Category: Chike Aguh

By Chike Aguh

Pillar #1: Creating the Work of the Future

While many academics and economists are optimistic that this new economy will create as many jobs as it destroys and will produce enough decent work for everyone, there is no guarantee.  Like in past economic transitions, new technologies have created jobs that never existed before but they also make it possible for firms to replace humans with machines in ways they never could.  What is different today is the speed of the transition.  In the past, they took decades and now they can be measured in short years and even months.  Government must and can take action to create the conditions to make sure that we have an economy that creates decent and fulfilling jobs for everyone. 

Pillar #2: Investing in the Workers of the Future 

To prepare the workers of the future, we must ensure that they have skills that are just-in-time (skills that are directly tied to current needs of the market) and timeless (those skills that have made humans successful throughout history like leadership, communication and targeted curiosity).  Along with those skills, we need to make sure that they have the social capital and connections to actually get the jobs they need.   According to Matt Youngquist of Career Horizons, over 70% of job postings are filled without a job posting.  This means that it is likely that there are candidates for certain jobs who have the requisite skills who cannot apply for the appropriate job because they do not even know it exists. 

Pillar #3:  Matching Americans Who Need Work With Work that Needs Doing

As of February 2019, there are 7.3 million open jobs according to the US Labor Department.  While there is always some degree of open jobs in the economy, this is a historic number.  While there is much attention paid to the skills gap (workers not having the skills required), there is also not smooth system for matching the work that needs to be done with the people who need work.  Once workers have the skills necessary to do the job, there is no guarantee that they will know it exists, find it and be able to compete for it.  

Pillar #4: Moving from a Social Safety Net to An Economic Trampoline

In the 20^th Century, we created a social safety net of benefit to blunt the hardest edges of capitalism when Americans fell on hard times.  These benefits consist of Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, unemployment benefits, etc.  These benefits are critical and have kept many Americans, over the decades, from falling off an economic cliff.  However, this safety net must be transformed into an economic trampoline: more than simply catching people when they fall out of the job market it must be strong enough to bounce them back into that market at a similar or better position than they were in before. 

Chike Aguh (Chee-Kay Ah-Goo) is a Technology and Human Rights Fellow at the Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and Venture Partner at New Markets Venture Partners. He holds degrees from Tufts University (B.A.), Harvard University (Ed.M; MPA), and University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School (MBA). He is a Fulbright Scholar, former Council of Foreign Relations term member and Presidential Leadership Scholar.

By Chike Aguh

Winning this future of work matters because it fuels the economic inequality and lack of social mobility that defines this age.  The economic inequality of the US currently rivals countries like China and Russia, and that is because the economic gains of our new economy have flowed to an increasingly smaller group of Americans who live in the right places, have the right education and, at times, have had the power to institute policies that protect those gains.  This trend will only accelerate unless a response equal to the size of this challenge is taken.  According to McKinsey and Company, over one-third of jobs overall could be automated by 2030.  The cost of not stepping up here will be grievous and will be visited most heavily upon communities that have already disproportionately suffered: communities of color and residents of our industrial heartland.  

Winning the future of work is critical because that aforementioned inequality and lack of social mobility is also what helps fuel our political divisions.  While we must confront the racism and xenophobia that characterize much of our current political debate, we must also see the historical pattern of economic anxiety making it easier to divide people along lines of difference. Real wages for Americans in the middle of the income distribution are up a mere 3 percent since 1979, and those at the bottom have lost ground.   Additionally, The United States lost some six million manufacturing jobs in the 2000s before recovering slightly in recent years; the remaining twelve million manufacturing jobs today account for less than 10 percent of nonagricultural employment. As Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations has argued: unless we solve this challenge, we will succumb to political sclerosis and civic division that will destroy our ability to be a world power.  

Lastly, winning the future of work is a necessity if we are going to truly have intergenerational justice.  If we do not solve this challenge, we will see massive economic harm visited upon Americans who have borne the brunt of this transition for the last forty years.  However, if our people and our government can step up in the way we have historically, then these new technologies and their equitably shared gains can fuel a new American century greater than the last.  To do right by our children and grandchildren, we must step up.

