 We've entered our third and final track of the summit over the course of the last day or so on the credentialing economy, which as you know is focused on innovation and disruption, where we'll explore policy and technology environments that we are currently and will be operating within as educators, employers, state agencies, credential providers, and community organizations. To set the stage for our last panel, I'd like to introduce Dr. Robert Atkinson, who is founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Recognized as the world's top think tank for science and technology policy, they are also a co-sponsor of Connecting Credentials. He's a prolific writer, speaker, and tech titan who is a valued advisor to policymakers and has held many prestigious posts with previous administrations, including President Clinton's commission on workers, communities, and economic change in the new economy. His most recent book, Big is Beautiful, Debunking the Mythology of Small Business, was released in April of this year, and I would also direct you to a series of essays, Work in the Digital Age, Challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Atkinson. Okay, well thank you everybody. It's a pleasure to be here with you, and let me just start by caveatting who I am. So I was named this digital titan or something, I don't know, a tech titan. But I also won an award, like down in a long time ago, there's doers, dreamers, and drivers of information technology, and I can tell you it was not for doing anything or even driving anything, it was for dreaming, so you all do things, I'm highly impressed with that. I can't do things, I just live in Washington and I think about things, so you live in the real world and you actually help real people, so I have enormous amount of respect for that. And the other caveat being, while I've been involved, I see my friend Steve here and others, I've been involved in workforce development peripherally for a long time, but I am not an expert in it. Really what I hope to be an expert in or think I might be is really much more broader about the economy and what's happening to it, and particularly in terms of innovation and its transformation to the economy and what we need to do about it. So keep that as a caveat to what I want to talk about today. So really what I want to talk today about is there's a lot of hype about what's happening to the economy, you know, we're not going to have any truck drivers in a couple of years and we won't even have any lawyers or doctors, we'll all be out of work and it'll be awful. We won't even need you anymore because the training is all going to be done by AI algorithms, so we think we can go home. So ITIF, we're a think tank, if you want to learn more just ITIF.org, if you click on innovation and competitiveness tab you can see all our work on employment and training and education policy there. Do lots of different kinds of books and reports and really a lot of our work is designed to give policymakers, particularly in Washington, but really at the state and local level, actionable ideas for what they can do in these spaces. So what's happening? Well there's this pretty clear, I think, consensus and I think in this case it's true that there are a set of emerging technologies that are going to have some important implications for the U.S. economy, U.S. industries and more importantly for you labor market structure. These are all ones you obviously know about, AI, robotics would be to me the two most important ones, but then a sort of few other ones that are in there in that space, Internet of Things, so this would be things, for example, much of what's happening or beginning to happen in U.S. manufacturing around what's called smart manufacturing, where everything is digitized. I was just in one of the leading smart manufacturing factories in Milan a couple of weeks ago and every worker wears an Apple watch and they get notified in real time when any machine in the factory is slightly out of tolerance in terms of cutting or whatever it might do. Autonomous systems, those would be things like trucks or autonomous vehicles, drones and the like. Blockchain, which is basically in this notion of being able to put information out there in a indisputable form that's encrypted, genetic innovation. So these technologies are all real, they're all happening, but the real question is just how big is this? Are we all going to be out of our job in 20 years and is this going to be like the greatest thing that's ever happened to humankind? Some people think this, this is Klaus Schwab who has written a book on this and I encourage you to not read it. And Schwab is basically, this is like, we've never seen anything like this before, Eric Bernofsen and Andy McIvy, MIT, they talk about the second machine age and this is all frankly, in my view, a lot of hype. There's a good article just a couple of days ago talking about, from a very good AI scholar on why AI seems to be hitting some real serious roadblocks and doesn't appear to be as powerful as people think. So I think we're much more akin to this, this is a little complicated, but essentially, when you really study technology in the US economy or an advanced economy, what you find is that it goes in these big waves. So there are periods where there's a bunch of new technologies that come together, they start getting better, they start getting cheaper, and then they start getting adopted widely across a lot of industries at the same time, they start powering GDP growth, they start transforming occupational and labor markets, and then eventually they peter out. So, I don't know if that has a, it doesn't happen. But if you go to the, if you look at the top of that middle curve, how many of you have an iPhone 10? All right, I don't know why you do, that's my question. So, I guess the reason you do is because your iPhone 5 broke, probably, six