Sunday Posts

There is a jobs crisis within the global supply chain. Squeezed between trade tensions and process automation, the global service economy that would have lifted all - or at least most - boats, hasn't been doing well lately. Even before the Corona Virus moment, China's factories were using two-thirds of the labour for like-for-like jobs compared to only a few years earlier. Ever-expanding back-offices in India had no net new hiring for some time now. And, yet, millions of people in these countries, as well as in Africa, South East Asia and the Americas, are reaching working age every month and looking for work. It seems that the great middle-class dream is about to go bust. But you always meet a particular kind of people who read book summaries and take the conference presentations too seriously. They were never out there and they usually find details boring. They keep their prophecies in the abstract, big picture level. For them, stories of the economic slide of the mid...

I have argued elsewhere that the expansion of formal higher education is precisely the wrong thing to do at a time of great technological change, as college lacks the inclusiveness and openness of informal learning, and expansion of college discourages spread and persistence of informal learning opportunities ( see the post here ). This prevents the diffusion of technology, as lack of inclusiveness and openness in learning mean a lot of people are left out, unable not just to take advantage of technological change to improve their economic prospects but also missing out on applying the technological possibilities in solving their own day-to-day problems.  Now, I want to take this argument further: The college does not just fail those which it excludes, but also its own graduates. This is because the college, in its current form, does a really bad job at developing two most critical abilities that one needs to succeed in the globalised and automated workplaces (and societies...

Indeed, I have borrowed the title from Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz's classic study, because we are living through a time when the race has entered a new phase, showing up in all its splendour with anxious hinges and critical turns. It's time to decide and act, and every step counts. Of course, technology is not autonomous and we are indeed the 'driver in the driverless car', and the choices we make today will decide whether technologies will tear apart our society, as some fear, or, if it would unleash the next cycle of prosperity. The optimists have empirical evidence, indeed. They cite - and this is what Goldin and Katz were primarily looking at - Industrial Revolution. Despite all the early fears of job losses and social unrest, the technological progress eventually ended up unleashing a new era of prosperity. The prosperity took time to build, and there were many social unrests along the way: Malthus came along to make us think people can be surpluses and...