What my kids should study?

Tuesday, November 06, 2012 Francisco Carneiro 0 Comments

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Well i guess they will study whatever they like but for the sake of making a decent living after they should consider this (the underlying is mine):

The fact that employment in routine occupations has been disappearing is well documented by recent job polarization literature (Acemoglu 1999, Autor et al. 2006, Goos and Manning 2007, Goos et al. 2009, Autor and Dorn 2012). This literature finds that occupations focused on routine tasks tend to be middle-waged. Thus, the disappearance of routine occupations in the past 30 years represents a ‘polarization’ of employment because the middle of the wage distribution has been hollowed out.

As recently as the mid-1980s, about one in three Americans over the age of 16 was employed in a routine occupation. Currently, that figure stands at one in four. The fact that polarization is occurring should not surprise anyone who understands the influence of robotics and automation on machinists and machine operators in manufacturing. Indeed, the influence of robotics is increasingly being felt on routine occupations in transportation and warehousing. Of equal importance is the disappearance of routine employment in ‘white-collar’ occupations - think bank tellers being replaced by ATMs, or secretarial work being replaced by personal computers and Siri, Apple’s iPhone-integrated ‘intelligent personal assistant’. Thus, all of the per capita employment growth of the past 30 years has either been in ‘non-routine’ occupations located at the high-end of the wage distribution, such as software engineers and economists, or in low-paying jobs, such as service occupations like restaurant waiters and janitors. For this last set of occupations, this has been especially true in the past decade.

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2012/11/jobless-recoveries-and-the-disappearance-of-routine-occupations.html#more

I think this trend is not going to change soon, Machines are much better than man and they never get tired. So you need the guys who control the machines and some manual & creative jobs and of course sales people (always).

All the rest is going to slowly disappear.