broke, yeah, thank you. So my point is, most of the technology that's coming out today, it's like, you don't have to have it, I mean my six is perfectly good, at some point I'll get a 10 when this gets the screen cracked or something like that. But if you remember when you all walked around with these crappy blackberries, or these flip phones, you're like, my god, an iPhone, I have to have it. Or when, if you remember that, when you would go online and your 28 kilobit modem, and how exciting it was when you doubled it to a 52 kilobit modem, but now we all have broadband, and I'm as most of you, I assume, have broadband, and it means probably 20 megs or 30 megs, and you can watch Netflix fine, and your wife or husband can watch it at the same time. Do you really want to get 100 megs? I don't think so. So my point is, I think we're sort of at the top of that S curve, and that's why for the last 10 years or so, I would argue, US productivity growth has been the lowest in history. So if you want to know why wages aren't going up, is all this consternation, why are wages growing going up when unemployment is so low? Wages aren't going up because productivity is going up so slowly. It doesn't matter how tight the labor market is, if a company is not producing more, they can't repay their wage, their workers more. So, but at some point we're going to get onto that other curve. And I would argue that it's probably going to be in five to ten years, and this is going to happen when these technologies are getting good enough, secure and safe enough and cheap enough. I don't know how many people saw the tragic case, read about the tragic case with the Tesla, just actually there's an article in the paper today, the Transformation Safety Board just came out, and the system didn't work, you know, it just, the driver had it on automatic pilot and it didn't work and it was a fatal crash. Eventually these systems will work. But if you, if you are, want to trust your Tesla and go to sleep in the back, or have your kid go to sleep in the back, you're making a serious mistake. Because the technology is not good enough yet. It's also not cheap enough. If you wanted to get a fully autonomous vehicle today, which by the way doesn't really exist unless you're on a test track, you'd pay 50 to $150,000. Okay, but eventually that's gonna, the technology will work, it will get cheaper, people will adopt it. Same thing with robotics, same thing with AI. So something's gonna happen, it's gonna be important, it's gonna largely be good, it's gonna be disruptive, but it's not gonna be this fourth industrial revolution thing. Okay, so there was a question, did people do this? And are we gonna put up the answers? So do you think after this whole thing you just heard about, although you answered before this, are we gonna be worse off about the same, workers gonna be worse or same or better? Worse off, oh my God. I have a lot of work that I have to do here. God. All right, the answer is better off, by the way. So, just to let you know. So why are the most workers gonna be better off? But the simple answer is, if you remember the link between wages and productivity, and there are people who argue that that link is broken, and I'm happy to discuss that later. It's not broken, it's bent. Productivity does still benefit even workers in the bottom, 10%, 20%, 30%, whatever. We're not gonna raise worker wages unless we raise productivity, we're not gonna raise productivity unless we get more technological innovation. The real question is, are how can workers who are negatively impacted by that make successful transitions? And that's what you all do, which is why what you're doing is so important. So I'll talk about that in a moment. But this is largely about, I don't know how many people have despair calendars, but nobody, nobody. Oh my God. All right, here's your task for tonight. Go online and go to despair.com. I have this calendar on my wall. It's fantastic. The one for last month was something along the lines of optimism and praise. The next generation is gonna need it because they've never been told they did anything wrong and they're gonna need as much enthusiasm as possible as they fail. So this is a good, you can't read that, but adaptation. The bad news is robots can do your job. Now the good news is that we're working, we need robot repair technicians. The worst news is we're working on robot repair robots and we do not anticipate any further good news. So there are people who believe this, not just jokes. So let me spend five minutes on why that framing, I would argue, was wrong. First of all, you can find the exact same things people are saying today in the 1960s. In fact, there was an entire book written for Fortune magazine called The Automation Panic, or Automation Hysteria, some of that. Exactly what people are talking about. There were people advocating for a universal basic income in 1960s. There were people saying that automation of the 60s is gonna kill jobs. Anybody here, Twilight Zone fan? So all right, a few. This is a great episode of the Twilight Zone where anybody leave it to Beaver fan. Nobody. All right, so you remember Lumpy's dad? So war, whatever his name was, he's the manager in this factory and the robots come in and they eliminate all the factory jobs. And he's the manager. He's like, this is great. And he walks into work one day and this robot had replaced his job. And this was a very popular notion in the 60s that this technology, what they call cybernetics is so powerful. The human brain is in this machine. How'd that work out? It raised productivity, but it didn't eliminate jobs. In fact, in the 60s, after all this, we had the lowest unemployment rate we've had, perhaps in US history. But you can look, okay, well, maybe something's different now. And there's a lot of people who say, Larry Summers, the famous economist, half the jobs will be eliminated. Even the