David McWilliams: Many ‘real jobs’ of the past are extinct, replaced with roles nobody could have imagined

It’s not every morning I wake up thinking about Rembrandt’s dad, but the other day, amid much hand-wringing over radical politics, the image of Rembrandt’s father Herman van Rijn appeared.

Born in 1606, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn should have been a miller like his father and his father before him, but he opted to become a painter. No one in Rembrandt’s family had ever been anything but a miller, and Herman agonised over his son’s artistic leanings and worried that his young fella might never get a “real job”.

A “real job” in those days was a job a parent recognised, a job that your father might have done or a job that your mother might have aspired for you to do. But “real jobs” require the economy to be static, absent technological or demographic change. They could be termed legacy jobs. In periods of great economic transformation, some jobs disappear as old industries are surpassed by new ones and developing tastes and habits demand new services.

Holland of the early 17th century was a country, like much of the West today, going through a period of intense technological, social and demographic change. Rembrandt became an artist in the milieu of an emerging Dutch middle class who wanted their portraits painted to reflect their newly acquired status. Following his apprenticeship, he made a decent living in the portrait business, flattering the merchant class who were making money in the first age of globalisation.

The Dutch traded with the world. Rembrandt was fascinated by what was landing on the docks of Amsterdam – exotic flowers, saplings and spices from Indonesia, oriental rugs and Chinese porcelain, tea and coffee, sugar and mahogany furniture. Stories of foreign civilisations, their wealth and wonders lit up the ale houses of Old Amsterdam, while the city’s commercial prowess attracted merchants, exiles, rebels and religious dissidents from all over Europe. Not since Constantinople in its pomp was a city home to so many languages, nationalities and ethnicities. Rembrandt was intrigued by this world yet these interests of Rembrandt’s generation were sometimes seen as whimsical affectations by the more closed, stolid generation that had come before.

But the changes were real.

On the farms, plummeting temperatures from the Little Ice Age, pushed down cereal yields, making it less profitable to farm wheat and grains, pushing local farmers into the cities. The arrival from the New World of a plant called Papas peruanorum, better known as the potato, transformed European agriculture and the European diet.

As more people left the land, Amsterdam filled up and new jobs, such as portrait painting, which barely existed a generation before, replaced many of the old “real jobs”. Is it any wonder that the parents of the likes of Rembrandt were full of angst about the direction their children might be taking in this new, unbalanced world where many of the old certainties were disappearing?

Fathers and mothers of many of today’s Irish adults have no idea what their 20-something children are going to do for a living

It wasn’t clear to anyone what precisely was going to replace the old ways. Maybe “precisely” is critical here, because what is missing in a time of great flux is precision.

I notice the same Rembrandtian angst in some of my friends when they discuss the drift of their adult children. Fathers and mothers of many of today’s Irish adults have no idea what their 20-something kids are going to do for a living. Echoing Rembrandt’s dad, many worry that the types of jobs their children now aspire to are not real jobs. They are also concerned about the lack of application of the younger generation, not unlike Rembrandt’s father, who worried about his son’s curiosity and artistic indulgence of new fads and fashions. But today’s concerned parents must adjust to the fact that the world they largely created or at least voted for – one of globalisation, technological and demographic change – is creating all sorts of economic and societal consequences for their children, some bad, many undoubtedly good.

Consider the way technology has changed real jobs in the past 30 years. In 1999 there were 50,820 telephone operators working in the United States. They are gone. Automation has destroyed machine-tool operators and sheet-metal workers, as well as many more jobs in manufacturing. Think about typists. Gone too. When I was young, secretarial courses for women were a big thing. The travel agent is an exotic species, as too is the video shop attendant. There are too many to mention – jobs that existed a few decades ago and have disappeared.

In their place are positions which no one had ever heard of in 2000. Data scientists, statisticians and data analysts are all new. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US, statistician jobs nearly doubled from 2008 to 2018 and the bureau projects a 31 per cent growth rate for data scientists. Also in the US, the number of software developers has grown by about 360 per cent, from about 500,000 in 1999 to just under 1.8 million in 2022. Or what about the social media manager, content curator or influencer messaging billions of eyes and scrolling fingers every day? Who would have forecast such jobs?

Looking out across the larger economy, we see that the most valuable companies barely registered a few decades ago. Back in 2000, the biggest companies listed on stock markets were banks and oil companies; they’ve been usurped by tech companies, most of which didn’t exist 30 years ago.

It’s also clear that in this transition period, lots of people who have been educated for “real” jobs are not taking them up – and if they do they are finding them unbelievably boring. They are overqualified and often leave, preferring to do something more fulfilling. For instance, in the US only 54 per cent of overqualified graduates are satisfied with their jobs, compared with 72 per cent of those in roles that match their qualifications. In the UK, 25 per cent of overqualified graduates are likely to quit their jobs within the next year . In their parents’ day, there wasn’t really such a thing as being overqualified. With unemployment rampant, any job was a good job. Today this is not the case, and graduates can sense when they are in the right sector or not. Years ago this was not a luxury afforded to most.

But take heart, it has ever been thus. When young Rembrandt set off from Leiden to Amsterdam, no one, especially not his father, had any idea where he would end up. His masterpieces such as The Night Watch were commissioned by a class that didn’t exist a generation before. He was the product of economic and social churn. And today, despite politicians wanting to return to the past, appealing to the seductive notion of nostalgia, the world keeps pushing forward, creating Rembrandts where the parents least expect it.