- Meaningful Work Movement. People want work that matters to them. Even with the recent decline of the stock market, labor markets are very tight and wages are rising. Millennials aren’t instinctively inclined, for good reason, to give over their loyalty to large companies. Attracting and retaining talent will be harder than ever.
- Opting-Out of the Grind. Increasingly, talented people will not be willing to accept pain-at-work-now for promised-gains later. Instead, they will become free agents, working solo or with a small number of collaborators. The advancingly robust free-agent/ gig worker social media infrastructure will make it easier to opt-out.
- Big Tech Accountability.For most of the 21stcentury, the large tech companies of the Silicon Valley have been the cultural darlings of the US economy. That’s over. There is widespread recognition that they don’t really protect our privacy well (see Facebook), that they contribute to growing income inequality (see their pay scales), and that government regulators will be all over them (see Europe).
- Tech Worker Social Engagement.On a closely related note, when tech companies don’t have external pressures they will have demands for socially-productive actions from their own workforce. A workforce that realizes not all forms of revenue and customers are “socially good,” and that CEOs of all size tech companies are terrified of losing their best software developers. Tech workers will organize more to make sure their voices are heard.
- Demands for Work-Life Balance Policies at Work. Fewer workers are actually going into the office, the labor market is tightening, large companies have about maxed out on the idea of dumping more work on fewer middle managers, AND more women than men are graduating from college. Everybody is stressed out. Progressive companies will pay more and more attention to how to enable better work-life balance.
- Economic Populism. US income inequality metrics are ridiculous, even for a capitalist society. University tuition costs are out of control. The middle-class American dream is eroding, with fewer and fewer people believing they will be better off than their parents. Everyone outside of Wall Street believes the economy is rigged in favor of the financiers. Both the political left and the political right will embrace economic populism.
- The Truth Movement. 2019 will be year of the not-fake-news-movement. The limits of our fragmented media echo chambers will be increasingly understood. Trust will matter more. Perhaps we will begin to see, more clearly, that many measures that matter – on climate change, on declining life expectancy for major population segments, on obesity, on social division – are heading in the wrong direction.
- Smart Government. The left always wants more government, and the right always wants less. Both sides are wrong. What we need is better, smarter government. Alas, this probably won’t happen in 2019 at the Federal level (prison reform aside). But it very well could at the state and local levels. Being mayor of a large city might be a better proving ground for a Presidential run than being a Senator.
- Elegant Product Design.Our acceptance of the role of tech in our lives is increasing- how did we ever find any place without our phones? – but our tolerance for clumsy tech – the mapping application that tells us to turn right off the bridge into the lake – is eroding. How many passwords should I really have? We want tech that makes our lives better, not more complicated.
- Collective Citizen Engagement. Our social divisions, at least in America, are at risk of burning down our social fabric. The 2010s might be more like the 1960s than any decade since then. Gratefully, citizen engagement is on the rise – more and more of us are realizing the limits of individual action and the potential power of collective action. Exactly where this goes, I do not know. But it is reason for hope in 2019.
Leave a Reply