economist, brain workers, so it's not just that factory workers are gonna lose their jobs, knowledge workers will lose it too. Guarantee, if you do a Google search on just put in automation and jobs, guaranteed the first link will have a site to Osborn and Frey, these Oxford economists whose work now is basically, it's iconic. It's like David Birch in the 70s and 80s said small business creates most jobs, even though small businesses don't create most jobs, everybody still believes they create most jobs. Everybody believes Osborn and Frey now. I won't go into why their study is basically just completely fallacious because what they did is they looked at the Onet things on jobs. If you know the Onet analysis of individual jobs, they just said if your Onet thing is X, then you're gonna lose your job. So my favorite two ones there were fashion models were gonna be automated because of their Onet scores. And I don't think that Versace is gonna put a really $3,000 dress on a robot. So that's number one. Number two is other one was school bus drivers. All right, so maybe school bus drivers will get automated at some point in time. Anybody here with kids, the school kids, would you ever let your kid get on a bus without an adult? Well, you might, because you're like, okay, but I'm talking normal people, you know. It'd be like Lord of the Flies, you'd never ever do it. So there will still be an adult on the bus. Yeah, that's true. Or brain implants in your kid, yeah. So if you look at these, how do you automate firefighters? How do you automate dental lab technology? You're gonna have a robot coming in and cleaning your teeth. So here's an interesting quiz for you. This is US jobs changed from 2010, 2015. Some of them declined, some of them grew. Network and computer system operators, computer operators, economists, taxi drivers, reservation, ticket agent, and shoe leather. Who wants to, who do you, let me just let a poll show of hands, how many people think that it was, you know, I don't know, taxi drivers were the biggest negative impact? No, anybody want to just half add them a guess? What do you think is the biggest negative impact? All right, I can't hear anything, so I'm just gonna assume the, I'll just tell you the answer. The answer was actually shoe leather workers grew the most. Do you have training programs in your state for shoe leather workers? Because it was a big growing occupation. Taxi drivers grew, why was that? Because Uber drivers are listed as taxi drivers. And what Uber and Lyft did is they dramatically increased the demand for paid rides, because it's so much easier and cheaper. Actually, computer operators declined the most. So the point of this is just simply to say, we can't really understand how these all play out initially, or even maybe in projection, because they're so complicated. So, instead, take that 47%, erase it from your mind, and instead put in 20%. The good studies that have done this, that have really been careful, so one was an OECD study that just came out a couple of months ago, basically said about 15% of jobs are gonna be automated. That's a pretty low number. We estimated 20%, McKinsey Global Institute said 25%. So if you're in that ballpark, that's generally a known number. Now, you might think 25% automation is a big number, but think about that over 15 years. That's about 1.1 or 2% compounded productivity growth rate a year. In the 60s, we had 3.5% productivity growth rate a year and 3.5% to 4% unemployment and 35% wage growth. So these just are not big numbers. Having said that, let me back up. Having said that, I believe that we're going to have a faster rate of employment and occupational disruption than we have now. So for the last 20 years, we did a little study on this. The risk of you losing your job in the United States from a layoff or a closure, sorry, a downsizing or a closure is the lowest it's been in 25 years. Just the opposite of what everybody thinks. But that number is gonna go back up as these things happen. So what's gonna happen? First of all, this stuff takes time. This is a study we did where we went back. It's on our website where we looked at every occupation changed by decade from 1850 to the present. And when you do that, you see a couple of things. One you see is man, you don't wanna live in the old days because occupational disruption was massively high, much lower today. But secondly, these things take a long time. This is my favorite. This is an elevator operator. We didn't have any elevators in the 1870 operators because we didn't have any elevators. So we invented steel buildings. We needed elevators. Otis elevator invented the elevator. But they were manual. You had to have an operator. 1923, they invent the self-service elevator. It wasn't until 1990 that they stopped collecting data on elevator operators because there's only like seven of them and they're all in New York City. So this takes a long time. If you were a techno panicker in 1923, you'd go, oh my God, elevator operators, you better retool quickly. Didn't happen. Secondly, what we have to also remember is technology does create jobs. There's gonna be a lot. If you look at the occupational list in the BLS, what you see is a lot of jobs, a lot of occupations that didn't exist 30 years ago. I know you're gonna think I'm really stupid, but I found a book, believe it or not, at a book sale one time and it's the 1923 Directory of Occupational Titles. Fantastic book. It's really fantastic because it's every single occupational title and a little description of what it means. And there's a lot of occupations in there. You're like, what is that? And it turns out there's a massive number of occupations related to making phonographic records like sieve grifters or something. I don't know what it is. And there are lots and lots of occupations making phonographic records. Now, actually with the redo of phone, everybody's now