demographics | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Japan’s demographic ruins

Japan’s urban ruins are a lesson for other countries facing an aging population

As Japan’s society ages and urbanises, the effects are being seen in buildings and communities being abandoned.

The Japan Times reports on how the nation is now becoming a magnet for urban explorers discovering what lies insides abandoned homes, hospitals, hotels and theme parks.

Many of the abandoned tourist attractions are legacies of the 1980s economic boom that saw a massive over-investment in property plays. With a shrinking population, those facilities were always doomed but in a growing society, there would have been economic reasons for redeveloping them.

In Japan though, those economic drivers don’t exist in much of the country as the Japan Times explains.

“Japan is in some sense uniquely blessed as a land of ruins. Its rapidly aging population, low birth rate, urbanization and lack of immigration have left a legacy of ghost towns and more than 8 million abandoned homes, or akiya. That tally could hit 21.5 million, one-third of all residences nationwide, by 2033, according to the Nomura Research Institute.”

Japan is the first of many nations that will face the consequences of an aging population, what they do will be a lesson to all of those who follow. Of those, China will probably the biggest experiment.

One big lesson is property demand changes and once valuable assets don’t necessarily hold their value in the face of a societal shift.

Japan looks to startups

Japan’s efforts to encourage startups is a pointer to the rest of the world’s economic future

Can Japan reinvigorate its startup community? A story in the Wall Street Journal describes some of the attempts to encourage entrepreneurs in an economy that has been stagnant for a quarter century.

In many ways Japan is a prototype for the modern global economy, just as the Japanese tried to stimulate their economy following their 1989 bust by pumping money into their deeply corrupt construction industry , so too has the rest of the world tried a similar strategy with the banking system after the 2008 crisis.

The results in both cases been the same stagnation as the money is wasted on non productive schemes and speculation rather than investment in job and wealth creating businesses and innovations.

Now the Japanese are looking to a bottom up stimulus to their economy which challenges the country’s social norms where getting a ‘safe job’ with a large corporation is seen as the best prospect for young people.

While this is a change from the accepted wisdom, the entrepreneurial model really isn’t that strange for the Japanese with a range of successful technology companies started by post World War II entrepreneurs ranging from Sony to Softbank.

The Japanese model though may not be suited to the Silicon Valley venture capital model and this is where it’s dangerous to make comparisons with what works in San Jose, Tel Aviv or Shoreditch.

Japan’s strengths in industrial engineering may well make its businesses well suited for the Internet of Things the Wall Street Journal article quotes serial entrepreneur Taizo Son as suggesting. Interestingly, the 43 year old serial entrepreneur is the youngest brother of SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son.

Another area where Japan is a glimpse of the future is in the aging population and it may well be that harnessing the abilities of older entrepreneurs is another area where the country can either show the way to success or what not to do with an older, stagnant economy.

In many ways Japan is a pointer to where the world is heading. How they manage the early twenty-first century will be a lesson for the rest of us.

America’s fading middle class

America’s fading middle class is bad news for businesses run on old models.

The US middle class is losing ground reports the Pew Research Center citing its latest report that finds less than half of all Americans identify as middle class.

A fading middle class is bad news for companies basing their businesses on increasing consumer spending such as old school retailers, big box stores and fast food chains. The affluent youth culture of the 1960s consumerist model is particularly under threat as the falls in income have fallen disproportionately on the young, as this New York Times examination of American social trends shows.

The end of the 20th Century miracle

It’s hard to see this trend being reversed as the bulk of the Twentieth Century middle class miracle was the surge in well paid manufacturing jobs during and after World War II. After thirty years of seeing those roles going offshore, the next wave of technology threatens to do away with them altogether.

That next wave of technology doesn’t promise to be good for middle class professionals and managerial workers either as automation and artificial intelligence promise to do away with many of their well paid jobs as well.

A large middle class is historically an aberration, when the term was first formally used in Britain just on a hundred years ago only 20% of the population fitted the criteria – incredibly the US only started studying the nation’s middle classes in the 1950s – and prior to the industrial revolution only a tiny group of merchants and professionals could fit the description.

A wartime boom

It was the economic boom after the Second World War that saw the assumption of everybody except the most chronically disadvantaged becoming middle class.

That idea really started to pass in the early 1970s but as a myth it’s continued to hold on, partly due to easy credit that’s allowed workers on declining real incomes to keep up the charade of an ever increasingly prosperous middle class lifestyle.

