victorian England.<br>Bear with me.

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I’m just back from a conference where I heard a terrific new paper presented by Hillary Vipond, a brilliant young economic historian. And I’d like to share the carefully researched story she told about a previous technological revolution.<br>Victorian bootmaking is not the same thing as a large language model, but history is a useful reminder that some outcomes that sound unlikely — namely, a labor-saving technology transforming the nature of work without cutting the number of workers — can actually be pretty plausible.

A New Technology Arrives

Take yourself back to the mid-19th-century England.<br>Bootmaking, as an industry, was huge. There were about 220,000 English bootmakers in 1851, making it the fifth-largest occupation in the country. Roughly one in thirty workers made boots.<br>Back then, bootmaking was craft work. It involved cutting leather, shaping it, stitching the upper together, attaching the sole, and finishing the product. This was skilled, hands-on work and a bootmaker might know the whole trade, from leather to laces.<br>But in the late 1850s, this profession got hit by a radical new labor-saving technology as the sewing machine was adapted to heavy boot leather.

The 19th century equivalent of a large language model. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash<br>Now a machine could stitch the leather upper together much faster than anyone could by hand. And workers using the new technology could produce more than four times as much as workers using the traditional methods.<br>Importantly, this breakthrough didn’t stay contained in one stage of production. Once the stitching got faster, the rest of the process became the bottleneck, creating pressure to speed up the other steps.<br>Suddenly, the old craft system started giving way to something much more mechanized , and an entire industry had to work out what happened next.

Cheaper Boots, More Boots

For bootmakers, this was not some abstract “future of work” seminar. This was their trade, their skills, their livelihoods. And in at least one bootmaking district, thousands went on strike for more than a year as they tried to stop this new technology from remaking their industry.<br>But before jumping into the impact on labor, I want to pause on the implications for the market for boots.<br>If a new technology lets each worker make many more boots per hour, then the cost of making boots falls. If the cost of making boots falls, then boots tend to get cheaper. And when boots get cheaper, more people buy more boots.<br>That step matters.<br>A lot of debate around automation skips from “this saves labor” straight to “therefore there will be fewer jobs.” But that leaves out the work done by markets and prices.<br>Prices adjust. And in doing so, they stimulate a greater quantity demanded.<br>This is where I want to introduce you to a charming character named William Stanley Jevons. He was an English economist, and a bit of a polymath. He actually spent a few years working in Australia — at the Sydney Mint — before going back to Britain to complete his education.

The Jevons Paradox, developed by William Stanley Jevons (pictured), helps explain why a labor-saving technology did not dramatically reduce the amount of labor used in bootmaking. Photo by Nickknack00 on Wikimedia Commons<br>Now, Jevons never wrote about boots, but he cared a lot about coal. And the puzzle he noticed was this: When steam engines became more efficient, Britain didn’t use less coal. In fact, it used even more. And that’s because efficiency made coal-powered activity cheaper, which made more of it worth doing.<br>That idea — that finding ways to use a resource (like coal or labor) more efficiently might lead you to end up using more of it — is called the Jevons paradox. Though if you think hard enough about it, it’s not really that paradoxical.<br>The broader forces here are often described by economists as “creative destruction.” It’s a useful term, but it can mislead if you stare only at the destruction bit. There’s also the creative bit: new technologies create new demand, new tasks, new firms, and new forms of work.<br>And in this story, that part mattered quite a lot.

Jobs Survived, But Changed

Now for the astonishing headline: English bootmaking went through a full technological...