Chike Aguh (Chee-Kay Ah-Goo) is a Technology and Human Rights Fellow at the Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and Venture Partner at New Markets Venture Partners. He holds degrees from Tufts University (B.A.), Harvard University (Ed.M; MPA), and University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School (MBA). He is a Fulbright Scholar, former Council of Foreign Relations term member and Presidential Leadership Scholar.

By Chike Aguh

The last time America faced an economic transition akin to what we are facing today was at the turn of the 20^th century. During that time, we were moving from a country in which most Americans relied on agriculture to make a living, to one in which families supported themselves with jobs in manufacturing, in industries such as textile and steel. During that time of economic and demographic change (as new immigrants were arriving on our shores), the American government didn’t step back, but rather it stepped up.  And, it did so with actions that matched the magnitude of the problems.  Our government outlawed child labor, instituted the forty-hour workweek and safeguarded the right to organize.  Additionally, our government confronted undue corporate power by breaking up monopolies and regulating the most egregious abuses of capitalism.  Furthermore, it also made two of the most massive investments in workers in human history up to that point: universal American public education and the GI Bill. These actions by our government, supported by the American citizenry in ways large and small, helped us conquer that change and lay the economic foundation of the American century.

As we proceeded into the postwar era, another shift began to take place: one defined by globalization, service delivery, and technology. A new transition had to face trading regimes that did not always prioritize American workers and new technologies that moved at speeds heretofore unseen.  At the same time, Americans were moving from the factory floor to service and content delivery enterprises.  Importantly, that content and those services were not just delivered to people in America, but around the world.  This trend was accelerated exponentially with the advent of the internet and is now being further augmented with the advent of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and autonomous vehicles.  However, unlike in the past, our government has not stepped up during this transition, but rather has stepped back.  Since the dawn of the Reagan era, we have been told that government cannot and should not step in to help us meet this challenge.  And it is average Americans, from black communities in our biggest cities to former industrial centers of our heartland, who have paid the price for this inaction.  We must step up to winning the future of work.

Chike Aguh (Chee-Kay Ah-Goo) is a Technology and Human Rights Fellow at the Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and Venture Partner at New Markets Venture Partners. He holds degrees from Tufts University (B.A.), Harvard University (Ed.M; MPA), and University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School (MBA). He is a Fulbright Scholar, former Council of Foreign Relations term member and Presidential Leadership Scholar.

By Chike Aguh Jr.

When we think about this future of work challenge, it is important that we define it precisely and practically.  For me, it is important to articulate the important but different sides of this challenge.  First, we have the challenge of jobs that may eventually be obviated entirely by technology.  There are many examples but one of the most visible is autonomous vehicles.  According to industry estimates, we will likely have autonomous vehicles on American roads en masse between 2030-2040 with the first disruptions likely happening in commercial trucking and public transportation.  Additionally, according to some estimates, this new technology will add $800-$1T of economic output to the US economy.  It also will obviate the most commonly held profession by an American man: driving a vehicle.  There are almost as many Americans driving a vehicle for a living as there are teachers in American public schools. 

There is a second half of the challenge which is spoken about all too rarely.  It is the challenge of the jobs that will still exist in the coming years but will be so radically changed by technology that the people who do that job now may not have the capacity to do it in the future.  The job that most encapsulates this is that of the loan officer.  Forty years ago, a loan officer’s job was to evaluate each borrower on a number of objective (and implicitly subjective ) criteria like loan need, previous financial history, etc.  Upon reviewing that criteria, that individual would make the decision about whether to approve that loan.  Today, that job is very different.  The decision about whether a loan is approved or not is not made by a human being but more likely by a machine.  Today, the job of the loan officer is much more about bringing potential borrowers in the door and keeping them happy so that they will make additional loans with the same institution in the future.  The question in this instance is: who is preparing those who were able to do the loan officer job before to being able to perform the job now?  Too often, there is not an answer.

Chike Aguh (Chee-Kay Ah-Goo) is a Technology and Human Rights Fellow at the Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and Venture Partner at New Markets Venture Partners. He holds degrees from Tufts University (B.A.), Harvard University (Ed.M; MPA), and University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School (MBA). He is a Fulbright Scholar, former Council of Foreign Relations term member and Presidential Leadership Scholar.