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Nonfiction articles

The Future Unemployment Crisis

Written by Stephen Euin Cobb

Technological innovations create jobs. Unfortunately, in some cases, they also eliminate jobs. This is not a new phenomenon. We’ve watched this happen over and over through all of human history. We saw it when cars replaced horses, light bulbs replaced gaslights, bullets replaced arrows, iron replaced bronze, and cloth replaced animal skins. New jobs with new skills were created; but old jobs with old skills passed away.

Today the world is speeding up. Every decade seems more filled with events and changes than its predecessor. Technological innovations are coming closer together than ever, which means we are both creating and eliminating jobs faster than ever.

This creating and eliminating of jobs is a scary thing for people who work for a living. It’s scary enough when one gets laid off due to a slowdown in the economy, but it’s a whole new level of scariness when the skill you have honed and perfected through years of experience is no longer used or needed or desired or employed by anyone. When a worker’s job is permanently eliminated from the face of the earth, the worker must change to a new profession.

Changing profession usually requires some kind of training or certification which costs money—usually, a lot of money. What’s worse, the more money it costs to learn the new profession, the more time it is likely to take too—time in which the learner has to pay all their old familiar bills using an income which may be composed of zero dollars; or, if they are fortunate enough to receive unemployment benefits, a greatly reduced portion of their normal income.

The result is that, for most people, changing profession is extremely difficult. For those suffering through it, the perception can be that it is impossible, but this is not as true as it looks from within. (I’ve survived it three times in my 54 years and they were the hardest, scariest, most demoralizing times I’ve ever had. But I did survive.)

As future innovations continue to come increasingly closer together we will eventually enter a time when the creation and elimination of jobs in the many different fields will overlap so much and so thoroughly as to produce a continuous crisis concerning jobs.

This crisis will involve two problems, not one. On the one hand, jobs which have traditionally been perfectly safe and secure will cease to exist continually and at an increasing rate. Simultaneously, jobs in newer fields will beg and cry and scream for qualified applicants but the qualified applicants will not come, because the qualified applicants do not exist.

This crisis is here now in a highly diluted form. It has been with us for years, but has always been small and difficult to see. It is slightly more visible during recessions, however, and some people have puzzled over why, at the end of each of the last few recessions, the jobless numbers have taken longer and longer to recover. While it would be simplistic to pretend that the rising strength of this future crisis is the only reason for this, it’s probably safe to say that it is one of them and may even be the main one.

Growing slowly worse year after year, eventually it will become visible without a recession, and will become impossible to ignore. Perhaps it will reach visibility when it involves one percent of all jobs, or when it involves 2 or 3 or even 4 percent.

Imagine living in a world where four percent of all workers lost their job every year and had to be retrained for a completely different profession in order to rejoin the work force. If retraining took an average of two years, eight percent of all workers would be in school and not working to pay their bills. The questions would then become: Who will pay their bills? Who will pay for all that schooling? And most importantly: is your job next?

If this problem escalates to a point where four percent of the population is laid off each year because the need for their skill is eliminated, the public will likely view this as a dangerous threat. Especially if they realize that it is not going to stop growing at four percent.

There are two possible responses to every crisis: fix it, or use it as a tool for personal gain. If history teaches us anything, both responses will become popular.

Fixing it will be difficult and expensive since it will require educating and reeducating millions of people every year. Most likely this will be financed by taxes which are then redistributed by large government organizations.

Using it for personal gain will be just the opposite—it will be cheap and easy. Many people will begin calling themselves "Luddites." A word which for two centuries was an insult directed at uneducated technophobes. These new Luddites, however, will wear the title proudly. Hats, T-shirts and bumper stickers will all proclaim the value of Luddism. For a portion of the populous, Luddism will become a movement and then a philosophy.

Some politicians, noticing its popularity, will embrace it as their ticket into office. And for some, playing the Luddite card will work. These politicians, once elected, will put all their effort into preventing any and all fixes to the crisis, since the crisis will be the only thing that keeps them in office election after election. Without the suffering of the people their political career would end. Perpetuating the crisis is the one job they don’t want eliminated.

Today the problem is not a crisis. Today the problem is visible only during recessions. Today the problem affects less than one percent of the population. But decades from now—at least one, perhaps two or even three—it will have grown to crisis level.

When that day arrives, and if the Luddite camp becomes a political majority successful at killing every fix which might efficiently retrain the unemployed, there is a good chance we will experience an economic depression as deep and long and painful as the famed Great Depression of the 1930s. (Paradoxically, a vast New Depression would also be a temporary fix to the problem since its widespread poverty would temporarily stifle innovation. Universal misery and suffering, however, is not a desirable solution.)

It should also be emphasized that this is not an American crisis, this is an everywhere crisis. Every nation will face this; every nation will suffer; and every nation will either retrain their unemployed or not. Which means that every nation will choose between prosperity or their own local version of the Great Depression.

The future is coming, and it will pause for no one. Countless wonderful things are coming, but there are bad things coming too. And we would be wise to get ready for them now.

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You can learn more about Stephen Euin Cobb here, or here.

And more about his podcast: The Future And You here, or here, or even here.