Where Have All the Workers Gone? The Bursting of the White Collar Job Bubble Amid the Global Labour Shortage
How central banks and venture capital misled the workforce
Future Perspectives Newsletter is a round-up of my monthly essays and thesis from the frontier of digital money, governance and organization. In my day job I’m a contract technical writer for Fintech companies, creating industry-leading OpenAPI Spec documentation. For more info please visit www.andrewgillick.com
How Do We Have a Global Labour Shortage in the Age of Automation? Pt 1
The Bullshit Jobs Bubble
In September I travelled across the breadth the planet from New Zealand to Ireland. I was amazed to find The Great Labour Shortage/Resignation is still rumbling through every country I stopped in along the way.
At Dublin airport two staff quit right in front of me.
Futurists and economists have been warning us for at least a century that, by now, many millions of workers would be automated by technology.
These redundant workers would be either indulging in idleness as Bertrand Russell presaged or form as a useless underclass as Andrew Yang staked his 2020 election campaign on.
Yet here we stand in the Age of Automation and the complete opposite is happening: we have a global labour shortage which is most acute in the human-operated industries. Instead the industries shedding jobs en masse are those in the business of automation, from Big Tech all the way down to VC/PE propped-up startups.
Has the threat from automation been exaggerated or is this the last stand of human workers?
I propose that we actually have too many workers in the digital economy doing largely Bullshit Jobs, as the anthropologist David Graeber described them, which has siphoned workers out of practical trades and more essential industries.
How Do We Have a Global Labour Shortage in the Age of Automation? Pt 2.
The Bursting of the Bullshit Jobs Bubble
My thesis for Global Labour Shortage draws the connection between central bank policy, investor Michael Burry’s (of Big Short fame) bet on the White Collar Job Bubble and late anthropologist David Graeber’s theory of Bullshit Jobs.
In this essay I append to Burry and Graeber’s my own theory of Bullshit Digital Products which are a byproduct of Bullshit Jobs (plenty of examples in the full edition!).
The amalgam is the White Collar Bullshit Jobs Bubble which is largely in the tech industry.
In other words, rather than having a redundant unemployed class we now have an entire class of the redundant employed who push pixels around in Bullshit Jobs creating largely Bullshit Products in the digital economy.
This White Collar/BS Jobs Bubble appears to be deflating along with US tech stocks: over 70% wiped off Meta’s value this year; Amazon -40%; Microsoft -30%. Amazon cut its workforce by an whopping 100,000 people in June, Twitter has begun the cull under its new CEO and Meta will also cut potentially thousands of jobs in the coming year.
Is this the end of a 20-year tech growth investment trend and a return to defensive traditional industries as we enter a new global market/political environment?
Will there be a glut of software developers and digital workers and a resurgence in demand for the traditional trades of mechanics, carpenters, builder?
Is there a glut of digital products that no one wants?
Superset Your Life: The Benefits of Mixing Low-tech and High-Tech Work to your Career and Relationships
Even as adults we can rediscover the benefits of going back to some manual work - for those who have completely lost it.
Over the years I became, accidentally, a fully-fledged pixel-pusher.
While I spent the past five years working in startups using frontier tech like machine learning, AI, blockchain, big data etc. I found I was actually regressing in practical skills which negatively affected many areas of my daily life and was, quite frankly, emasculating.
This is the story of how I went back to basics and trained as a bike/e-bike mechanic over and the many unexpected complementary benefits it had on my work when I went back to contracting as a technical writer and writing REST API documentation for Fintech companies.
I continue to “superset” the two contrasting careers now and I find I probably couldn’t do one without the other now. I believe the has improved the relationships with my partner and two sons and working with my hands in the workshop provided a mental shelter a the while the world was falling apart.
Do We Need to Reorientate Our Education System to Cultivate Self-sufficiency in Citizens?
In August, Ireland’s Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability (Feasta) published my discussion paper on reorientating the education system to cultivate self-sufficiency in Irish children and more resilience in the economy.
Being Irish living in New Zealand with two boys, I contrast the two education systems with some very interesting differences and outcomes for its citizens.
Like many parents of young children I’ve been wondering and worried about the kind of world they are going to inherit.
Especially working in tech for the past few years - and more pointedly Web3/Crypto - I’m convinced we’re heading down the wrong track by throwing exponentially more technology at the problems created by technology.
Crypto in particular is gamifying and monetizing our youngest generations with play-to-earn gaming where kids earn crypto/NFTs by literally twiddling their thumbs.
This is not to mention the monetization of soccer/baseball cards as NFTs, and monetizing your social media following with ‘social tokens’.
We’re not even talking about the pros/cons of Google Classroom and how it is now ubiquitous in classrooms around the world since the pandemic.
ABOUT ANDREW GILLICK
Andrew creates industry-leading technical and API documentation for Fintech startups that frees up developers, attracts new investors and captures customers. For more info on working together please get in touch at www.andrewgillick.com
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