Things Have Changed
Things Have Changed
Transforming the Job Landscape: Insight from Dr. Seth Benzel
Are you prepared for the future? What if we told you that philosophers will play a key role in it? We had a fascinating conversation with the brilliant Dr. Seth Benzel, a Digital Economist from MIT and Assistant Professor at Chapman University. He shared his insights about the transformation of job market landscape, the rise of new types of jobs, and the profound impact of AI on jobs and productivity. We explored how universities are stepping up, investing in STEM education, and how they can play a pivotal role in reducing inequalities and stimulating growth.
Ever heard of luxury jobs, last mile jobs, or new tech jobs? These are part of David Autor's taxonomy of future jobs and they're not as far away as you might think. We also delved into the increasing wealth of the top 3% and the subsequent rise in demand for luxury services. What does this mean for you? Well, we chatted about the importance of teaching philosophy in universities and striking a balance between STEM skills and interpersonal skills. We rounded out our conversation by discussing the increasing compensation for leadership and cooperative jobs. Ready to equip yourself with the right skills to remain competitive in the modern job market? Then you don't want to miss this episode!
AI is just the latest in technologies that allows to produce a lot more goods and services with less labor and overwhelmingly over the last 700 years that has been great for society. I mean, we used to all have to go out and farm. We barely got enough food when the weather was bad. People would starve. Now, through better seeds, fertilizer, lots of things most people are not farmers, and so AI will bring us immense new productivity.
Speaker 1:Now it will bring it quickly enough that adjusting for that and really understanding how do we train people for the new jobs, how do we have the benefits firms work the right way that's a very key thing. But it will allow us to take the shortage where we don't have enough people to go out and work with elderly people or reduce class size or help special needs kids. This extra productivity is a very, very good thing, used in an enlightened way. Someday we'll even get to the point where we can say, hey, people don't have to work super long hours, they can have periods of their life they don't work as much. Now what will that mean? That's the sort of more social, philosophical side we'll have to answer that AI can be our friend in terms of allowing us to take these huge shortages, both here in the US and the world at large, and provide to everyone what only a few people are able to get today.
Speaker 2:You just heard Bill Gates talk about the impending technology gains and its impact on jobs and productivity. It's no surprise that technology is displacing jobs and opportunities. But what is going to be relevant? With all the advances taking place, where are the jobs of the future going to come from? We have just the person to talk to Dr Seth Benzel, mit Digital Economist and Assistant Professor at Chapman University. Seth helps us understand how new technologies could impact employment and the jobs of tomorrow. Check it out.
Speaker 3:An engineer, banker and dancer go on a hike.
Speaker 2:They realize how things have changed and start a podcast.
Speaker 4:Hi, I'm Jed the banker.
Speaker 3:I'm Shikar the engineer, and I'm Adrian the dancer, and we are THC.
Speaker 4:We break down topics, meet pioneers and share ideas.
Speaker 2:Welcome to. Things have Changed.
Speaker 3:I wanted to learn about universities investing in STEM and trying to help students and the new young workforce an even older workforce that might be going back to university to get more skills and be more competitive in the labor market. Is this helping any substantial way to really increase the skills that people have to stay competitive and basically allows them to get out of that job market that is really under pressure from automation?
Speaker 5:Well, it's an absolutely fantastic question, right? So trying to think about what sort of advice would you give people moving forward and kind of, where are the jobs of the future going to come from and how can we prepare people for those jobs? So I definitely think that universities and reeducation have a huge role to play in trying to A boost growth and, b try to solve some of these inequality issues that we've been talking about. Thank you, thank you. I think there's obviously some ways in which universities do a cool job of reducing inequalities, sort of on their face. And let me get those out of the way, and then we'll come back to some of the more techie, interesting ones.
