High-quality service jobs and the advent of a new golden age?

As MIT’s Zeynep Ton has pointed out, the U.S. suffers from a deluge of bad jobs, many in the service sector. While some suggest trying to revive manufacturing as the basis for a solid middle class, automation and other advances make it highly unlikely to be the solution. Instead, let’s think about what it would take to create high-quality frontline jobs and potentially lay the groundwork for a new Golden Age.

Of bubbles and golden ages

When looked at through one lens, things look pretty grim out there. Tariffs are once again on the policy menu, the assumptions of economic order that have been in place since the end of the Second World War have been shaken up and organizations are facing multiple existential threats. But, economist Carlota Perez reminds us, we have been here before. In roughly 60-year cycles, capitalist economies reinvent themselves with a new technological regime that goes through a fairly regular pattern — first an eruption of new possibilities, followed by a bubble, then a crash and then eventually a deployment phase where the new discoveries are in widespread use, investment capital lines up with production capital and we have the potential of achieving a new “golden age.”

We are in the messy middle, where the old regime (think mass production…