I saw the headline Five jobs that didn't exist 10 years ago and in anticipation of finding some interesting jobs, probably some interesting jobs with a limited shelf life, leapt in ...
The UK jobs market has changed incredibly over the past 100 years; even the past decade has seen a proliferation of new roles. We look at a selection and ask whether your role existed 10 years ago.I was not disappointed ...
Now I, being an boring old fart**, well remember the serious sincere assertions thrown out at us about the benefits increased computerisation and mechanisation the onward march of technology was going to deliver and in particular how we none of us needed to worry about the future because the fewer people required to do mundane manual tasks etc. the better - First up the vastly increased profitability of being able to do so much more with far fewer humans involved meant not only would we all be guaranteed greater wealth all round, with everyone being able to pick and chose how much, basically how little we worked and living a largely leisure oriented lifestyle but Second up, with the mundane and repetitive being taken care of by machines people would be able to move on and do the new more satisfying and fulfilling jobs that would spring up like Wordsworth's daffodils ... I don't know where the masterplan fell down and who is at fault but ...Offshore windfarm engineer
Zumba teacher
App designer
"Green Deal" assessor
Social media manager
VSLVSL** I'm not alone ! And I'd certainly agree with the sentiment ... you just can't be "a policy adviser" without a degree any more ... in fact, you can't even do "filing" without a degree, because it is all "electronic" now, and you do of course need to have degree to be able to file documents that only exist in electronic form ...
Recommend 325Offshore windfarm engineer = engineer
Zumba teacher = PE teacher
App designer = Programmer
Green Deal assessor = Sales Rep
Social media manager = Wanker
The more things change the more they remain the same.
whodhavethoughtit
Recommend 57My role existed 40 years ago when I started work. Basically an an office admin/secretarial role. I still do the same job now but it has to be dressed up with a fancy title (facilitator/co-ordinator/policy officer etc) to justify asking for a degree to get through the door.
I am probably exaggerating for effect somewhat but many job descriptions I see nowadays could come under the generic 'administrator'.
What have we wrought in the UK?
6 hours ago
18 comments:
Ou sont les handsome cab gas lamp fitters d'antan?
I dunno about Handsome, rumour has it that gas lamp fitters generally had fizzogs like the back of a gas lamp ...
L, do you mean "hansom cab", no "e"?
B, is it?
My favourite Zumba teacher story.
We do all have more leisure time. It's that we choose to spend $5K going to florida, having 2nd cars, a higher meat diet, or having expensive kitchens that mean we're still working.
I know a skilled guy who is rather frugal (holidays in France in a tent, beat up old car), and he takes 2 months off a year.
And "social media manager" is basically PR/marketing.
MW - I made that rumour up in a determined effort to do a mildly funny and avoid simply asking L the "did you mean ...... 'no d, no e'" question you asked - because it surely was an intentional misspelling as checking out this url :-
http://lolathebeautiful.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/mais-ou-sont-les-handsome-cab-gas-lamp.html
and the comments there will show
Technology Evangelist.
Blogger.
Visual Clearance Engineer.
Growth Hacker
SEO Optimizer
Chief Visionary Officer
TS @ 14:35
OK so "we all" have more leisure time but a lot of us sadly don't have the wherewithal to make best use of it and are denied being able to make the choice between spending $5K going to Florida, or having 2nd cars, or having expensive kitchens?
The important thing about your frugal friend would appear to be that he is skilled and thus in demand and able to largely dictate his own terms to the extent that he only needs to work 10 months of the year to earn enough to ensure he can do what he wants with his leisure time.
The continuing growth in the use of "zero hours contracts" for low skill jobs suggest an increasing number of people have what might be described as ample "free time" but hardly time that can be devoted to leisure, assuming their ZHC actually generates sufficient income to make "leisure" possible.
"Second up, with the mundane and repetitive being taken care of by machines people would be able to move on and do the new more satisfying and fulfilling jobs that would spring up like Wordsworth's daffodils ... I don't know where the masterplan fell down and who is at fault but ..."
Was it ever standing up? Surely it must have been obvious to anyone with the slightest knowledge of history that increasing mechanisation only leads to greater "leisure" by virtue of having more people unemployed. Surprisingly new jobs did spring up, but they were almost universally created, either directly or indirectly by the State, either by employing people to do things that didn't need to be done or by passing legislation that forced the private sector to do things that didn't need to be done and to employ people to do them.
B, that's a slightly more serious point:
"new jobs did spring up, but they were almost universally created, either directly or indirectly by the State, either by employing people to do things that didn't need to be done or by passing legislation that forced the private sector to do things that didn't need to be done and to employ people to do them."
My view is
a) rather than pay (or force others to pay) people large amounts of money for consuming resources to produce nothing of value, it would be better to dish it out as universal welfare. As long as there is a marginal benefit to working, enough people will do it.
b) it is the landowners who ensure that people will always run to stand still, because most of the gains from mechanisation go to higher rents.