Speaker 5:So, you know, a university in a rural area can certainly bring a lot of intelligent, creative people into a region, and those people might start new, dynamic, exciting businesses for the locals to participate in. And even if they don't get educated themselves, there might be exciting opportunities from the spillovers of having a highly educated, research focused area near you. And it's certainly the case that to run a university you need plenty of high end people, but you also need a lot of people to keep the lights running, and those can be really good paying jobs also, and there's that mixing to right universities. There's plenty of good universities in big, rich cities, but there's also plenty of good universities sort of out in the countryside. And maybe one sort of idea moving forward for trying to reduce some of this inequality is to try to in more, invest in building more of these land grant universities in struggling economically regions to try to infuse some of that technology and some of that dynamism and some of those opportunities into different regions. And I definitely think there should be more funding from the United States government and from businesses into research and development to both boost growth and to create more and more of these opportunities. And so a good sort of just sort of basic way to try to reduce inequality and to get more people participating on the positive side of these technological changes would be more land grant universities out there with more research funding in order to get more people involved and to get us more cool, new, exciting, dynamic ideas. So maybe we can't, maybe, maybe, instead of a thousand troubadours, we only have one Spotify. Well, let's try to make a thousand Spotify's. That's sort of the logic there, right, where they all find their own niche and there's plenty for everybody to have be the master of their own superstar domain, right? So?
Speaker 5:But what are these new sorts of jobs that we want to try to prepare people for? So, david Autor, who's a very, very well known economist for speaking on these issues of inequality, skill bias, technological change, globalization, etc. He kind of has this taxonomy where he divides new jobs into sort of three categories. Three categories he has and I think this is a useful taxonomy, so I'm stealing. It are Last mile jobs, which we talked about a little bit, and I'll re explain those luxury jobs and kind of new tech jobs.
Speaker 5:Okay, so, let's, let's go in order. Some of these are easier. So the new tech jobs are easy, right, that's programmers, those are people installing solar panels. Those are what we usually think about when we think about jobs of the future, right, people directly using and implementing the new technologies. And so computer programmers, people installing solar panels. So those are some jobs of the future.
Speaker 5:A second wave of jobs of the future are what we call, like these, last mile jobs, and functionally, a lot of them are going to end up being gig economy jobs, because they're going to require a huge amount of flexibility, right? So what's the last mile job? So think about the task of delivering a package somewhere, right? So Amazon is super good at automating and designing and using artificial intelligence to make sure that boxes get to every different warehouse across America. But because driverless cars aren't there yet, what they do is they pay people to show up at the factory. It's done as a gig on your app, as an app on your phone, and people go and take those boxes and bring it to people's doorsteps, right?
Speaker 5:So the idea here is there's this part of the process that Amazon has done a really good job of automating and making highly efficient, and then there's, like, a last step of the process that you still need a human to do, and you can imagine that even if we were able to get driverless technology going so that the trucks themselves moving the big packages up and down the highway were fully automated, well, there's still the guy who has to move the box from the truck to your front door, right?
Speaker 5:And if you can't design a robot to do that, well, you're going to need a human sitting in that truck the entire time just to move the box to your front door. So that's an example of last mile job, and you might imagine all sorts of circumstances where we have some sort of automated process that's out there in the wild that we need some guy to show up and resolve if something comes up right. Again, think about what if we have one of those little pizza delivery robots that's going around delivering pizza, get stuck somewhere, right? Well, you're going to need a hire, a guy to go and rescue the robot, right?
Speaker 3:And Jed and I got to experience these. They looked like RC cars with like a box basically put on top of it, and we'd walk around campus and we'd see these things. What were they called, jed, Do you remember?
Speaker 3:I do not remember, but some of them could talk, dude, it was so weird, yodol, some of them you could push over and they'd be like hey, and I'm like whoa dude, I think just talking, and we would joke around in like snapchat videos of like them like struggling because they like fell into a pit or something or like off the sidewalk and they're just like struggling like no way to up front. You know what I've seen?
Speaker 4:though I've seen a dude, just completely random dude. Well, I don't know if he just out of the goodness of his heart or something like that, but if something's messed up, if I'm watching it for like 20 minutes, some dude will come and like fix it.
Speaker 3:Oh, okay.
Speaker 4:Like all right Cool. I think it's called Kiwi, kiwi food delivery no, no, no, the last mile people is what they call it.
Speaker 2:The way you set it up. I thought he would just come and just end it and its misery. I'd rather than have it just put it down.
