I don’t see a scenario where we can avoid that situation. Looking at it super simply (my favourite):
- there are more people every day
- every company on the planet looks for efficiencies constantly
- technology is a runaway train
I just don’t see a future where enough jobs exist for people to work. Maybe we can split aside some “legacy careers” that require more experienced people, and have everybody else retire at 40? Or younger?
Forget telling me about how UBI is a great idea or a terrible idea, and somebody tell me how there are enough jobs for people aged 17-65 in 30 years.
I would counter that there should be more markets products and services to replace obsolete markets products and services every day. That's the biggest part of incentivization, it rewards innovation and change.
While there are more people every day, Birth rates are dropping in first world countries, while the job market continues to look for younger people that are more tech oriented.
Where the biggest changes comes in is that there will be no such thing as long term career paths. People are going to have to continually change their job orientation as the job market shifts faster and faster.
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I don’t see a scenario where we can avoid that situation. Looking at it super simply (my favourite):
- there are more people every day
- every company on the planet looks for efficiencies constantly
- technology is a runaway train
I just don’t see a future where enough jobs exist for people to work. Maybe we can split aside some “legacy careers” that require more experienced people, and have everybody else retire at 40? Or younger?
Forget telling me about how UBI is a great idea or a terrible idea, and somebody tell me how there are enough jobs for people aged 17-65 in 30 years.
Why is the next 40 years different from the previous 2000?
There was a time where the only job available was food gathering and hunting. But once agriculture made that obsolete tell me how there was enough jobs?
The efficiency gains currently being made are nothing compared to the industrial revolution and they didn’t run out of jobs then either.
In general “running out” of jobs means the cost of producing sufficient food and energy has decreased and as a result less labour is spent on this activity and more can be spent on luxury. That luxury can be spare time or it can be consuming other goods and services.
So don’t worry about it, it will take care of itself.
Why is the next 40 years different from the previous 2000?
There was a time where the only job available was food gathering and hunting. But once agriculture made that obsolete tell me how there was enough jobs?
The efficiency gains currently being made are nothing compared to the industrial revolution and they didn’t run out of jobs then either.
In general “running out” of jobs means the cost of producing sufficient food and energy has decreased and as a result less labour is spent on this activity and more can be spent on luxury. That luxury can be spare time or it can be consuming other goods and services.
So don’t worry about it, it will take care of itself.
The big potential difference I see with current times is the speed of change. Frictional unemployment is always around as opportunity in the labor market changes and people lose jobs, take time out to re-skill and then enter new jobs. With a much greater rate of change though, skills become obsolete more quickly and the skills needed to re-enter the workforce are more sophisticated than they used to be. The result may be that people just can't keep up with the rate of change anymore, and that people are out of the workforce trying to re-skill much more frequently than in the past or just end up giving up on keeping up with the chase.
Also, the large majority of industries are already well into becoming digitized. The way tech industries tend to work is winner-takes-most, and the number of employees for large companies in digitized industries is much lower than big companies of the past. It's the nature of digitized products and services that they can scale without requiring much human labor. So, our industries are all moving towards a model that we already see using less labor to achieve market dominance, and that doesn't bode well for employment.
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Why is the next 40 years different from the previous 2000?
There was a time where the only job available was food gathering and hunting. But once agriculture made that obsolete tell me how there was enough jobs?
The efficiency gains currently being made are nothing compared to the industrial revolution and they didn’t run out of jobs then either.
In general “running out” of jobs means the cost of producing sufficient food and energy has decreased and as a result less labour is spent on this activity and more can be spent on luxury. That luxury can be spare time or it can be consuming other goods and services.
So don’t worry about it, it will take care of itself.
Nothing ever takes care of itself, humans take care of humans. But even given that it doesn’t always mean the solution is going to be straightforward and if we’re using the industrial revolution as our example, planning ahead is crucial. The industrial revolution saw an increase in jobs, but a decrease is work conditions and poor pay for terrible work. Even children were put to work. The life changing technologies that came from the industrial revolution and changed how we live and work took decades in some cases to see wide adoption. But this industrial revolution is moving at a much more rapid pace that any we’ve seen in our entire history in earth.
“It will take care of itself” seems painfully naive to me.
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I came across this video that touches on a lot of topics discussed here and seem to be relatively objective:
Kind of a side note, but it mentions around the 12 minute mark that in the late 1800s, some workers needed to live in accommodations owned by their employer, which kept them basically in servitude, but this practice lasted far longer than that. When my parents came to Canada, they lived in housing (a camp actually) owned by their employer and almost all the money they made working went to pay for their room and board. It was essentially indentured labour. That was in the 1970s.
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Last edited by FlamesAddiction; 09-13-2020 at 01:36 AM.
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Just the fact that universities and colleges are now called 'higher ed' tells you all you need to know about where society is. In election polling, a high school diploma now falls under the 'uneducated' category.
