Attrition and Career Ladders

At a previous institution, I once had to tell a heartbroken younger colleague that it wasn’t her fault that she was trying to climb a ladder at a place that was downsizing, but she was, and she could expect to be disappointed over and over again. The strategy of cutting by attrition that protected incumbents pushed disproportionate risk onto newbies. Eventually she left, and I couldn’t blame her.

A new piece in Work Shift, by Margaret Moffett, suggests that similar conversations may become more common as AI displaces jobs that used to be the first rungs on career ladders. I hope it’s wrong, but I can see the short-term incentives for managers.

Over the short term, cutting by attrition lowers costs with minimal political blowback. When someone who leaves or retires isn’t replaced, the people who are harmed by it are real, but unknowable; who would have gotten the job that no longer exists? They were never identified, so they can’t really push back. And the macroeconomic effects of pushing disproportionate risk onto the next generation are both larger than any individual employer and beyond the scope of their immediate concern.

If a single employer moves in that direction, the macro effects are negligible. If large numbers of employers do, though, decisions that are rational when considered in a vacuum become cumulatively devastating. Without jobs, how will people buy the goods and services being produced? Henry Ford figured out over a century ago that workers needed to make enough money to buy his cars. We seem to have forgotten that lesson. So far we’ve used expanding consumer credit to paper over the gap, but that only works until it doesn’t.

Perhaps uncharacteristically, higher ed has been on the leading edge of this movement for decades. The shift to a largely adjunct faculty, which happened even as graduate admissions expanded, protected early incumbents at the cost of their former students.

I’m not sure how much of recent entry-level job loss is actually AI-driven and how much is simply using AI as an excuse. Over time, though, I’m guessing the AI excuse will become more true, more often. Aside from the technological and legal issues—copyright infringement, AI feeding ever more on its own slop, etc.—the economic impact on early-career folk strikes me as more urgent than we’re recognizing. And that impact is likely to make its way up the chain over time, magnifying the economic impact with each new wave.

As uncomfortable as I am with the abrupt ubiquity of online gambling and crypto, I can see how young people would get drawn into them. If the entrances to career pathways are largely closed, how else are they going to make what it costs to live a middle-class life in America? With rare exceptions, the gig economy doesn’t pay terribly well, and not everybody wants to be a nurse or a welder. Gambling and crypto are predatory and produce far more losers than winners, but the barriers to entry are low. We can’t say the same about careers. That shouldn’t be true.

Higher ed can prepare students to a point, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t control the economy. As the economy moves progressively away from labor, it’s hard to know just what to prepare students for.

I’d love to be wrong on this. The standard libertarian response would be that we’re at the point at which blacksmiths are being replaced by mechanics. So far, though, I’m only seeing the first half of that sentence come true. And I don’t know how to prepare students for a future without jobs. My erstwhile younger colleague left because she had somewhere to go. In the absence of somewhere to go, I don’t know what to tell the next cohort.