[ConspiracyFact]

>Largely, those who worked in factories did so because the benefits/costs exceeded that of farm work. If there were no incentives to change, everyone would have stayed on the farm, preserving the agrarian status quo.

This is true for the first generation of factory workers. After that the proletariat emerges, an urban underclass that can’t use the threat of going back to the farm as negotiating leverage, because they don’t know how to farm. I don’t think that the way that leftist governments went after farmers was fair or even humane, but the motivation for it was basically terror at being trapped under the thumb of the owner class.

[grafmax]

If you were a handicraft worker and a factory opened, your old livelihood was destroyed. You may be making optimal choices for yourself by shifting to factory work, but to claim that factory life was better because people chose it obscures the fact that the old choices were made defunct by the factory opening.