At Davos the choice each day is staggering: in one single hour I could have gone to any one of nine different debates or workshops.
Youth unemployment was a big theme. Europeans, we were told by Kenneth Rogoff, Prof of Economics at Harvard, are still in grave employment difficulties. The situation in Spain for example is critical, with 50% of its young people unemployed; and if they don’t work for the first four or five years of their working life, their long term earning power is far reduced – along with the taxes they should be paying.
The trouble is that as the economies of the world’s nations see productivity rise they also see jobs in decline, just disappearing. So is technological innovation in the 21st century driving jobless growth? Professor Erik Brynjolfsson, Director of the MIT Centre for Digital Business, agreed that this is the great paradox of our era, that while innovation has never been faster, with greater productivity bringing record profits, the number of jobs is in decline. Software
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