There have been a bunch of things I’ve wanted to post about, but have simply not had the time. I still don’t have the time, but I with a bit of enthusiasm and not much time, I thought I’d mention some good things.
The first is that I listened to this podcast of Dan Pink talking about his new book on Econ Talk. The interviewer almost invariably annoys me with the way in which he labours all the ideological points he wants to make about how ‘economics’ shows that markets are great. I don’t need persuading of many of these points, though it’s all argued with such repetitive vigour that my only instinct is to look for grounds to disagree because I hate that style of discussion where we all smugly congratulate ourselves about how we know and how silly all those people who don’t agree with us are.
But the interviewee can’t be blamed for that, and the interviewee comes up with lots of interesting thoughts on the (now not particularly original) theme that the jobs that will survive the next great wave of globalisation the ‘offshoring’ of services will be those things that use the right side of the brain or rather use both sides of the brain.
Like any self respecting aspirant for the job of writing a bestseller, Pink has got his lines down to acronystic (sorry about that) lists. The forces driving offshoring are
- Abundance;
- Asia; and
- Automation.
And the things us normies in the West ought to be developing if we want to be on the right (economic) side of the tectonic shifts that will take place are to emphasise
- Design;
- story;
- symphony;
- empathy;
- play; and
- meaning.
Anyway, I often find this kind of thing a bit of a bore, but I liked it, so go listen if you want to, and try not to be annoyed by the interviewer. You have to put up with him on all the Econ Talk podcasts which are often very interesting. At least for those of us interested in this stuff.