As an indication of where the economy is going, someone should calculate permanent jobs created per dollar of capital expenditure for all the new datacenter construction.  That’s probably a new low for expenditures of this magnitude.  It’s more complicated to predict the effect on jobs in the rest of the economy, but that’s most probably negative.

It’s hard for me to think this doesn’t say something about the world we’re going toward.  It’s not so much that there will be a shortage of jobs overall as of good jobs.  What is it that we are going to use to bargain with employers?  Traditional education is about knowledge and capability.  In our familiar world it takes years to put together the package that an employable person represents, and there are many distinct niches that need to be filled.  In the new world, knowledge is more readily accessible, the capabilities required are more generic, and staffing levels may be reduced by efficiencies.  We’re only beginning to see how that will shake out.

As we noted last time, the private sector is not good at managing effects of radical change—on people and on the environment.  On the other hand, we’re talking about really significant productivity improvements, so in principle that should be a good thing.  But that’s not going to happen by itself. It sure didn’t happen at the start of the industrial revolution—for most of humanity that meant misery and war.

In this anniversary of the American Revolution there is a relevant quote from the signing of the Declaration of Independence: “We must, indeed, all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”  That’s now true worldwide.  In this time of economic ferment, climate change, and nuclear weapons we had better learn to work together for global well-being or there may be nothing left at all.