Fortune’s own president, Alan Murray, returns from Davos with an upbeat report on the global economic outlook.
In two decades of attendance, “I can’t recall a time when the meeting ended with attendees as optimistic about the economic outlook as last week,” he says in his recent CEO Daily dispatch.
High on his list: President Trump’s repurposed “America First” to “America First, but not America alone,” helped ease trade concerns, and the president’s new tax bill has added to a spate of reasons why the U.S. is the top spot for foreign investment once again. And the global economic outlook is unusually favorable, with every big economy experiencing some growth. (China and India are leading the way.)
But these points also got my attention, given my current preoccupation with re-tooling the workforce. From his column:
- With unemployment low and inflation dormant, we face the possibility of several years of “high pressure” growth, in which wages and other rewards to workers will rise, after a decade of anemia. The unusual bonuses paid by some companies to workers in the wake of the tax bill are partly an acknowledgement of that trend.
- The rapid advance of technology—and, in particular, the increasing ability to take proliferating pools of digital data and turn them into useful intelligence (AI)—carries the promise of a sea change in business productivity, as well as potential solutions to a host of difficult social problems. U.K. Chancellor Philip Hammond said in Davos that AI could “double the rate of economic growth in advanced economies by 2035.”
- A new generation of global business leaders are rethinking their companies’ obligations to society—a healthy development fueled by rising populism, declining trust, failing governments, and a generation of workers who want to know their employers are doing good in the world.
Murray correctly notes that while there are plenty of problems we still need to tackle, this is a good time to enjoy the progress. (When the boss gives you permission to feel hopeful, do it, I say.)
But it’s also a good time to smell the opportunity.
Big employers and ambitious entrepreneurs will be hunting for gritty, diverse and prepared thinkers to leverage gains in technology to enter new markets while solving big social problems.
Expect a boom in creative credentialing, like this experimental new master’s program in data, economics and development policy, offered by MIT. The initiative is associated with MIT’s Poverty Action Lab, which studies and measures the effectiveness of poverty alleviation programs. Interested students are allowed to take core courses online for free, and if they do well on exams, they can be admitted into the master’s program. Simple. They don’t even need a college degree, just an affinity for learning the subject at hand. More than 8,000 students from 182 countries have enrolled online, many from China and India.
Lessons learned from MIT and others could have a real impact on developing the workforce that employers will clearly need. And it’s safe to say our level of thinking has been insufficient so far, as this piece from The Atlantic makes clear. The tech gig economy of low-paid digital piecework has become the 21st century equivalent of sorting coal or taking in washing, rather than an innovation revolution in the making.
If the Davos elite puts their optimistic thumbs on the scale in favor of meaningful access to creative education opportunities, it would go a long way to fulfilling their promise to make the world a better place ahead of schedule and under budget.