Klaas Bals' Blog

Yes, what you say is true. Actually the agile, creative designer is one of the only groups that will make fabulous livings in the US in the 21st century.

Said differently, the age of the creative, the agile worker is upon us, and the age of the knowledge worker, the worker who processes knowledge without being creative about it is about over in the West.

For example, India produces 350,000 US qualified engineers per year. Approximately 50% of all US engineering work is being done now in India, as fiber optics make it irrelevant whether a person is in the next room or the next country.

$8 per hour is 25 times more than the average wage in India. A person can live a very nice upper middle class life earning $8 per hour. Therefore, companies are being faced with a choice. Either pay an American $50 an hour for engineering work or a qualified Indian $8 per hour. You can imagine where that discussion goes.

The same is true of other knowledge work as well. Much of US legal work can be done by perfectly qualified Indians over the net. It is no longer necessary to pay a new lawyer $100,000 to do grunt work for three to five years before being up for Associate or Partner. With the net providing all precedent electronically, anyone knowledgeable in terms of how to do legal research can do what only US lawyers could do a couple of decades ago.

Paralegals are also taking away much of the work that once required a law degree.

In the area of medicine, most of the diagnostic work that GP's did just a few decades ago can now be done by the educated layman online. Anyone who knows how to use a search engine can put in his or her symptoms and get the same kind of advice that once was the province of the GP.

The AMA has done a pretty good job of saving the medical profession with the prescription pad. As long as only the physician is entrusted with that pad, the public will be forced to pay whatever fees the physician requires.

However, that can only last a limited time as well. People are not going to stand still and have their lives compromised by a group of people who are simply not providing something that they cannot provide for themselves.

Dentistry though, we think will fare much better than other knowledge workers. That's because, along with the diagnosis a certain degree of art is required.

Professions where both art and knowledge are required, will, if anything, make more money in the 21st century than otherwise. that's why your call for agile designers is right on target.

Daniel Pink's book, A Whole New Mind, is worth reading. It addresses this very topic, and does it very well.