In 1950, half of the world’s population was employed in agriculture. Most societies were agrarian and lived off the land, farming with limited tools. A large proportion of the populations in industrial nations were employed in factories and performing manual labor. A much smaller proportion of the population was employed in professions requiring sophisticated intellectual skills.
By the year 2000, the transition from analog electronic and mechanically-driven devices to digital technology, now called the Third Industrial Revolution, had spawned a myriad of entrepreneurial initiatives that created an unprecedented demand for an intelligent labor force. Many Third World countries joined in this computer revolution and the percentage of the global population employed in agriculture had dropped to 40%. By 2020, it had dropped to about 25%. In America, it was 1.3% of the working population.
To meet the increasing demand for an intelligent workforce, people, especially in the industrialized nations, sought higher education and enrolled in universities. The new technology was serving as an intellectual amplifier, increasing in leaps and bounds, the productivity of those who were educated beyond the others. In Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960–2010, Charles Murray states:
Over the last century, brains became much more valuable in the marketplace. … What was someone with exceptional mathematical ability worth on the job market a hundred years ago if he did not have inter-personal skills or common sense? Not much. … What is a person with the same skill set worth today? If he is a wizard programmer, as people with exceptional mathematical ability tend to be, he is worth six figures to Microsoft or Google. If he is a fine pure mathematician, some quant funds can realistically offer him the prospect of great wealth.
Murray further explained that, not only mathematicians, but corporate managers with higher cognitive abilities and the potential to increase productivity or market share by a few percent, can earn for a company huge multiples of their own salaries, and this “makes brains worth more in the marketplace.”
In the 21st century, the world is becoming increasingly aware of both the vital importance of human capital in a country’s economic future and the huge discrepancies among nations in their ability to harness this vital asset. In the preface to The Human Capital Report 2015, Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, stated:
Talent, not [monetary] capital, will be the key factor linking innovation, competitiveness and growth in the 21st century. More than a third of employers globally reported facing difficulties in finding talent last year and nearly half expected talent shortages to have a negative impact on their business results. Yet the world’s pool of latent talent is enormous. To unlock it, governments, business leaders, educational institutions and individuals must each understand better the global talent value chain.
As the Third World Countries began to educate larger portions of their population, companies in industrial nations began to outsource work to countries like India and China, where an increasingly educated workforce was prepared to work harder and longer at lower cost. This meant that people in industrialized nations now faced competition from abroad, increasing the premium on intelligence.
During the COVID epidemic of 2019–2022, many companies encouraged their employees to work from home. This reduced the cost of maintaining an office and relieved employees from the drudgery of a tedious daily commute, further increasing the benefits of intellectual work over physical work.
People without sufficient education either found relatively lucrative work in the blue collar trades or survival level work in the service industry. Artificial intelligence was gradually overtaking many unskilled jobs as MacDonalds and others began using robotic servers who didn’t require vacation time or job benefits.
With the emergence of ChatGPT, middle-level jobs are now becoming threatened by technology, as the new software generates reports that are, to some extent, indistinguishable from what a journalist might write. However, in the hands of the highly intelligent, software like ChatGPT will merely serve as a tool that will amplify their productivity.
While it’s difficult to predict how all of these changes will play out, it seems that our society will be divided into economic classes wherein those who have the greatest cognitive skills will generate the largest incomes. Blue collar workers with marketable skills, such as plumbers and electricians, will receive substantial incomes, albeit less than most of the intellectual elite, while those without marketable skills will survive at the lowest income levels from public sector employment, the service industries or manual labor.
These are very crude “first order predictions” that are based upon the information we have at this time. However, we are immersed in an unprecedented period of change of global dimensions and no one knows how things will unfold as new creations of the computer technology appear. The best we can do is to nurture our intelligence and the intelligence of our offspring and welcome the future with open arms and fertile brains.
