McKinsey: Automation may wipe out 1/3 of US workforce by 2030

John Mauldin | Nov 29, 2017

McKinsey: Automation may wipe out 1/3 of America’s workforce by 2030

As I’ve been working on my new book, The Age of Transformation, the chapter on the future of work has been the most challenging one to think and write about; and so I’m always on the lookout for good thinking and new data. Now, McKinsey & Co. has come out with a comprehensive report on the predicted near-future effects of automation on employment.

International in scope, the report, entitled “Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained: Workforce Transitions in a Time of Automation,” takes us a big step closer to understanding the massive impacts of the transformation we are now embarked upon. 

Since the report itself is 160 pages long (but very readable), today’s Outside the Box is a helpful review of the report that appeared this morning on the Axios site. The review’s author, Steve LeVine, has this to say about the scope of the employment challenge:

The transition compares to the U.S. shift from a largely agricultural to an industrial-services economy in the early 1900s forward. But this time, it’s not young people leaving farms, but mid-career workers who need new skills. “There are few precedents in which societies have successfully retrained such large numbers of people,” the report says, and that is the key question: how do you retrain people in their 30s, 40s and 50s for entirely new professions?

Good question! Since the bulk of those displaced will have been doing what McKinsey terms “predictable physical” labor, and since the new jobs that are created will, the report says, “require social and emotional skills, creativity, [and] high-level cognitive capabilities,” there is likely to be severe stress on our existing educational and job-training systems.

McKinsey estimates that up to 30% of the hours worked globally may be automated by 2030, with more workers displaced in advanced than in emerging countries. A third of the US workforce could be seeking new employment. If our middle class is on shaky ground now – and creating seismic social and political pressures – where will be after 12 more years of technological disruption?

Good question. This is all part of a theme that I have been writing about: the fragmentation of society. I am more and more concerned. There is a tremendous amount of frustration in this country now. I don’t see the “tax reform” that seems to be working its way through the peristaltic innards of Congress making the middle class feel any better.