Some thoughts on the future of work

A probably ill-advised foray into futurology

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

As either Yogi Berra, Niels Bohr or some random Dane once observed, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” So, take the following forecasts with a large tablespoon of Himalayan rock salt.

But having promised in my previous Substack missive to identify the likely winners and losers of the recent shifting of economic, political and geopolitical tectonic plates, I feel obliged to chance my arm, even though I fear this article will not age well.

So, here we go…

THE WINNERS

Asian tiger cub workers

This is the Asian century and a new wave of Asian ‘tiger cubs’ are following in the footsteps of Japan, Singapore and South Korea. These countries may or may not get stuck in the middle-income trap, but even that sure beats being mired in the ‘shithole country’ snare.  

Western nations, not least Australia, have long benefitted from Chinese and Indian brain drain. However, as the West declines and the East rises, traditional migration flows are likely to slow and possibly even reverse with a goodly number of first-generation migrants, and sometimes the children and grandchildren of migrants, returning to the ancestral homeland.

First-world workers  

For almost half a century, labour supply-demand dynamics have favoured employers. To the extent that they long had the luxury of being able to avoid hiring anyone over the age of 50, let alone anyone with, say, a physical disability, mental health issue or criminal record.

Notoriously, even highly educated women with rare skill sets could be relegated to the mummy track if they had the unmitigated gall to do their bit to create the next generation of workers and consumers.

And as Charles Murray and others have observed, an alarming proportion of able-bodied, working-age, blue-collar men have dropped out of the workforce in nations such as the US. The reasons for this are complex. But at least one factor would seem to be that in advanced economies primarily powered by service industries, employers often prefer female employees, who are both more emotionally intelligent and less demanding than their male counterparts.   

Also, if you weren’t a neurotypical “team player” comfortable with spending most of your waking hours labouring cheek by jowl with other humans, well, good luck getting a job prior to 2020.

When I was a child, all my friends had at least one sibling and it wasn’t uncommon for them to have two or even three. Surveying my current friend group, none have more than two children, some have one, and a surprising amount are childless. (Fertility rates started going into serious decline in first-world nations circa 1970, shortly before I was born.) With the pandemic encouraging even more baby boomers to retire than were already doing so, the demographic winter is starting to have a chilling effect on the labour supply.

Rich nations’ declining fertility has long been mitigated by their ability to skim off the cream of the human capital crop from countries such as China and India. But if living standards in China and India are rising and both are or soon will be economic superpowers, it seems likely their best and brightest will be more inclined to hang around rather than seek their fortunes in the US, UK, Canada, Australia or New Zealand.

Likewise, with Asian tiger cub nations such as Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia beginning to prosper, you have to wonder if their software developers, accountants, engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs will continue to be so eager to transplant themselves to the Anglosphere.

Gig economy workers

Despite the relentlessly dire media narrative, I’m bullish about the prospects of those of us toiling in the vineyards of the gig economy,

The Wild West period, where new(ish) ride-share, food-delivery and task-marketplace tech businesses could pocket lots of cash while transferring all the risk onto their contractors, appears to be ending.

Neoliberal poster boy Emmanuel Macron is currently enduring a political backlash for having, on the down low, backed Uber’s successful attempt to disrupt the French taxi industry. In Australia, the company has belatedly made nice with the Transport Workers Union and agreed to pay drivers a minimum wage. The recently elected Labor government seems likely to honour its campaign promise to give the Fair Work Commission powers to set minimum pay and conditions for those operating at the arse end of the gig economy.

On balance, even relatively expensive first-world micropreneurs should benefit from the rise of remote work. Having had some experience doing remote work for clients based in Singapore, the US, the UK and New Zealand and having briefly experimented, at the insistence of a business mentor, with employing a Filipino virtual assistant/researcher, my sense is that while some work can be offshored, a lot of it can’t.

It’s one thing for an Australian (or American, British, German, Danish, Singaporean or Israeli) start-up to have code written by a software engineer in India, Vietnam, Poland or Argentina.

Given cultural differences and language barriers, it’s quite another thing to, for instance, get even a highly educated Eastern European with passable English to write a 10,000-word ebook on, say, America’s world-leading AI research or London’s vibrant start-up scene.

I discovered employing a foreign researcher was a false economy when I asked for some material on business etiquette and got back a lot of 18th-century quotes about not fiddling with your wooden teeth and always sending a thank-you letter after being invited to high tea. Lest that sound condescending, I hasten to add I’ve no doubt exhibited similar tone deafness when doing jobs for non-Australian clients. And that’s precisely why I’m sceptical of claims that the widespread embrace of remote work since early 2020 will see first-world businesses rush to outsource complex tasks to cheap foreign workers. My guess is that businesses will outsource more work now that everyone has gotten used to video-conferencing, but they will prefer to outsource it to local contractors who won’t require a lot of supervision.

THE LOSERS      

Photo by Hannah Nicollet on Unsplash

If this guy is a university educated, neoliberal expat who likes to sound off about automation, he’s screwed.

Neoliberal globalists – I’ve discussed this at length (see here, here and here), so I won’t belabour the point here. Other than to observe that even right-of-centre political parties have been showing a newfound interest in “levelling up” areas and social groups long left to their Darwinian fate, making multinationals pay some tax and, mirabile dictu, curtailing the ability of their donor class to help themselves to as much cheap and compliant migrant labour as they please. Whether they lament or celebrate it, most economic commentators now agree an era of deglobalisation has kicked off.   

Automation boosters – I’ve got a lot of time for tech entrepreneur turned political gadfly Andrew Yang. Nonetheless, he was (knowingly) talking out of his arse when he argued, during his 2020 presidential run, that America’s 3.5 million truck drivers were at imminent risk of being automated out of a job.

Maybe, just maybe, self-driving vehicles will become a reality one day.

Maybe, just maybe, whatever job you’re currently doing, dear reader, will be done by a software program or robot in 5/10/15/20 years.  

But the claim technology is about to render hundreds of millions of human workers obsolete is self-evidently bullshit. Even after the pandemic-induced turbocharging of digital transformation throughout 2020-2021, labour markets are tight as a drum in many nations. The unemployment rate in the US is 3.6%. A not insignificant part of the reason its inflation rate is 9.1% is because of a shortage of (flesh-and-blood) truck drivers.           

Universities ­– This may be a little off-topic, but with something like half of all young people in developed nations now going on to university – often for no better reason than they fear they’ll be seen as a loser if they don’t, or because they believe it’s the only way to signal to future employers they are reasonably intelligent and conscientious – I’d argue we’ve finally reached peak university attendance.

Granted, we’re not heading back to the 1950s, when only the talented tenth at the further reaches of the IQ distribution bothered with tertiary education. But given a choice between doing a free or cheap 3-6 month online course in data analytics, UX design, Android development or digital marketing then walking into a well-paid and high-status job or spending years amassing a sizeable debt only to acquire a credential that may well prove worthless, how long are even guileless 18-year-olds going to continue to opt to spend 3-4 years taking a deep dive into anthropology, art history, creative writing, gender studies, sociology or theatre arts?