What do you get when you cross an overeducated population with an absence of high-quality jobs? This is, perhaps, the setup to history’s least funny joke. But the punchline is important, perhaps world-changingly so. We are about to find out what it is.
This year the number of graduate jobs advertised by employers has gone down 33 per cent. AI is to blame, naturally. Robots are doing the grunt work that previously fell to capitalism’s least pitied whipping boys: recent history graduates who dream of accountancy qualifications and an annual holiday in Santorini. As a result we can expect to see a bunch of smart, overeducated youngsters wandering about with nothing to do.
In a way, this is an acceleration of something that was already happening. According to the most recent figures from the Office for National Statistics I can find, in 2017, 31 per cent of graduates were in jobs for which they were overeducated. We will now look back on them as the lucky ones. AI is about to make the problem so much worse.
So back to our non-joke. What do you get when the young population is overeducated and underemployed? I find Peter Turchin’s theory of elite overproduction persuasive. When a society contains too many people who reasonably expect to become elites, and not enough elite roles for them to fill, he argues, instability follows. The would-be elites become resentful. They agitate for change, and they have the wherewithal to bring it about. His theory has been used to explain (at least partially) uprisings from the French Revolution to the Arab Spring.
The pollster James Kanagasooriam made a similar case in The Times last week. In Britain young white-collar (or would-be white-collar) workers are already saddled with student debt, struggling with high house prices and seeing a decline in the graduate premium, he wrote. “Automation may be the final straw before white-collar Britain goes into full political and economic revolt.”
Revolt! Revolution! How terrifying. But how exciting too. Maybe. Who knows, perhaps a better world awaits on the other side. But what if there is no revolution? What if, instead, the next generation just gives up?
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There are already signs this is happening. The number of young people not in education, employment or training is at a ten-year high. In particular, young men, who are falling behind their female peers educationally, are more likely to be out of work.
I keep returning to a panel discussion chaired by Fraser Nelson at the Centre for Policy Studies this year, with Richard Reeves, author of Of Boys and Men, and Nicholas Eberstadt, author of Men Without Work.
Here’s an extract from Nelson’s summary of what was said at the event: “‘They (young men) basically don’t do civil society,’ Eberstadt said. Reeves added: ‘They’re not acting out — they’re checking out.’ Time-use data shows screen addiction: ‘2,100 hours a year watching screens … as if it were a full-time job.’”
They’re not acting out — they’re checking out. Call off the revolution, boys. Instead, a slow slide into apathy. Might young women follow too, as the supply of good jobs dries up, even for the more educated? It seems plausible.
It is a future so bleak as to be almost unimaginable. Our shared cultural vision of the apocalypse often comes in the shape of a cataclysm — a tornado, an asteroid. But what if we instead just sink gently into indifference and isolation? Not with a bang, but with a long, quiet, screen-addled whimper? The idea breaks my heart.
What is to be done? I am distinctly aware I cannot bemoan a slide into apathy and then shrug my shoulders and declare: “I can’t be bothered to work out how to fix this.” So here’s the beginning of an attempt.
The unspoken truth of many graduate jobs is that they are actually rather boring. Trainee lawyers and management consultants often find they are, in practice, little more than highly paid proofreaders. This is often the case even in the creative industries: someone has to organise the bibliography of a book that is being published and fill in the spreadsheet tracking the guest list for the art gallery party.
Of course, AI can also do those things. And so those jobs are disappearing. But what if these companies could instead decide to keep employing young graduates — paying their salaries with the savings they have made through automation — and redeploy them in an imaginative way on tasks that actually create new business, or new ideas?
What if AI could do this donkey work, and those young people could be given something more meaningful to do? They could make more money for their companies. More importantly, they could lead more fulfilling and engaging lives.
This all sounds very utopian, I know, but I’m optimistic. It would require serious thought by employers to work out what it is they want from these bright young minds, and how they can get it. But I’m optimistic. The profit motive is a powerful driver of action. There’s gold in them there hills for companies that get it right. I hope they do. The very future of society might depend on it.