However that charade is increasingly becoming harder as the Pell survey shows and that is bad news for those retailers, fast food companies and other businesses based on the 1960s consumer model.

All is not lost though, the vast majority of those falling out of the middle classes in 21st Century America – or Australia, the UK, Canada and New Zealand – will still have lives far richer and healthier than those of the middle classes a hundred years ago.

McDonalds and its shifting market

Global fast food giant McDonalds is in a bind as markets, society and production methods move against its business

“No business or brand has a divine right to succeed,” said McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook last May.

As McDonalds’ management desperately try to adapt to a changed marketplace, Bloomberg Business spoke to some of those bearing the greatest risks – the fast food chain’s franchisees.

The expansion of menu items and the shift to more custom produced burgers is creating problems for franchisees and store managers as equipment and procedures designed for simpler times struggles with varying demands.

McDonalds is in a terrible bind as the company faces a society-wide shift in consumption that leaves its business model stranded at the same time that the market is wanting more customised products.

The latter is an aspect that many businesses whose success and profitability is based on mass production are now facing as customised products become easier and cheaper to produce.

While McDonalds isn’t likely to go out of business soon, the broader trends aren’t running in its favour. That’s bad news for both the company and its franchisees.

Japan’s adjustment to a low growth society

Japan’s decades of malinvestment are a lesson for all aging and slowing economies

As the world worries about whether China is the next Japan, the Japanese themselves are getting on with life in a low growth economy.

One of the latest ideas is to convert disused golf courses into solar energy farms as manufacturing giant Kyocera proposes a solution to deal with the nation’s power shortage after the closure of the Fukushima power plants.

Japan’s golf course boom of the 1980s, which they exported around the world, was a classic case of overinvestment driven by easy money and lax lending standards. Something that China has certainly had in spades.

The aging nation isn’t doing a perfect job however with the Washington Post reporting that the country’s over 65s are convicted of more crimes than juveniles and the sad reason is seniors are shoplifting to survive.

One of the major mistakes made by Japanese governments through the 1990s was to pour money into corrupt civil projects to stimulate the economy. That money was largely wasted on bridges to nowhere and bullet trains to tiny towns which did little to add to the nation’s productivity or build a safety net for the aging population.

Japan may well be leading the way for other aging nations, we need to heed their mistakes before our societies follow them.

Internet adoption and wealth

US internet adoption rates tell us much about affluence between different groups

With 85 percent of Americans now online it’s safe to say the internet has reached saturation point in North America.

However not all groups have been as quick to get online and the Pew Internet Survey has a detailed analysis of adoption rates across different demographic segments.

The results aren’t particularly surprising with lower adoption rates reflecting class, race and education differences although older age groups are the fastest growing segment.

Ultimately adoption comes down to affluence with the key chart being the connection rates across income groups.

What the Pew report does illustrate is how critical the internet is to income levels and why it’s important for the disadvantaged to be connected for them to participate in the new economy.

For countries following affluent nations in internet adoption, getting disadvantaged communities connected might be one of the easiest ways they can improve national income, education and well being.

Defining the jobs of the future

Instead of asking what will happen to today’s jobs, we should be preparing the workforce for the economy of the future.

Once again the question of what happens to the jobs of today in the face of technology is raised in a Quartz story by Zake Kanter looking at how driverless cars will lost the US economy millions of jobs over the next decade.

Zake isn’t alone in this, just one study predicts half the US police workforce could be put out of work as autonomous vehicles take to the road.

Worrying about today’s jobs is understandable as it’s clear the news won’t be good for many occupations. However the discussion should be about what roles are going to be needed in the future.

Looking back

Should we go back a hundred years there were a huge number of people, primarily young boys, employed in cleaning roads of horse dung. The equine industries provided work for tens of thousands of workers ranging from skilled blacksmiths and buggy makers through to those unskilled street sweepers.

Most of those people lost their jobs and their careers became redundant as the age of the motor vehicle took over.

Yet those displaced eventually founds jobs – as mechanics, panel beaters, traffic cops and gas station workers – although for many the dislocation was tough.

Automotive transformation

The motor car also stimulated a transformation in society as it made travel easier and wide scale logistics viable. Those changes allowed supermarkets, drive-in theatres and fast food chains to develop, all of which were unthinkable at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.

