If It Can Be Defined, It Can Be Automated or Outsourced: The New New New Job Market

Markets are said to abhor uncertainty.

Which makes sense because markets, it is increasingly clear, are less the rational random-walks we have been led to believe and more the unstable, neurotic reflections of their human progenitors.

As in markets, so in jobs. We in the western democracies were (mostly) raised in a pretty linear world, where dads had jobs to which they commuted and moms too(sometimes)if they werent at home. The tasks were defined, as was the work day, the work life and all of the attendant obligations and rewards. Wages were stable, pensions were guaranteed, health care included.

That world existed in recent memory. And yet, people already look back in awe at that time and ponder what it must have been like, as if in a dream.

One aspect of that lost certitude was embraced, widely at first, as freedom. No more cubicle, no more neck tie, no more sucking up to the boss (well, on second thought...). The belief was that if you were educated, competent and self-confident, there was nothing you couldnt do better on your own. Until, of course, it became clear that the price of freedom was insecurity and instability. It is our atavistic inheritance that there is always safety in numbers.

So we find ourselves struggling to define the indefinable. What do we do? How are we doing? We want to know. And yet, maybe, in this economy, it is better not to ask - or hope - for too much clarity. Because if you can figure it out that easily, so can your laptop. JL

Megan McArdle comments in The Atlantic:

Arnold Kling writes one of the most troubling, and true, passages about the American job market that I've read in a while: "The paradox is this. A job seeker is looking for something for a well-defined job. But the trend seems to be that if a job can be defined, it can be automated or outsourced. The marginal product of people who need well-defined jobs is declining. The marginal product of people who can thrive in less structured environments is increasing."

The jobs that are being automated are the stable, well-paying jobs where you could settle in and know exactly what you'd be doing for years. As Arnold says, if you can define it, you can probably outline it specifically enough to outsource, either to a lower-wage worker somewhere else, or to a computer. Why is this troubling? Aren't routine jobs stifling? Soul-destroying? A tool of the oppressive overclass?

Well, that's what we used to say when we had more than enough to go around. The assembly-line was grinding modern man into just another machine part; the stultifying conformity of the white collar world was producing a nation of anal-retentive Casper Milquetoasts.

Then the jobs started to go away and we discovered that many people like dreary predictability--at least, compared to the real-world alternative, which is risk. What many, maybe most, people actually want, it turns out, is the creativity and autonomy of entrepreneurship combined with the stability of a 1950s corporate drone. This is a fantasy, of course, but given their druthers, it's not clear that most people will pick risk over dronedom.

Unfortunately, they're being given no choice. Even if we stopped outsourcing, we're not going to somehow stop automation. One of my first jobs out of school, way back in 1994, was as a secretary. I'd be shocked to find that any of the executives at that organization still have secretaries--maybe the executive director, but maybe not even him. Already at the time there wasn't really enough for me to do; my boss had a secretary because, well, people in his position did. That's not because the work was being outsourced to Bangalore, but because computers and the internet were eliminating much of the coolie labor that secretaries used to take care of. And of course, the recession is accelerating the pace of change--and leaving the people who are displaced fewer options to transition.

Don't get me wrong--I'm no Luddite. I don't think it's unfortunate that progress is being made, and a lot of fairly boring jobs are being eliminated. I do think it's unfortunate that people don't like it.