The story
Proposed by John Habakkuk (1915–2002), British economic historian, in his work American and British Technology in the Nineteenth Century: The Search for Labour-Saving Inventions (1962).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Habakkuk thesis
Today it means: The theory that land abundance and labor scarcity in the 19th-century United States led to high wages, which resulted in labor-saving technological innovations and the development of the American system of manufacturing based on the extensive use of machinery and interchangeable parts. Full definition →