Industries like fast food and the drive-in theatre were also driven by the demographic and social changes of the mid-Twentieth century as concepts like the teenager and the consumerist society were developed.

Demographics and economy

Those changes to demographics are important as well, the developed economies’ aging populations and shifting income patterns are going to determine the shape of society and the workforce even more so than technology.

For businesses and governments assuming the mid Twentieth Century consumerist economy is the future the next wave of change could be a difficult time. Even more so given that model of growth and employment was allowed to continue far beyond its natural life by the 1980s credit boom.

Credit, and banking, will be one of the challenging fields for the next decade as governments struggle with the consequences of guaranteeing institutions during the Global Financial Crisis along with the disruptions of higher frequency algorithmic trading, Big Data analytics and startups with new payments platforms.

Disruption everywhere

The disruptive effect on the banking industry by new technology will be repeated across sectors with startups and new business models challenging everyone from retailers to window cleaners, it’s not just the automotive industry that’s challenges.

While it’s difficult to predict exactly what the world is going to look like in 2025, it is clear that many industries and occupations will be struggling with a very changed world. The task for managers and business owners is to be aware of unexpected threats and opportunities.

Some of the opportunities are going to lie in studying statistics – essential in a world of big data – and learning the basics of software coding. Design is another area that is going to need many new workers.

For today’s workers, it’s more important than ever to be grabbing the skills required to be employed in the industries of the mid Twenty-First Century.

What will the workforce of the future look like?

How do we imagine the economy, workforce and government of 2055 will look?

Yesterday this site looked at the shortcomings of the Australian government’s Inter Generational Report and criticised it primarily for its failure to imagine how society and the economy would look by 2050.

While no-one has a crystal ball, making projections on how government spending will look in the future without having some basis for the assumptions on revenues and expenditures renders a document like the IGR somewhat useless.

So what might Australia’s economy in 2050 look like? Here’s a quick list of thoughts.

Rethinking retirement

The obvious is most western societies, including Australia’s, are going to be older. This has a number of consequences, particularly with the retirement age.

In 1909 the old age pension was introduced in Australia with eligibility starting at 65 for men and 60 for women. At the time, life expectancy was 55 years for men and 59 for females.

Today age pension age has barely moved with it becoming 67 for those born after 1952. Life expectancy today 91.5 years for men and 93.6 for women, this expected to increase by 2055 to 95.1 and 96.6 respectively.

More importantly, life expectancy at age 60 will move from 16.9/19.3 years today to 21.3/23.1 in 2055.

Quite clearly the superannuation assumptions of being able to get a tax free pot of gold at 60 are doomed, few people will get enough from their lump sum to see themselves through twenty years retirement.

That throws them back on to the state. Given these numbers it’s clear the eligibility age for the old pension is going to have to be increased.

Coupled with a declining birth and participation rates seeing fewer taxpayers contributing to government coffers, the need to reform the pension age is going to become more pressing.

A healthier population

One of the differences between 1909 and today is that we’re far healthier. A fifty something today is generally in better shape than a thirty year old of their grandparents’ time.

Coupling that with the changing nature of work where most workers of a century ago were employed in exacting physical labour, today’s employees are far more likely to be sitting on a computer. This means the working life can be extended.

While the population is going to be healthier, an older population is going to mean more people with chronic conditions and those with serious issues like dementia are going to be an increasing drain on medical services, not to mention increased incidence of cancers and possibly diseases related to sedentary lifestyles.

This means the nature of medical treatment is going to change, a lot more is going to be spent on early identification and intervention of chronic and debilitating conditions.

Changing the workforce

While the workforce is going to get older, it’s also going to become more precarious. This is already clear in the long term trends since the 1980s and with the rise of ‘collaborative economy’ businesses like O-Desk, Mechanical Turk and Airtasker we can see jobs becoming more casualised.

Today’s children will not have a steady career path and governments have to plan for extended periods of unemployment. This too affects the participation rate and the levels of household spending.

A precarious income also means workers are less likely to take on large debt commitments. This trend is already apparent and is the main reason why companies with a 1960s consumer spending model are struggling in the economy of 2015.

Property stagnation

The Australian middle class model that depends upons highly indebted householders paying down mortgages is likely to be unpopular by the middle of the century as people will be reluctant to take out a huge loan to buy a property when their medium term job prospects are uncertain.

This one aspect is where the Australia government projections go badly awry. It’s understandable not to consider this given the political poison of telling the population their assumed property gains aren’t going to happen but it damns the IGR to failure.

