One of the mantras of the 1980s was the future of western nations lay in becoming ‘knowledge economies’, unfortunately things don’t look like they are turning out that way.
As the developed economies moved their manufacturing offshore – first to Japan and Korea, then Mexico and finally China – the promise to displaced Western factory workers was the replacement jobs would be in vaguely knowledge based industries like call centres and backoffice computer work.
From the 1990s on, those jobs also started to go overseas to lower cost centres in India, the Phillipines and other countries.
When the internet became ubiquitous in the developed world in the late 1990s, the creative industries – musicians, artists and writers – found income dried up as their work became commoditised by digital distribution channels.
Now the professions are being affected by combination of offshoring, artificial intelligence and automated processes. Many of the jobs that were done by highly paid accountants and lawyers can now be done by computers or in places not dissimilar to those that took away the call centre jobs twenty years ago.
So it turns out the knowledge economy isn’t the key to riches after all and the future turns out to be more complex than what we thought in the 1990s.
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