Job market

For decades the road to success in the developed world has been straightforward. A university education, increasingly treated as a sort of white-collar trade school, offered people the chance to acquire specialist knowledge which could be used to secure a position lingering at a desk for 40 years. For those of us who grew up watching machines replace men on the assembly line, acquiring a degree was the way to escape this fate. In the digital age, however, the automation of cognitive labor has forced many professionals to confront a threat that once seemed confined to workers on the factory floor.

I recently walked past an old minicab stand which, during our younger student days, sallied my friends back and forth between the city’s nightlife and our more affordable suburban digs. It is gone now; only a dilapidated and cordoned-off shack remains of a once-thriving minicab empire. Like thousands of others across the western world, the business went into terminal decline the moment Uber appeared in our lives. Yet a simple check of the app today shows the price of an Uber is not substantially less than a minicab ride back then. Uber rocketed to celestial heights because it was heavily subsidized by venture capital – driving the value through the floor, bankrupting all physical competitors, before it then jacked up the price to create an instant monopoly.