For the past five decades, from after World War II until the turn of the Millennium, the U.S. relied on companies to create jobs and grow the economy. However, the days when job growth outpaced population growth are over. Government data show that during the past year, U.S. population growth outpaced jobs growth by more than 1 million. Several factors have changed the way we view employment, but there are two big variables that deserve attention:
The most obvious one is technology. It's clear that manufacturing jobs are vanishing. More than 4.5 million of them disappeared in the U.S. during the past 20 years alone. And where new manufacturing facilities are being built today, they create far fewer jobs than in the past, because of robotics and automation. That's true in the United States, and it's true abroad. It's not much different for so-called "knowledge workers," whose job involves handling or using information, such as software engineers, physicians, pharmacists, engineers and scientists. Artificial Intelligence systems and Big Data analytics are already replacing many rules-based jobs, such as accountants, lawyers, mid-level managers, and even doctors.
The second factor has to do with demographics. Millennials have entered the workforce, a generation with very different expectations for their work-life balance. Their career choice is not based on finding the right employer to stay with from graduation until retirement. They want to be in control, do their own thing, work at their own pace.
Both trends undermine the traditional approach to tackling issues like unemployment and poverty, because the focus on "creating" or "bringing home" jobs becomes an outdated metric for job creation.
We simply must reboot how we think about work. Yes, the digital economy may have destroyed many jobs that we thought would be around forever, but at the same time, it has created incredible new opportunities. The barriers preventing you to "do your own thing" are coming down - both for start-ups and for those who joined the gig economy, for example by driving an Uber or securing jobs through TaskRabbit. The "burn rate" – the cost of hardware, software, and manpower that killed plenty of start-ups at the turn of the century – has all but vanished. Many in the U.S. now have access to technologies that can power the gig economy - whether it's cloud computing, mobile devices, platforms like and , or services like Uber and Airbnb.
This is not a "first world" thing. Emerging markets are going digital at an amazing speed. Just look at mobile banking, where countries in sub-Saharan Africa account for as many as half of all mobile banking accounts, way ahead of Europe and North America, which make up less than 10%.