> A study conducted by consulting firm Korn Ferry found that by 2030, there will be a global human talent shortage of more than 85 million people, roughly equivalent to the population of Germany. That talent shortage could slash $8.5 trillion from nations’ expected revenues, affecting highly educated sectors such as financial services and IT as well as manufacturing jobs, which are considered “lower skilled” and require less education.<p>I'm ready to believe that there could be harms associated with this, but it's notable that Fortune doesn't bother actually identifying the real, concrete, human harm caused by an 85-million-person talent shortage.<p>There's a historical model that proposes that the Renaissance directly came out of the Black Death—the decrease in population gave the working class more bargaining power, which led to higher standards of living for the survivors, which created an environment where there was more leisure time to spend creating and consuming arts and philosophy.<p>It doesn't particularly matter to me if this model is strictly accurate to the history, it's a plausible outcome from reduced workforces.<p>We only need to work more if companies need to continue to bring in large amounts of profit. I'll need to see some really persuasive evidence that companies having a smaller bottom line because they have to compete for workers in a shrinking workforce hurts the workers in any meaningful way.
It is getting difficult to navigate all this inconsistency. Robot farmer but 6 day work weeks. Climate change but RTO. AI but labor shortage. Like a Ouija board jumping back and forth; what is it trying to spell?
Presumably those young people forced to work their asses off 6 days/week will be even less inclined to become parents, further compounding the problem. Trying to solve lack of workers due to sub-replacement fertility by squeezing more workhours of people that already can't afford children is like ship captains trying to solve the iceberg problem by speeding through areas known to contain them.
Right, because working an extra day will make up for no one understanding what they are doing, and an increasing number of people not participating in the workforce.
<a href="http://archive.is/HYyrC" rel="nofollow">http://archive.is/HYyrC</a><p>In reality, this is what will happen: 6 days a week and immigration, because the ultimate goal is to benefit the corporations. More workforce supply means lower wages, essentially modern slavery.
The point is, the western world is still in a "stable decline" so as the article said we will see the result of it in a century.<p>The China problem however..thats 2 decades from now..
This neglects to state ... unrestricted immigration can buy us an out, for now, for in theory an maybe ~10 years.<p>So this immigration solution gets us to maybe 2035 or so.<p>And even that is dependent on none of the South American and African countries actually improving. Living conditions in Mexico are rapidly approaching the level where immigration from Mexico will stop outright. Columbia is behind that, but not ridiculously so. Venezuela is an exception, but short of the current government starting a war ... and Brazil won't be providing the immigration numbers we need.<p>Okay ... and then? I won't even reach retirement age until 2045, and I do hope to enjoy retirement for 20-30 years. By the time I kick the bucket, if I calculate right, we'd need ~1.5 times the size of the human population to immigrate to the west.<p>I find this figure problematic. For one thing, that's more humans than the UN predicts will be alive at that time.
There is a whole economy that depends on people working 5 days a week, such as hospitality. Furthermore, as someone who is now 60, I can tell you how disastrous for the health it is when you have to work also during week ends. As you can never really rest, tireness stacks up to the point of burn out. You need these days badly to give your mind a bit of fresh air. I went many times through absolute nightmares when a manager had decided on unattainable datelines, which forced us to skip week ends all together. I would spend weeks before being able to work properly again. Those fat geese sitting on a fat matress of stock options, threatning us to make them richer is beyond indecence.
How about a pause on immigration while we figure out how it is that despite all the advances in productivity and essentially supercomputer chips inside laptops, there is a need for 6 day workweeks?
The notion of labor shortage relies on the assumption that productivity is the same, but there is a opposite offsetting effect that's comparable (stronger? weaker? who knows, but IMHO of a similar magnitude) - structural unemployent caused by increased automation, as the electronics and AI systems become both more capable and cheaper. There are already many jobs which could be done better by machines, but it's simply cheaper to pay peanuts to a person instead - and as soon as the machine becomes cheaper and/or wages grow that the person is 1% more expensive than the machine, that profession will shrink in numbers.<p>It's counterproductive to try to grow a workforce segment that's likely not be needed soon. If there indeed is a labor shortage for some years, the society will handle the increased wage cost (which also imply increased push for automation) much better than it can handle a large segment of angry unemployed people, so while the future is unclear, it's better (at least for the society - the billionaires definitely benefit from cheap desperate potential workforce) to err on the side of doing <i>less</i> to solve this "problem" rather than doing too much.
This clickbait headline suggests 6-day workweek as an alternative when job market is defined by limited supply. It feels like the goal is to scare some people to persuade them supporting pro-immigration policies. What a nonsense.<p>Yes, immigration can solve the demographic problems of some Western countries. However it is not sustainable and it will most likely deprive poor countries from the most talented people. This is colonialism in disguise. And the ticking bomb is global: we will see population peak everywhere already in this century, so what’s going to happen when Nigeria won’t produce more workers for America or Europe?<p>We need to focus on fixing demographic problems instead. Solving gender inequality, building parenting-friendly education system, building better safety net and reforming the work - not just for remote cases, but for the majority that still has to attend their workplace.
Why don't the rich elites invest in LSD's (Labor Saving Devices), ie Automation?
That investment in technology (LSD's) would also help to create gainful employment.<p>Immigration is just a way to keep wages down and drive Asset prices high.
IDK we have record immigration in Canada and a housing shortage. I am not sure the solution is more immigration. We do have a productivity problem though. At some point the working population will find equilibrium when the baby boomer generation dies out.
> But he maintains the only way to solve rich countries’ labor problem is to let in immigrants to work, particularly from countries where population growth is increasing, such as Nigeria or Tanzania, rather than decreasing.<p>Aren't birthrates declining pretty much <i>everywhere</i> (including Nigeria and Tanzania, per the graphs Google pulls up)? It seems foolish to just assume sub-Saharan Africa is going to buck that trend forever, and be a baby-factory needed to make the math on Western corporate growth targets work.<p>I propose we solve this problem by firing Lant Pritchett from whatever fake job he currently holds and have him work a 128 hour workweek doing something actually productive. If that's insufficient, we can do the same to all the other economists.