buying LPs again, so maybe those jobs are coming back. But the point being, technology creates all these new jobs that we didn't hear. This is computer occupations. Also the key thing we have to remember here, by the way, is if you're working for an organization and they cut their workers, organizations do two things on average. One is they end up actually raising wages. So the relationship between productivity and wage growth through industries is pretty solid. If you're in an industry that raises productivity faster, you tend to get more money. And secondly, they lower prices. Either you buy more because you're a consumer or you spend more because you're a worker, that creates new jobs. That's why after we've raised productivity 50% over the last 50 years, we don't have 50% fewer jobs. What we have is 50% more income. And we're spending it on all sorts of useful and useless things, so. Okay, now, I think for what you're doing, this is probably the most important point. Not all jobs are gonna be impacted the same. So we did a study on this and a couple of other folks have done a study on this. Basically come up with the exact same conclusion. If you were to correlate the risk of occupational loss, so for example, if you're a cashier, your risk of occupational loss is pretty high from technology. If you're a CEO, the risk is pretty low. So just correlate that with the wage levels and occupational skill levels of jobs. What you find is very high negative correlation, essentially around 0.55 negative correlation for those of your math people. In other words, what this next revolution is going to do, it's going to have a disproportionate impact on lower-skill, lower-wage jobs. When you control for the income and skills, race is not a factor. Gender generally is not a factor, but age is a factor, and age is a factor in a good way, in the sense that if you're young, occupations that have more young people in them are more at risk than occupations with older people. That's really, really good, because older people have a much harder time making adjustments, they've got commitments, they've got, you know, they're stuck in their ways oftentimes, younger people are not. But the key thing is we're going to have fewer low-wage jobs. Now is that a good thing or a bad thing? If I did a poll, most of you probably would be even worse than the first poll. I would argue it's fundamentally in the long run a good thing, because we have, and don't get me wrong, because I'm a fully, full supporter of training and helping people with low skills get more skills, we've written a lot about it, we've advocated for it. But at some point, you run into limitations of that strategy. Not everybody can be a middle and high-wage worker. You have low-wage jobs, and even with training and even with going to sort of high-performance work organization, there's a limit to what you can do. There's only so much you can do to make a cashier job a good job. So the fact that we're gonna get rid of a lot of these jobs, I think is a real opportunity because what it means is that on average, the jobs in the U.S. in 20 years or 15 or 10 years will be better jobs than what we have today. The problem or the challenge is low-skill workers are like old people. Low-skill workers have the hardest time adjusting, just like old people have the hardest time adjusting. So that's why what we've argued for and what you all are doing is you really have to begin to revamp our employment and training system and particularly our dislocated worker system. All right, so let me ask you another question about where we're going without it kind of giving you, oh, we've already got the answers, okay. So do you think the next production revolution, all these technologies are gonna need more skills, the both the same or fewer? And okay, you're right on that one. So that's an easy one. But it's not just more, I think it's different. And my colleague, Manuel Trachtenberg, who's just a wonderful scholar of the stuff in university in Israel, I think it's Technion, he wrote a study recently where he said, quote, the skills employers desire and demand are poorly related to the competencies taught in school. Employers want workers with strong analytical, creative and adaptive capabilities, which are competencies few, secondary and collegiate schools in part. So I'll give you just a quick example of that. We're hiring, we have this position at ITIF, basically a sort of very, very junior-level economic researcher or data grunt. We usually almost invariably hire some BS economist, a bachelor's economist, and we give them a test. And the test is a very simple test. Well, most economists are BS economists. No question about that. But in this case, I'm referring to the bachelor's of science economist. So we have a little test, because we've learned the hard way, because there are no credentials, by the way. Having a bachelor's degree in economics to me is a meaningless thing, it's just a piece of paper that doesn't tell me almost, it does tell me almost nothing. So we have a little test, and one of the tests, very simple tests. You've got to go online to the BLS website, you've got to look at these numbers, and you have to have, and the numbers are annual average change, and then you have to tell me what the rate of productivity growth was from 1997 to 2007. It's a really simple thing you have to understand. You cannot have an average of averages. Most people who have any kind of economics background understand you cannot average averages. You have to get the raw number and then get the, oh, it went up 27%. Out of seven finalists I had, including finalists, four of them from the top 10 ranked colleges in the country. Out of seven, only one of them got that right. Now, what does that tell you? That tells you, number one, that economics departments are not really teaching kids these kind of skills. The kind of skill I need is not all