We tend to think that better education gets better jobs. While this may be true for comparing individuals, it turns out that better education does not mean a higher standard of living for the society as a whole, as far as the Western society is concerned. Everybody has heard of BPO (business process outsourcing). Only a few years back on my way from India did I hear of LPO (legal process outsourcing). Again because of similar accounting practices in India and Australia, many accounting tasks were outsourced to India. While all this is bodes well for India, the situation cannot continue indefinitely. Pretty soon professionals like lawyers, accountants, programmers and engineers will have to start collective bargaining. That is the conclusion I drew from Paul Krugman's article in the New York Times (March 3, 2011).
Outsourcing is just one side of the story. Computers at one time were thought to replace manual jobs. Now computers are becoming more sophisticated that many of the routine jobs that skilled people do can now be done by computers. An average manager spent more time looking for a document than actually reading it... until recently. With the smart document searching tools, that time searching is reduced. Managers become more productive and hence fewer managers are required. In my own work I spend less time thinking original ideas and more time looking evaluating existing solutions... not the case about ten years back and my productivity is much higher. This is partly because of the huge amount of information that people have put up for free. The solution for the individual is to be creative and to constantly work on improving his/her productivity.
The way I see it the rat race will become even cut throat. Gone are the days when you could do your job and you can skirt office politics. Now you'd have to be naive to think like that.
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