You can see how this positive feedback loop leads to more food and more stuff, culminating in a world where people have so much stuff that we must rent space to store it, and so much food that obesity has become a bigger killer than starvation. Thanks, Thought Bubble. So this increased productivity also meant that fewer people needed to work in agriculture in order to feed the population. To put this in perspective, in 1520, 80% of the English population worked the land. By 1800, only 36% of adult male laborers were working in agriculture, and by 1850, that percentage had dropped to 25. This meant that when the factories started humming, there were plenty of workers to hum along with them, especially child laborers. Err, err, err.