That you claim in polling there is an "uneducated" category. From your links, all I can see is one guy tweeted "uneducated". The other one says "low education counties" which mostly sounds like awkward wording to compare to "high education counties". There is nothing officially putting people with a high school diploma into an uneducated category, as your post suggested.
Nothing ever takes care of itself, humans take care of humans. But even given that it doesn’t always mean the solution is going to be straightforward and if we’re using the industrial revolution as our example, planning ahead is crucial. The industrial revolution saw an increase in jobs, but a decrease is work conditions and poor pay for terrible work. Even children were put to work. The life changing technologies that came from the industrial revolution and changed how we live and work took decades in some cases to see wide adoption. But this industrial revolution is moving at a much more rapid pace that any we’ve seen in our entire history in earth.
“It will take care of itself” seems painfully naive to me.
It isn’t moving faster than at any other point in history. Productivity growth is rather poor right now.
It, being jobs. The idea that we should be planning for a world with a shortage of jobs in the next 20-40 years is not supported by evidence.
I would agree that tracing people for these jobs and transitioning people whose jobs have become obsolete to new jobs will (and always has been) challenging.
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They cant find enough school bus drivers right now to take kids to school no one wants to work for the wage with other alternatives out there.
Does programs like CERB or UBI help that?
CERB doesn't, but I think UBI does. You lose CERB if you make too much. You get UBI no matter what, so there is an incentive to have income.
Driving a school bus full time is hard because hours are limited and awkward, so it's not conducive to having a second job.
UBI + school bus hours could add up to a living wage, thus making it more realistic for those that would enjoy earning a living driving a school bus to do so.
CERB doesn't, but I think UBI does. You lose CERB if you make too much. You get UBI no matter what, so there is an incentive to have income.
Driving a school bus full time is hard because hours are limited and awkward, so it's not conducive to having a second job.
UBI + school bus hours could add up to a living wage, thus making it more realistic for those that would enjoy earning a living driving a school bus to do so.
There isnt enough money in the world to make that enjoyable
Both options are better than blowing money on schooling that you have no interest in, and that will inevitably provide you no benefit. And set you years behind your peers.
Well that is the point, isn't it? Because we sit around and wait till kids finish high school and then allow them to decide what they want to do, many of them make poor decisions.
In Europe, kids are already on career paths when they turn 15.
North American kids have been brainwashed by the elite that college & university with that humanities degree is the way to get a job when it is clearly a load of crap.
Like I said, there is a massive attitude problem among our teachers and guidance councilors. Even in small town Alberta we were told 'university is a must', or 'you will never amount to anything if you don't do post secondary.' Most successful kids in my class are in the trades.
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I have come to feel much of the discussion around the future of work and STEM in the education space is very misguided. The conversations we ought to be having regarding our education systems are around the future of society, not merely the future of work. There will always be aspects of educational experiences that are just pragmatic and instrumental in moving towards a career, but our lives shouldn't be reduced to our careers and our education shouldn't be reduced to career prep. Education for wisdom, for joy, for mental health, for social cohesion, for meaning and purpose in life are all tremendously important, especially in a future of continued rapid change in industry.
Obviously, needs have emerged that can be addressed by new pathways like those provided by Google's certificates and others, but they're not replacements for a well-rounded education and we shouldn't be throwing the baby out with the bathwater in our rush to revolutionize education systems.
I think this exact attitude is the reason why the student debt level is on a linear path up, with no end in site, and there are thousands of jobs not being filled, while unemployment among first time job holders is at a record level.
You know what makes people happy? Not coming out of a 4 year degree program and realizing the only job available is flipping burgers at Mickey D's while living in their parents basement.
For some reason North America has this warped sense of reality where we think telling kids they should go for 'what they love' is going to equal a happy and functioning society, and yet European countries, where the education system pushes kids into programs where they can get 'jobs' is a lot more successful.
The whole problem is that the trades are not presented as an option simply because they are considered by our education system and the elites that run it as 'lower' in society, and surely our kids shouldn't strive for something lower.
But hey, lets continue living in fairytale and with rainbows and pots of gold while the issues keep piling up.
Well that is the point, isn't it? Because we sit around and wait till kids finish high school and then allow them to decide what they want to do, many of them make poor decisions.
In Europe, kids are already on career paths when they turn 15.
North American kids have been brainwashed by the elite that college & university with that humanities degree is the way to get a job when it is clearly a load of crap.
Like I said, there is a massive attitude problem among our teachers and guidance councilors. Even in small town Alberta we were told 'university is a must', or 'you will never amount to anything if you don't do post secondary.' Most successful kids in my class are in the trades.
Having been through high school and then university more recently than probably 90% of this board, I can tell you that isn’t really the way it goes (at least in Canada). There is a lot of understanding over what degrees do what, what kind of jobs you need a degree for, and what kind you don’t, and a place like Sait is held up as just as important as U of C.
I was certainly never told, not were any of my peers, that university was a must and that we would never amount m to anything otherwise. Perhaps high school 30-40 years ago was different.