Speaker 4:In Berkeley. I wouldn't be surprised if some dude was doing this shit.
Speaker 3:You know, if some stonk should have got it, People would mess with them for sure.
Speaker 4:Hey THC fans, before we get into more jobs of the future, talk with Seth Benzel. We wanted to share some exciting news with you. On September 18th, things have changed. We'll be participating in the Forward Conference by LSX, a platform that is building the first visibility as a service platform that helps early stage startups connect with media channels of the future. The Forward Conference is designed to focus on the future of media, which really includes podcasting. We're going to be participating in the future of podcasting segments. We're going to share some really cool stories. If you're interested, click on the forward link in the description of this podcast and use the discount code THC20 for a 20% discount on tickets. Also, we've been reaching out to the THC community to give everyone a platform to share a message in our community. We'll be including these testimonials in every THC episode. Here's Leanne from London. Hi, I'm Leanne and I work in cybersecurity in London. I love listening to THC to stay posted on the latest from the world of economics and discover cool and innovative startups.
Speaker 5:Get your dose of THC now, with new episodes every Monday.
Speaker 4:Thanks, leanne. We appreciate you for being part of the THC community. Now to get back to Seth and the future of jobs. One thing on this topic I guess that I'm curious about is I haven't looked at the numbers at all, but aren't we divesting from arts and humanities as we're focusing more of our resources on math and STEM? Is that a good approach? Because I feel like some of the jobs that require personal touches it's going to be harder, I guess, to replace with robots. Are we causing the end of human race by making everybody mathematicians and people working in STEM? It's always, you know, it has a positive outcome to our GDPs. Go to dasautobuscom for all of your book帽 and I don't know, man. If we don't have any philosophers anymore, I don't know what's going to happen to who thinks about if this shit is right or not. Economists.
Speaker 5:Yeah Well, the economists are often known as worldly philosophers or dismal philosophers. I listen to you. We tell you about that. Yeah, yeah, you listen to the partially examined life one.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that was really interesting.
Speaker 5:Oh, I'm glad, I'm really glad you enjoyed that. So, if you anyway, I will plug my other favorite podcast on your podcast, which is everyone should listen to Partially Examin' Life, which is an absolutely fantastic podcast on friends with one of the hosts and couldn't recommend it more highly, and, of course, listen to my episode about the philosophy of economics.
Speaker 2:That was a good plug. It's like it's a great show, but this is a really cool episode, yeah yeah, they talked about it.
Speaker 5:Yeah, yeah, okay. So awesome question, jed. Let me make one more. Let me list the third kind of job, and then I'll answer that question. Okay, so what's the third kind of job of the future?
Speaker 5:Well, these luxury wealth jobs, right? So, you know, you look at these sometimes, the job posting boards and the shit just gets sillier and sillier. Sometimes there's stuff like, you know, luxury dog grooming, luxury therapy, luxury apartment organization, right? So the third category of job that's emerging is emerging because of how rich the top 3% is becoming, right, and so now they've got way, way too much money. Well, some of that's got to go to paying workers to do something for them. So, you know, they invent these sort of luxuries, right, and some of them are legitimately nice things. I think it's a wonderful thing that many, many more people have access to therapy these days, and so that's so you might think of that as a third category where it's like these jobs have always exist. It's not like we invented talk therapy in the last 10 years, but as the country becomes richer, and especially as the top 3% becomes richer, they can afford more of these really kind of one-on-one personal services that aren't automated personal coaching, therapy, things like that, and these jobs are a lot more of this sort of interpersonal service variety that you just brought up.
Speaker 5:Yet, right, does America need philosophers? Yes, I think we do. Do we need right now? How does that translate into policy about universities? It's not 100% clear to me, right? Our universities are really tasked sort of with this really sort of diverse set of goals, one of which is to be kind of one of the core institutions of learning and knowledge and respectability and understanding and adjectives that have nothing to do with wealth, and, on the other hand, they have to be, you know, training, our workforce of the future. And you think about all these super important professional schools that produce lawyers and doctors and engineers and computer scientists. And so, jed, you know, I'm just gonna have to say that we need to have our cake and eat it too. I think universities are gonna have to be able to walk in, chew their gum at the same time. And does that mean that we need to teach our computer scientists more philosophy? Or does that mean that we need to train people who might be doing service jobs more philosophy? Or does this mean that we shouldn't be increasing the share of our education which is in STEM?