As usual, an LVT-CI system fixes both of those problems.
B: Is that really true though? Agreed, state regulations and state employment has "created" a lot of jobs, that we can safely say wouldn't exist if the regs and high taxes were not in place. OTOH, AFAIK, increase in employment did follow technology even before the state went full tilt as a percentage of gdp and in regs over a hundred years ago, and it would probably have followed that route. The point being made by some economists about the situation now, is that we are at a point where technology growth is so fast that employment growth can't catch up.
Further points is: if not for high taxes on labour, maybe technology growth would have been somewhat slower because of the reduced need for mechanising away the least productive jobs?
Also a large part of govt. intervention has been in healthcare, and there would certainly have been growth in healthcare even without nationalization.
MW: agreed, that's another side of the coin. And with LVT/CI hypothetically being introduced in the past, or the growth of rents as a portion of GDP had otherwise been suppressed by intervention, maybe more of produtivity growth would have been taken out as [voluntary] leisure, rather than unemployment?
Kj: "Is that really true though?"
Yes it is, lots of people have observed this, it's not a political thing.
"Further points is: if not for high taxes on labour, maybe technology growth would have been somewhat slower because of the reduced need for mechanising away the least productive jobs?"
Agreed.
MW: I wasn't talking about rents vs. labour, but like Bayard, technology vs. labour. Is it true that technology was and is at the demise of labour. I'm not sure it is, only sometimes. But rent-issues affect this ofcourse.
Kj, there is no long term conflict between technology and labour. We've been inventing labour saving devices since the dawn of history.
Remeber: you can automate all you like, but there is only any point in increasing output if there is demand for your products.
See also Henry Ford (the facts are disputed but the principle stands).
"Technology" can only possibly lead to high unemployment in the long term if it is combined with monopoly power (and patent protection is an example of this) - because if nothing else, you still need experts to design, make and maintain the technology.
MW: that was my point as well. The problem with intervention in labour-markets, and non-intervention in land, is how crazy it turns out.
Points as an example, Spain, and maybe Japan, for slightly different reasons (political vs political/cutural). Where you've got a certain part of the population set for life, their earnings and job descriptions vaguely have some connection with productivity, and OTOH, of the ones that do have entry-level jobs (esp. Spain), they're also doing stuff inefficiently (who needs 3 people to welcome you or sell you stuff?), because they earn zilch and live with their parents.
Or in the case of my country, a huge chunk of jobs is either done illegally, by yourself, or not at all. Low productivity labour is then referred to disability or early retirement (10% of the population!). It's such an inneccessary waste, and it gives the impression that tech is against labour.
Kj, I was looking at the C18th where increasing mechanisation in agriculture and manufacture put a lot of people out of work. It didn't put unemployment up, except in the short term, because of the concurrent huge increase in activity in manufacture. By and large, workers got re-employed into worse jobs than they had before, not better, so where anyone got the idea that mechanisation ever means people working shorter hours for more money from, I don't know. As Mark points out, all the cost savings ultimately get soaked up in higher rents. How do you think the landowning aristocracy got the money to build all those stately homes that dot the English countryside?
B, IMHO, you are putting the cart before the horse.
Step 1: enclosures, automation in farming, more sheep fewer vegetables (less labour intensive).
Step 2: starving people driven off the land and into cities to look for work.
Step 3: the satanic mill owners have a ready supply of slave labour (faced with the choice of a shit job in the city or starving in the countryside, that is hardly a voluntary choice). They'd have been stupid not to exploit it.
Had there been no enclosures etc in the countryside (and hence no slaves), then perhaps industrialisation would not have been so fast, but so what? The satanic mill owners would have offered much better pay and conditions and this would have spared us two centuries of industrial strife and union tomfoolery.
A large part of the reason why China is industrialising so fast is because two-thirds of their population is effectively slaves.
And being entirely fair here, people's living standards have improved enormously (again) over the past couple of centuries, and we do work shorter hours than then.
B: MW beat me to it. But if you are saying what it seems you are saying, that's patently not true. Combine population growth, and the fact that current private sector production finances current government waste, and that we are quite obviously working less, for higher real wages, with higher standards of living. Whether landowners skims the cream or the state does, is a side-issue. Ofcourse we are, as a whole, better off after mechanisation.
Mark, if the inventions that caused the industrial revolution (the power loom, the spinning Jenny, the steam engine etc)had been made after the inventions that caused the agricultural revolution, there would have been no satanic mills to welcome the poor starving masses coming in from the countryside. Yes, Britain, like China, was able to industrialise quickly because of the ready supply of labour, (although I was taught that most of the labour supply for the mills was home-grown: the mill-workers, not being physically exhausted at the end of the day unlike their agricultural brethren, reproduced far more fecundly) but there had to be the industrial base there to begin with.
Kj, I think the rise in standards of living over the C20th was caused by a different mechanism than mechanisation, the fact that the two went hand in hand is more coincidence than cause.
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