There’s lots of talk these days about how technological innovation and globalization are taking our jobs.

Of course, these are not unreasonable concerns. The data suggests a hollowing out of the middle class and the threat of automation feels perhaps more real than over with the recent advancements in AI and robotics.

But here are 3 things to consider and discuss:

1) It doesn’t feel realistic to believe that the jobs which went overseas will ever return en masse – as nice as it may sound to argue that. They went overseas to take advantage of a particular cost structure and those motives haven’t changed.

2) It is not guaranteed that technological innovation will destroy more jobs than it creates. In fact, historically the opposite has often been true. The jobs that were lost by technological innovation were replaced by new / more jobs and greater economic surpluses. For instance, think of agriculture.

3) But could this time be different? If we are indeed entering a new economic period, then it strikes me that 1), above, becomes even further away from the right solution. Some of the proposed solutions include universal basic income and a robot tax (links to interview with Bill Gates).

Tech Toronto recently published a new study called, How Technology Is Changing Toronto Employment. 

They estimate that there are over 400,000 tech jobs in Toronto, out of a total of 2.7 million people employed. That number includes tech people working for non-tech companies, and tech and non-tech people working for tech companies. So tech jobs are thought to represent about 15% of the city’s employment.

Within this 400,000 or so jobs, an estimated 93,000 people are self-employed (23% of tech jobs). And the belief is that there are around 2,500 to 4,100 active “startups.”

Zooming out, it is also one of the fastest growing industries in the city:

To try and put this into perspective, a similar report for New York – published in 2014 – reported 291,000 tech jobs out of 4.27 million people employed. I was a bit surprised by these numbers, but the Toronto report seems to have been modeled after the New York one. So presumably they use similar methodologies.

Of course, there’s the big question of quality over quantity. There’s a certainly a difference, in terms of impact to the economy, between a back office tech job and fast growing startup that will eventually reach the coveted $1 billion valuation number and create thousands of new jobs.

Obviously every city is hoping for the latter.

Earlier this month, The Atlantic published an article called: The Free-Time Paradox in America. The gist of the article was that the wealthy are increasingly starved for time, whereas the exact opposite is happening to the poor.

The article throws out this stat: “In 2015, 22 percent of lower-skilled men [those without a college degree] aged 21 to 30 had not worked at all during the prior twelve months.”

More recently, Larry Summers published the following graph on his blog, along with the prediction that by the middle of the 21st century over a third of men between 25 and 54 will no longer be working in America.

He cites technology and declining marriage rates as two possible explanations. Supposedly unmarried men are more likely to be out of work.

If you’re interested in this topic, Nicholas Eberstadt has a new book called Men Without Work. The focus is on a new class of men who are neither (1) employed nor (2) unemployed and looking for work. Instead they voluntarily electing not to participate in the US labor force. Similar to Ed Glaeser, part of his argument is that the incentives not to work (welfare) are simply too great.

This drop in labor force participation is largely concentrated among those without a college education. The problem seems to be that we are no longer creating enough good paying jobs for the less well educated. So the way I see it is that we have two options: we figure out how to do that (again) or we focus ourselves on education and training.

Richard Florida has written a lot about elevating service and retail jobs to fill this gap. But I have never understand how that works. I think it comes down to figuring out how to better elevate people.