Speaker 5:I don't know exactly the answer, but I can give you some data points that might be interesting to think about. So one data point that is really interesting to think about is I've done some research on returns to skills of different kinds over the last again, we're talking about over the last 30 or 40 years, and there's been some excellent research by this, in addition to by me, by this guy by the name of David Deming, and so we talked about before that one class of jobs that are doing poorly in the new economy. Are these routine jobs right? Because we think that they're particularly successful and particularly susceptible to automation. So you can divide jobs into routine versus non-routine. Another way to divide jobs is by like different kinds of skills, and the two that I'm gonna focus on are like leadership skills and cooperation skills, right, and you might think that leadership and cooperation, that these are pretty closely intertwined concepts, and in some ways they are, but in some ways they're pretty different too. So it is certainly the case that incomes for people with like high-end computer science skills have gone up a lot and high-end engineering skills have gone up a lot, but it's also the case that people who have really good leadership abilities, their incomes have gone up a lot. Right Now you should think about, like top executives at businesses, managers, people who can get a lot of work out of maybe a less educated workforce or, alternatively, be able to really enable a super highly educated workforce and set goals and set clear outcomes, people with those leadership skills, which are partly STEM. Obviously there's some math in being a leader and some cost-benefit analysis, but a lot of those are interpersonal skills that help you get the most out of people, organize people, and I wouldn't necessarily call those STEM skills, right.
Speaker 5:On the other hand, we've seen great employment growth for people in cooperative occupations, right? So if you think about working in a factory, in one of those routine jobs, they're not very cooperative, right. You stand here and you move this thing into this box, right? Of course, any job involves working with other people, but on a scale of how closely you need to coordinate with others, not so much, right, those sorts of factory jobs. But when you think about the sort of service jobs that have the sort of more low end, lower income service jobs that have replaced those factory jobs, they do require a lot more cooperation. Again, it's things like working in a restaurant, working in facilities, maintenance, working in landscaping. These are jobs where you have to like do a lot of coordination with people.
Speaker 5:And what I'd like to point out is the leadership jobs. There aren't more of them, but they've become more highly compensated, right. Instead of we're seeing kind of less managers, but the managers who are able to land those jobs are doing great right. Or maybe I shouldn't say less managers, but less. A slower growth, relatively slower growth, in the rate of production of managers, and maybe that's in part because they've been boosted by these information technologies. Maybe it's part because managing is more winner take all. As we get bigger businesses, spotify can afford to get the best manager instead of having to settle for the 200 best manager, right.
Speaker 5:But these cooperation jobs, even though a lot of people have been flowing into these positions and their wages have stagnated right.
Speaker 5:So we've seen a lot more people working in these cooperative jobs. But because there's been an oversupply of people with these skills and if you think about cooperation, it's a kind of skill that a lot of people don't officially get trained in. It's just a kind of a skill that a lot of people are sort of they could use it in their job or they might not use it in their job. That's been a less compensated refuge, so it's been a refuge for people forced out of these routine jobs, but it's not been super highly compensated. And so now to circle back to your question of like what are the skills we should train people in that aren't STEM skills? Well, I guess the answer is we want to train people in more of these leadership skills, that those are the ones that are sort of more lack in demand and those are the ones that are getting the really nice jobs. These are the cooperative skills, where there's certainly a lot of job growth in them, but a lot of people sort of have those skills already.
Speaker 4:Gotcha, as you were talking about those in the third type of job I was thinking about like people who have jobs that are like head of culture. Now, hey, thanks so much for listening to our show this week.
Speaker 2:You could subscribe to us and, if you're feeling generous, well, you could even leave us a review. Trust me, it goes a long, long way. You could also follow THC at THC underscore pod on Twitter and LinkedIn. This is, things have Changed.
