“Mama don’t let your babies grow up to be Cowboys…” – Ed and Patsy Bruce, 1975
Dear Clients and Friends,
There is nothing about the current labor market that Willie Nelson or Waylon Jennings would have recognized as “normal” in 1978 when they won a Grammy for the remake of this song.
“Mama don’t let your babies grow up to be Cowboys…” - Song by Ed and Patsy Bruce, 1975
In 1978, the most common job according the US Census bureau was “Secretary”, but farmers and Machine operators were close behind. * And while Doctors and Lawyers had and have a special role within society as Willie and Waylon noted; at that time, Pilots and Engineers were among the most prestigious and recruited positions within the workforce.
Let me explain why these numbers and details matter.
The Labor force can be broadly defined as the different roles that society values in a hierarchal structure. In most economies these roles are defined by skill and wage, the higher the skill the higher the wage. Education and experience matter in the wage outcome, but they are not always proportionate. Today, Secretaries (administrative assistant), make up around 2% of the labor force as technology has taken this role and shifted the workload from 50 years ago**. Occupations that took multiple assistants in 1978, may only take 1 assistant today. The same is true for farming and engineering. This is productivity, but had you seen the coming digital revolution of the 80s and 90s as a secretary in the late 70s, would your first emotion have been to panic?
What makes the conversation different today is the power of technology has increased to the point where the tool is now more powerful than the user. So, while a secretary looked at Microsoft Excel or Word and said, “that was easy”, today a truck driver looks at the driverless cars and thinks, “that’s not good”. If you rely upon your intellectual capital to make a living, you have to ask if AI makes your institutional knowledge worth less, or even worthless. But haven’t we been here before, you might ask? Kind of, the ATM didn’t outmode the bank teller and the tractor didn’t displace the horse. But what makes this change different is the speed by which the change will likely happen. The one thing that can change this sudden shift is the one thing that could derail the entire experiment; which is the speed by which the economy surrenders its agency to the ‘machines’. Ultimately the argument over AI is more political, rather than economic.
Technology has automated tasks, made planting and harvesting less labor intensive and changed the structure of labor. This example provides a blueprint for how we should think about the labor market – technology provides tools that make the entire system more productive. The usage of AI will be similar to the usage of Excel in the 90s, whereby those who incorporate the tools of technology keep their jobs, while those that abstain from their usage find themselves out-of-step with reality.
1 The Most Common Job in Every State, 1978-2014 - Sociological Images
2 OES Home : U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
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