The Economist - On The Future of Jobs

I really like the magazine, The Economist. I frequently find myself thinking about a topic, finding ideas and looking for ways to present it - and then there is a fine article in this magazine which says it wonderfully. A friend of mine subscribes to it, and gives them to me when she is done with them. I find each one a little gold mine.

The one I am currently perusing is from Jan. of 2014. The edition has a wonderful little piece on the future of employment - will there be any jobs in the future? You can find it here:
  The Future of Jobs
 
Just to whet your appetite a bit, here are some of the things I found in there that are quite well done.

Historically, Increases in Productivity Generate More Jobs
Most economists these days are not concerned about jobs disappearing because of automation or cheaper labor from foreign competitors. They assume that the increases in productivity generated by these trends will create even more demand for goods and services, which will create more jobs, and so on. Looking back on the industrial revolution, one would have to admit that this has, indeed, worked out. Even the rapid automation of our times has not managed to upset this balance. YET!

And it may work well into the future, even though our increases in computing power and ability to put it to use are literally increasing exponentially. We have made more advances in the past decade than all of the history of computing to this point in time put together.

The Transition is Painful
That said, the transition from a work force where 75% of us worked the fields, to the situation where less than 1% are actually engaged in farming took a long time and stressed many parts of our world. And the trend today toward lousy jobs and higher unemployment seems inevitable.

Today, U.S. manufacturing jobs have fallen from 30% of the workforce in the 50s, to less than 10% today. That transition has had some serious costs in unemployment and financial stress for areas like Detroit.

In the depths of this transition, many factors worked to help - wide spread education and the worker movements helped to keep wages for the laboring classes rising. But that trend seems to have come to an end. It is much easier to introduce 12 years of education for everyone, and even make a stab at offering 4 years of college, and in most of the world. But stepping up to persuade people to continue on to grad school in order to maintain their level participation in the work force is a different kettle of fish.

The promise of our new technologies is that they will have even greater productivity and quality of life gains, but with increasingly more severe transition costs. And the "classic" approach to the transition cost is to let it work itself out over time. That may not work this time! If the income disparity and unemployment rise too high, the fabric of society is at serious risk.

" Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University and a much-read blogger, writes in his most recent book, “Average is Over”, that rich economies seem to be bifurcating into a small group of workers with skills highly complementary with machine intelligence, for whom he has high hopes, and the rest, for whom not so much."

The article doesn't really put forth any easy solutions - because there are none. This time is different - very different.