Human capital getting sidelined

For many years, economists and others have gone on about the importance of what they call “human capital.” According to them, the future belongs to countries that boast large numbers of well-educated, tech-savvy men and women rather than those with many easily exploitable natural resources but ignorant inhabitants. This has long made sense. After all, as many pointed out, Switzerland and Singapore are far richer than the Congo or Bolivia and seem likely to remain so. Suitably impressed by such arguments, governments throughout the world created new universities and expanded those that already existed with the stated aim of increasing the human capital at their disposal.

But then some very big flies started landing in the ointment. In almost all relatively rich countries, a considerable number of diploma-holders soon found themselves obliged to settle for jobs they had been led to regard as beneath them. ‘Why should a person with a degree he or she often paid through the nose for be forced to earn a living washing dishes, flipping hamburgers or stacking shelves?’ they plaintively asked. As has happened time and time again, the discrepancy between what seemed to be quite reasonable hopes and a dispiriting reality has bred discontent among the “overeducated and underemployed” which helps explain the unrest that is affecting not just developed countries but also others that are seeking to join them. 

This is not surprising. When they come together, such malcontents – who form what some have taken to calling a lumpen intelligentsia in all Western countries – are dangerous. Over the years, they have supplied extremist movements of left and right that are determined to smash the status quo and everyone who upholds it, with both leaders and cannon fodder; there is no reason to think that this time they will be any more passive than those like them were in the past. They are rebels with plenty of causes but with few attainable objectives.

And now, to make matters even worse, Artificial Intelligence has begun to deprive millions of academically qualified people of their jobs and, if the experts are right, before too long it will do the same to a great many others who are doomed to become surplus to requirements. The hardest-hit already include individuals who specialised in computer programming and the like; it quickly became evident that AI can code far better that all but a tiny minority of gifted individuals and, the way things are going, it is about to shoulder most of these aside.

Does this mean that the many who tell us that from now on people will have to re-educate themselves every five years or so in order to keep pace with technological change by acquiring a new set of skills, have got it wrong? Perhaps it does. The recently installed educational model, in which teachers strive to prepare students for the labour market, whether the current one or its hypothetical successors in the decades to come, and tell them that degrees are beneficial because they add greatly to your earning power, could soon be out of date. Though for many years to come plumbers, electricians and so on will have no difficulty in finding customers for their services, the same cannot be said about many people with degrees in computer science, let alone in fields such as gender studies or post-colonial studies that were established for blatantly political reasons. 

For young people who have yet to decide what to do with their lives, such uncertainty about what the future is likely to bring can only be disheartening. A mere couple of generations ago, their equivalents could confidently look forward to careers spanning up to half a century in which they would be able to climb the ladder step by foreseeable step, but today nobody appears to have the slightest idea about what will await those still in secondary school by the time they get into university, if that is what they want, let alone in the years that follow.

Academia is changing fast: in the United States, college teachers who are not on the tenure track often have to rely on public assistance to make ends meet. So too is journalism which, fairly recently, enjoyed something of a boom, hence the fleeting popularity of “media studies” in universities in many parts of the world, before it then got clobbered by the Internet which took over much of the advertising revenue on which major newspapers and television stations depended, forcing them to try their luck online. Many went under, taking most of their employees with them. A similar fate could be in store for a considerable number of lawyers, financial experts and even doctors if, as some plausibly predict, AI moves further into their domains.

Like everything else, education is in flux. For the last four or five decades, most systems have been oriented towards satisfying the demands of the labour market, with vocational training taking precedence over allegedly old-fashioned beliefs in the value of what for millennia have been called the humanities, but with drastic economic and therefore social changes coming thick and fast, this now looks wrongheaded. Perhaps it would make more sense for schools, universities and other such institutions to concentrate once again on teaching youngsters about the roots of the civilisation their country belongs to and trying to pass on to them what Mathew Arnold memorably described as “the best that has been thought and said” by our forerunners that is preserved in books, as well as taking into account beliefs that flourished for a while before being discarded and, by delving into the history of our species, help them place themselves in the human story so they can understand better what is happening in the world.