You’d like to see that happening again now. But the data show that it just isn’t happening as fast. We’re having the automation and the job destruction; we’re not having the creation at the same pace. There’s no guarantee that we’ll be able to find these new jobs. It may be that machines are better than that.

That said, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, because ultimately the purpose of economic progress and technological progress is to be able to create more wealth with less work. I mean, isn’t that what we want? More wealth with less work? So, if we are in a Star-Trek economy, where replicators create all the essentials that we need, that doesn’t have to be a bad thing if we can have an economic system that matches to it and find a way that people can share in that benefit. And people can still continue to find meaning and value in life. May 11, 2013 at 10:23AM

A new study from the International Labor Organization takes a global tour of youth joblessness and finds that what’s gone up won’t come down in the next five years. The youth unemployment rate* among the richest countries is projected to flat-line, rather than fall, before 2018. As a result, the global Millennial generation could be uniquely scarred by the economic downturn. Research by Lisa Kahn has showed that people graduating into a recession have typically faced a lifetime of lower wages. May 10, 2013 at 11:43PM

“Agents represent workers who pick and choose projects that match them rather than signing on for indefinite amounts of time. The Harvard Business Review calls this supertemping. Business Week calls it going Hollywood.

But here’s the big takeaway. A fundamental shift is taking place, where the path to getting a job is massively circumventing college credentials. And, at the same time, the American public is fed up with the insane debt that college are expecting new grads to take on in order to graduate. (Good essay: How College Ruined My Life.)…
Loads of great stuff in this piece May 01, 2013 at 09:07PM

People work an average of 1,902 hours per year in the surveyed cities but they work much longer in Asian and Middle Eastern cities… People in Lyon and Paris, by contrast, spend the least amount of time at work according to the global comparison: 1,582 and 1,594 hours per year respectively. August 24, 2012 at 11:08PM

stoweboyd:

If we were rational about the new world of work, we would accept the idea that people should work less, since productivity has climbed so much in the past few decades. But will that be accepted doctrine of Western countries? Can we shift to a 20 hour work week?

Heather Stewart via The Observer

A thinktank, the New Economics Foundation (NEF), which has organised the [recent London] event with the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics, argues that if everyone worked fewer hours – say, 20 or so a week – there would be more jobs to go round, employees could spend more time with their families and energy-hungry excess consumption would be curbed. Anna Coote, of NEF, said: “There’s a great disequilibrium between people who have got too much paid work, and those who have got too little or none.”

She argued that we need to think again about what constitutes economic success, and whether aiming to boost Britain’s GDP growth rate should be the government’s first priority: “Are we just living to work, and working to earn, and earning to consume? There’s no evidence that if you have shorter working hours as the norm, you have a less successful economy: quite the reverse.” She cited Germany and the Netherlands.

Robert Skidelsky, the Keynesian economist, who has written a forthcoming book with his son, Edward, entitled How Much Is Enough?, argued that rapid technological change means that even when the downturn is over there will be fewer jobs to go around in the years ahead. “The civilised answer should be work-sharing. The government should legislate a maximum working week.”

People would be able to spend more time in community activities and growing their own food, for example.

However, the inherently Calvinist mindset that animates much of the policy discussion around unemployment and the inequitable distribution of income will likely block productive course of action around new work models. The answer will lie in more people dropping out, adopting a freelance lifestyle, and dialing down their consumption: a bottom-up adoption of slow, no-growth lifestyle.

(Source: underpaidgenius)