In the future, will every job be a healthcare job?
The US added 38,000 jobs in May, including 46,000 in healthcare. In other words, healthcare added more than 100 percent of the new jobs in the economy. That won't happen every month, but it's a pretty striking statistic.What's going on here?I recently read The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, which basically argues that almost all jobs --including highly skilled ones-- will be wiped out by automation, robots and artificial intelligence. Case in point: truck drivers and taxi drivers, who will be replaced by self-driving vehicles.Job destruction is happening today on a large scale. Manual laborers have been vulnerable for a long time, but professionals are now under threat as well. There's little opportunity in previously safe jobs like bookkeeper and paralegal. I firmly believe that a big driver of Donald Trump's popularity is the alienation felt by many workers --including skilled ones-- whom the economy no longer really needs or won't need soon. It's easy to blame free trade pacts, Chinese, Mexicans, and our feckless political leadership, but technology is actually the root cause.The two big exceptions to job loss are healthcare and education, sectors that have been very slow to match the innovation pace established by the rest of the economy. That's kept costs high and rising. As a result, Americans are getting killed by healthcare and education expenses at a time that incomes are stagnant.Healthcare is always 10-20 years behind the rest of the economy (I'll let someone else speak for education) so we can expect continued robust healthcare hiring for some time.If the jobless future described in The Second Machine Age really comes to pass, society will be in serious trouble. I really don't like the author's idea of addressing joblessness by paying everyone a guaranteed minimum income. Sure people need an income, but they also need purpose in life, which often comes from having something productive to do on the job.As I've been saying for years --for example Welcoming immigrants and robots to fill the nursing shortage and Robots are coming and they plan to treat you like a moron --I do think healthcare will eventually catch up with the rest of the economy and healthcare jobs will go by the wayside. But maybe there will be enough lag time that we will in fact preserve and invent meaningful jobs in healthcare, and that the healthcare field will lead the next wave for the re-humanization of the economy.
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By healthcare business consultant David E. Williams, president of Health Business Group.