A society with lower levels of property ownership means a dramatic shift in the tax mix and government expenditures. Assuming that today’s normal will also be tomorrow’s is very risky.

Changing technologies

The technologies themselves are changing the revenue and expenditure streams for government, just rolling out diverless vehicles might eliminate the need for half the US’s police force while reduced registration fees, taxes and fines will hit state and local government budgets.

Similarly the global nature of digital businesses is going to challenge governments as the locations of where work is done, goods are delivered and profits made becomes less certain. Right now tax officials are struggling with the revenues of multinationals but increasingly smaller companies will present the same problems.

The other changing nature of work is going to be its composition, just as a hundred years ago nearly half the workers in western countries were in agriculture, a number that’s below one in twenty today, we can expect changes in employment sectors as robots and algorithms take over many of today’s jobs.

All of this means a very different society and workforce to today’s. While it’s difficult to envision what it looks like from here, just as the current economy was almost unimaginable in 1975, it’s necessary to give some thoughts on the shifts to make informed policy choices rather than the opportunistic populism displayed by most of today’s political leaders.

So how do you see the economy of 2015 looking? And where are governments going to raise their money from? I’d be interested to hear what you see in the crystal ball.

The Inter-Generational Report – Australia’s flawed roadmap

the Inter-Generational Report is of little use in planning for the challenges and opportunities facing Australia over the next thirty years.

“If you don’t know where you are now, you don’t know where you’re heading” says science presenter Karl Kruszelnicki – aka Dr Karl – in the publicity for the Australian government’s latest Inter-Generational Report.

Doctor Karl is part of a glossy campaign based around the report with the grand title of The Challenge of Change. The problem with the report is that it barely identifies any of the changes, let alone the effects, that might affect the economy over the next forty years.

The aim of the IGR is to identify the long term trends in the Australian economy and provide a basis for policy development. The first was delivered in 2001 and one has been produced roughly every five years since, making this the fourth.

An aging population

Much of the 2015 IGR hangs on the observation that Australia’s population is aging; stating the bleeding obvious that became apparent when the nation’s post World War II baby boom came to an end in 1965.

While the fact Australia’s population is aging despite massive immigration in recent years is undeniable, most of the report is a mish mash of motherhood statements that expose the key contradictions – dare one call it schizophrenia – lying at the heart of Australian politics and society.

The motherhood statements are all quite valid; the nation needs to develop better infrastructure, build a more skilled workforce and develop new industries as the mining boom sputters to a messy end.

Cutting education

Sadly the actions of Australian governments at both state and Federal level are in direct opposition to these laudable aims. The discussion on training and education illustrates the contradictions;

Under the ‘proposed policy’ scenario, Australian Government spending on education and training is projected to decline to 1.0 per cent of GDP by 2054-55. However, these figures do not take into account the significant increase in lending to students through the higher education and vocational education and training loan schemes.

Despite recognising the importance of training the workforce in order to keep the nation competitive the Federal government is actually forecasting to reduce spending on education and worker training.

Given the typical government education spending among developed nations is around 5% of GDP – in Australia total government spending is 5.1% for 2014 – this indicates a lot more cost to be pushed onto states to make up the shortfalls, if it is being made up at all.

A lack of investment

Particularly notable in the report is the scant talk about what industries are going to develop over the next thirty years or where the money for investing into them is going to come from.

The little discussion there is around private sector investment revolves around the superannuation system – the Australian equivalent of the US 401(k) personal pension accounts where workers are compelled to contribute into private schemes.

Total Australian superannuation assets have increased strongly since compulsory superannuation was introduced in 1992. At the end of 2013-14, total superannuation assets were $1.84 trillion, around 116 per cent of GDP. As the superannuation system matures and wages grow, total Australian superannuation assets are expected to continue to increase and make a growing contribution to national savings.

This statement ignores how the pool of superannuation funds is going to decline as baby boomers and Generation X reaches retirement age and starts to draw down its savings.

An even more important aspect missed by the authors are the risks Australian workers are exposed to as the only thing guaranteed by these funds are the rich fees charged by the managers.

During the global financial crisis of 2008 both the returns and asset bases of superannuation funds were hit hard with some funds suspended from trading and withdrawals restricted. The risk of similar event happening in the next forty years and its impact on household savings and business investment is simply ignored.

