“Education, is No Longer the Answer to Rising Inequality”

“Having a higher education won’t help you anymore in your job, writes New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.

Conventional thought holds that technology eliminates jobs for less-skilled workers, but increases demand for more highly educated workers and eventually increases living standards.

But now, highly educated workers are just as likely as are less-educated workers to be displaced. “And pushing for more education may create as many problems as it solves,” Krugman notes.

He points to a recent report from The McKinsey Global Institute that lists a dozen major new technologies that may be “disruptive” for workers and their industries.

“Even a quick scan of the report’s list,” Krugman says, “suggests that some of the victims of disruption will be workers who are currently considered highly skilled, and who invested a lot of time and money in acquiring those skills.”

For instance, watch out for “automation of knowledge work,” he states, where software will do work once done by college graduates, and robots will handle more manufacturing and could also replace some medical professionals.

“Education, then, is no longer the answer to rising inequality, if it ever was (which I doubt).”

We could be facing another industrial revolution, a time when many workers lost their jobs to machines…”

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