The Job-Seeker’s Paradox
15th September 2011
Arnold Kling is always worth reading.
The paradox is this. A job seeker is looking for something for a well-defined job. But the trend seems to be that if a job can be defined, it can be automated or outsourced. The marginal product of people who need well-defined jobs is declining. The marginal product of people who can thrive in less structured environments is increasing.
Megan McArdle takes the ball and runs with it.
Why is this troubling? Aren’t routine jobs stifling? Soul-destroying? A tool of the oppressive overclass?
Well, that’s what we used to say when we had more than enough to go around. The assembly-line was grinding modern man into just another machine part; the stultifying conformity of the white collar world was producing a nation of anal-retentive Casper Milquetoasts.
Then the jobs started to go away and we discovered that many people like dreary predictability–at least, compared to the real-world alternative, which is risk. What many, maybe most, people actually want, it turns out, is the creativity and autonomy of entrepreneurship combined with the stability of a 1950s corporate drone. This is a fantasy, of course, but given their druthers, it’s not clear that most people will pick risk over dronedom.
Unfortunately, they’re being given no choice. Even if we stopped outsourcing, we’re not going to somehow stop automation.
UPDATE: Smitty at The Other McCain kicks the extra point.
Restated, jobs that involve information management, especially in well-bounded cases, are readily re-stated in software.
So, knowing how to
- write code,
- administer information systems,
- do jobs that have a significant ‘real-world’ component (fixing cars),
- involve creativity,
- are not easily structured in code (customer service)
are likely to remain longer.
Back on topic, though, the Information Age has blown away vast swaths of the private sector, and is even now crushing the public sector. Private citizens just do not require the government, especially the federal government, managing their birth, housing, health, education, employment, and retirement. Private citizens do not need legions of civil servants reading email, shuffling from meeting to meeting, and emitting PowerPoint all day. This must stop.