Ignoring the elephant

The key to understanding the Australian economic miracle of the last 25 years lies in the property market where housing lending has been boosted at the first sign of economy trouble.

As a consequence Australian households have become amongst the most indebted in the world and the bulk of domestic savings are in housing assets. Housing is the cornerstone of the Australian economy and the source of its middle class wealth.

Remarkably in the entire document the words ‘housing’ and ‘property’ only appear twice and three times respectively.

In ignoring the effects of housing on both state and Federal budgets, the bureaucrats have ignored the single most important factor in Australia’s wealth.

Given even in the most favorable projections, baby boomers and Generation Xers will be selling down their property portfolios to fund their retirements during the IGRs forecast periods, it is nothing short of amazing there is little mention of such a critical factor.

A flat line future

An important feature of the IGR is its focus on government spending with a strong ideological bent supporting the Australian political obsession with privatisation and currying favours from the deeply discredited and corrupt global ratings agencies.

This blinkered view of the world makes it hard for the authors to give a balanced analysis of the risks presented to the Australian economy and this weakness is exacerbated by poor analysis.

Each of the reports has featured ‘flat line’ projections for growth, unemployments and trade. For example here are the terms of trade projections from the current report.

Such analysis is effectively useless and, because of each of the reports features such lazy forecasting, the projections in each time period end up being distorted by the circumstances of the day; forecast economic growth for the 2020s across the four report has varied between 1.6 and 2.8% over the reports.

Indeed the latest report is possibly the most optimistic with a 2.8% forecast growth rate which is at odds with the comparatively pessimistic view of 2.3% in the halcyon days of the 2002 report.

Lazy analysis

The IGR’s forecasters justify the flat line analysis by claiming long term trends will be due to underlying changes in the economy which will smooth out business cycles.

It is also important to keep in mind that the long-term projections look through business cycles and assume a smooth growth path through to 2054-55. In reality, it is almost certain that any economy will go through such cycles over a 40 year time period. However, the outlook to 2054-55 will not be driven by these cycles, but by the underlying trends in population, participation and productivity.

While this is to an extent true as short term cycles oscillate around the longer term trends, the forecasters do nothing to identify what will drive growth in the Australian economy for the next thirty years.

The IGR’s greatest failure is in not considered the structure of the economy and the workforce over the next three decades is its greatest flaw. How people are working and where they are working is going to shape the nation and government revenues.

Compounding the report’s failure to at least attempt to forecast the workforce’s changing structure, the authors’ projection of unemployment are almost an insult.

As this blog has pointed out constantly over recent years, the workforce is undergoing fundamental shifts in the face of automation, robotics and intelligent systems. While it may turn out five percent is the average rate of unemployment over the period we can expect major fluctuations in the workforce as industries are dislocated.

In turn those fluctuations are going to affect government revenues and expenditures, not to mention their influences on home prices and the superannuation balances of those facing extended periods of unemployment.

A flawed roadmap

Ultimately the Inter-Generational Report is of little use in helping policy makers and the community plan for the challenges and opportunities facing Australia over the next thirty years.

Like the Australia in the Asian Century report it’s a curiously selective document that fails to consider most of the external factors that are going to shape societies over the upcoming decades.

Just as the Australia in the Asian Century paper is a dated and discredited document a mere three years after its release shows the calibre of advice being given to the nation’s leaders.

While Doctor Karl is exactly right that we can’t know where we’re heading unless we know where we are, this report fails to acknowledge how Australia came to be in its privileged position and what the opportunities are in a radically changing world.

It may well be that The Lucky Country stays lucky to the middle of this century and caps off two hundred years of good fortune. If that does happen though it will not be because of this flawed and shallow report.

The authors of the Intergenerational Report ducked the challenge of change.

Leaving the Jagger generation behind – Coca-Cola’s journey into milk

Coca-Cola’s move into selling milk is part of a far deeper shift in the consumer marketplace.

Coca-Cola are now selling milk as their markets move away from consuming sugary drinks, how much of this is due to the baby boomer era coming to an end?

Following yesterday’s post on McDonalds and the franchising model, it’s worthwhile considering how other businesses are being affected by today’s changing society.

Certainly the fast food industry is one of the most deeply affected as KFC owner Yum Food starts experimenting with a modernised layouts and menus to counter the drift in consumer tastes.

KFC are not alone in struggling with this as McDonalds experiments with own changes in response to the demographic and market shifts.

