The onward sweep of the machine process, published by Industrial Workers of the World, Chicago, c.1917. Wikicommons. Some rights reserved.Work is being revolutionised. The era of the career is over. Robots will increasingly render humans redundant — half of today’s jobs are likely to go over the next decade. The transformation of working lives means we’re all destined to become multiple-jobbers and portfolio-jugglers capable of continually reinventing ourselves as we adapt to the winds of economic change.
I could go on — and on. There is an endless river of reports, summits and policy commissions flowing forward with a hyperbolic account of the unprecedented disruption we are living through. The trouble is that some of these claims are demonstrably untrue, while others are merely highly questionable.
Typical job tenure, for instance, is much the same as it was a generation ago (it’s actually risen slightly). Job-hopping has fallen sharply. We move around for work less than we used to in the 1990s. The assumptions underpinning doomy projections about tech and jobs are very suspect. We’ve never had more work yet in important respects our jobs market has become less, not more, dynamic (Tyler Cowen has set out a version of this argument with some vim for the US, and Tim Harford distilled it nicely recently). Sure, many things are changing and there will doubtless be shifts in how we work not least due to technology. But when, you might ask, wasn’t that the case?
