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October 3, 2024

The New “Old Girls Network” in the American Workplace

One of America’s great success stories has been the gradual opening of opportunities for women in nearly every field, from athletics to higher education. Nowhere has the change been more profound than in the workplace. In 1970, just over 15 percent of all management jobs were held by women. According to McKinsey, that figure has now risen…

August 20, 2024

The Robots Are Going to Take These Jobs. Thank Goodness.

Today, The Verge profiled a new Tesla project aimed at training robots for routine materials movement. The company is hiring workers between 5’7” and 5’11” to move 30-pound packages while wearing sensor arrays and virtual reality goggles. These workers will provide the motion capture data to train Tesla’s Optimus robots, which will eventually begin taking over this…

July 27, 2023

Time to Do Something About the NILFs

The overall employment situation looks great in the United States—so why are so many men not working? The Wall Street Journal reports that work among prime-age Americans—those between 25 and 54 years of age—is at the highest rate in two decades, driven by rising wages and worker shortages. After years of decline in labor force participation, this is certainly welcome…

June 1, 2023

Will Chat Tech Help the Neuro-Divergent Find Their Place in Society?

The lament that digital technologies and social media are contributing to an epidemic of loneliness and conflict is ubiquitous. Whether these technologies caused or exacerbated these challenges is hard to unpack. My view is America’s sociability crisis was already advanced before Facebook, Twitter and other technology companies figured out how to monetize loneliness by providing…

January 24, 2023

“Gig,” Contract, and Nontraditional Workers

A recurring theme of the Workforce Futures Initiative has been how little we know about the evolving needs of workers and businesses or even how the nation’s spatially and numerically vast labor market actually operates. This is especially true when we consider the “gig” or contract worker economy, which has grown dramatically in the past…