McDonalds’, KFC’s and most particularly Coca-Cola’s Twentieth Century success is largely due to the post war baby boom, as the children born during and after World War II reached adolescence – the Jagger generation as described by Irish economist David McWilliams – they indulged themselves in their newfound wealth and personal freedoms that were unthinkable for their parents who struggled through two world wars and a depression.

Coca-Cola was the emblem of that freedom and wealth which made up the twentieth century American dram that the world envied, adopted and copied. Today the world still looks to the United States but its a different America they see.

As the Jagger generation retires and sugary drinks are no longer their first priority their kids and grandkids are looking to different beverages; coffee, energy drinks, bottled water and, possibly, milk which are more in line with their lifestyles.

The task of Coca-Cola, and all the other brands that represented post War American affluence, the task now is to adapt to a very different generation and a society with priorities very different to that of the previous century.

How smart hiring paid off for the PayPal mafia

Companies miss out when they won’t hire former business owners as PayPal shows

One of the challenges facing people who’ve started their own businesses is re-entering the broader workforce. Many managers are reluctant to hire previously self employed workers; the PayPal experience shows that attitude could be hurting working

At the Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco yesterday three PayPal alumni, part of Silicon Valley’s infamous ‘PayPal Mafia’, discussed why the company was such a successful incubator of talent.

“The company was composed of a bunch of young folks who were very driven,” said founder of LinkedIn and early PayPal employee, Reed Hoffman. “Once they sold the business to eBay they weren’t the type to retire.”

Along with PayPal’s founders being driven, the company also tended to hire people who had run their own businesses but were finding the going tough in the economy at the time; “Silicon Valley was collapsing under its own weight,” observed PayPal founder and fellow panellist Max Levchin.

“There was a lot of running for safety in the Valley,” Levchin remembers. “We were looking for people who were into risk taking and were excited to take a risk and this would be the last company they worked for because the next one would be their own. As a result we biased the selection towards entrepreneurs.”

Copying that hiring practice today is Stripe where co-founder John Collison told Decoding the New Economy last month that one of the keys to managing a fast growth business is to hire entrepreneurs and former self employed workers.

“They are self starters; they don’t need much supervision,” said Collison in describing how hiring people who’ve run their own businesses makes running a business that has gone from ten to 150 employees in three years.

it’s no coincidence that one of the investors in stripe is Peter Theil who along with Levchin founded PayPal and is probably the best known of the ‘PayPal mafia’.

PayPal and Stripe’s experience show the folly of overlooking workers who’ve run their own businesses; in a world where business is becoming more competitive, having entrepreneurial employees is an asset too good to miss out on.

Times get tougher for journalists and the middle class

Business and sports reporting is increasingly being done by computers, many other middle class jobs are going the same way.

Journalists have had a tough time over the last twenty years and it’s about to get tougher.

Last July The Associated Press announced they will automate most of their business reporting. AP’s Business News Managing Editor, Lou Ferrara explained in a company blog how the service will pull information out of company announcements and format them into standard news reports.

instead of providing 300 stories manually, we can provide up to 4,400 automatically for companies throughout the United States each quarter

This isn’t the first time robots have replaced journalists, three years ago National Public Radio reported how algorighms were replacing sports reporters.

Ferrara admits AP has already automated much of its sports reporting;

Interestingly, we already have been automating a good chunk of AP’s sports agate report for several years. Data comes from STATS, the sports statistics company, and is automated and formatted into our systems for distribution. A majority of our agate is produced this way.

Reporting sports or financial results makes sense for computer programs; the reciting of facts within a flowing narrative is something basic – Manchester United led Arsenal 2-0 at half time, Exxon Mobil stock was up twenty cents in morning trading and the Japanese Yen was down three points at this afternoon’s close don’t take a super computer to write.

Cynics would say rewriting press releases, something many journalists are accused of doing, could be better done by a machine and increasingly this is exactly what happens.

The automation of commodity reporting isn’t just a threat to journeyman journalists though; any job, trade or profession that is based on regurgitating information already stored on a database can be processed the same way.

For lawyers, accountants and armies of form processing public servants the computers are already threatening jobs – like journalists things are about to get much worse in those fields.

It could well be that it’s managers who are the most vulnerable of all; when computers can monitor the workplace and prepare executive reports then there’s little reason for many middle management positions.

This is part of the reason why the middle classes are in trouble and the political forces this unleashes shouldn’t be underestimated.