Success Quote by Arnold H. Glasow

In a culture forever hyping “labor-saving” gadgets, Glasow flips the slogan like a coin and shows you the ugly side: maybe the real shortage isn’t efficiency, it’s work. The line lands because it’s a businessman’s joke with a policy argument embedded inside it. We’re trained to treat automation as uncomplicated progress; he treats it as a redistribution machine that often moves security upward and anxiety downward.

The phrasing is doing more than wordplay. “A few” implies restraint, as if we could dose invention the way we dose medicine, rather than unleashing it and dealing with side effects later. “Labor-making” is also deliberately awkward, a Frankenstein term meant to sound wrong. That wrongness is the point: we’ve normalized technologies that erase jobs, so the idea of inventing toward employment feels unnatural - even though “jobs” are how most people experience dignity, stability, and citizenship.

Context matters. Glasow lived through the Great Depression, wartime mobilization, and postwar productivity booms - eras where the public learned, repeatedly, that markets don’t automatically convert new efficiency into shared leisure. Yes, automation can lower costs and raise output. His subtext: without intentional systems (training, wage growth, job creation, safety nets), labor-saving can become life-disrupting.

It’s a one-liner that pressures the listener to admit a quiet contradiction: we celebrate invention, but we panic at its consequences, then act surprised that “progress” didn’t include a place for everyone.