that different than the kind of skill an insurance company needs for an economist, or a bank needs for an economist. So, what does Trachtenberg say? He says there's really three kinds of big skills. There's analytical skills, there's interpersonal skills, and there's emotional and self-competent skills. As far as I know, we don't do anything with three. Maybe two if you're lucky. But even one, most places don't make a serious effort to do that. Argumentation, critical thinking, it might happen, but in my experience, that's not really what most colleges do. The other component of this is workers are gonna need another set of skills. Not everybody, but my colleague and friend, David Moshella, who's with the Leading Edge Forum, and to me, one of the smartest guys in the universe on IT, and he goes out and does basic jobs, he goes out and talks to CIOs from corporate companies in the US and asks them what they're doing. And David says, quote, double deep employees, which are those individuals who know both their job, be it engineering, marketing, accounting, and so on, as well as IT relevant to that job. What David is saying, and other people are saying, that's what employers want today. They don't want somebody who just knows accounting, you have to know all the packages around that, and probably increasingly have to know AI and accounting, or graphic design, and all of that, or even manufacturing. So this is a little study that Brookings did recently, where they did an ONet analysis compared to 2002 to 2016, and what you basically think you gotta understand, or remember is that dark blue are the number of workers in the economy who are now in jobs with high levels of job digitalization. It went from essentially 5% to 23%. Middle levels went from 40 to 48%. So now essentially 70% of jobs in the US economy should have, or say they have, some reasonable component or need for digital skills. So if we're not doing that, I think we're making a, we're not responding to the needs of students or employers. How are student schools doing on that? Not very well, one of my favorite stats is there are more kids in high school in California taking pottery than there are taking computer science. Now a lot of groups that I speak to think that that means that I'm anti-art, and I am. Just kidding, I'm going to pick up my daughter. She's actually at an art magnet school and she's a wonderful artist. What I am saying, though, is you have to be teaching CS skills in high school. You just have to be, and most high schools either don't do it or they do it pretty badly. It's sort of glorified JavaScript. The other one is if you ask today, or an employer, what do you want, what do you think is more valuable to have a student know? Geometry or statistics. I guarantee you it's not geometry. It's statistics. And everybody said, oh, you hate geometry. And I actually, I love geometry. It's my favorite classes, but it's just not as useful as statistics. Only 7.7% of high school students take and pass statistics today. So we've completely made it backwards. Why do we keep teaching geometry? Because we have always taught geometry. So we need to think anew on that. Colleges need to do better. So there's a number of different studies on this. The College Collegiate Learning Assessment study, these NYU economists, Arun and Roska, found that only 45% of students, didn't have any gains over the first two years. So the only thing they learned was how to drink, as far as I can tell. 36% had no gains. So they're in school for four years, they have no gains. Now you can say, well, maybe the test isn't quite good enough, but you ought to have some gains. 38% of college second semester seniors are fully proficient on pros. So I guarantee you, you should go take this test, educational testing, service test, really easy test. Only 38% of college seniors can pass it. I mean, that ought to tell you something. And then 34% of US business leaders think they're not graduating. I'm surprised that number is as low as it is, as high as it is, as low as it is, are not giving the skills that they need. So what do we need to do? First of all, don't panic. We shouldn't slow the rate of growth. And the worst thing we could do, put in place a universal basic income. Because we're not gonna have workers who are out of work. What we need is much more income support while workers are out of work. Unemployment insurance is abysmal in a number of states. We've argued for basically turning the Trade Adjustment Assistance Act into the Trade and Technology Adjustment Assistance Act. But to give workers money in perpetuity, just because you feel like it, is basically a way to keep workers out of the labor market, because they don't have to work. It'd be a terrible idea. So speed the adoption of this, reduce the risk of job loss. So certainly universal health insurance, we need much better UI coverage, as I said. But also better programs. So there's a report that we wrote recently. It's on our homepage. It's called How to Reform Worker Training and Adjustment Policies for the Ear of Technological Change. And one of the things I did in that report is I pretend that I was an unemployed or dislocated worker in the state of Maryland where I live and I said, I'm gonna go online and see what help I can get. So it took me a long time. I knew where to look, by the way, but I pretended I didn't. It took me a long time to sort of find the one stop just through Google searches and things. I found that I found the page where it would say, okay, you can take this test to assess your skills. I took the skills assessment test online, blah blah blah, and the answer came back that I was qualified to do nothing. So I just am praying that my think tank survives. Until I retire, because I don't know what I'd do. I'd have to go back to school and my PhD is not good enough. So then I decided I would go and say, well, pretend that I wanted a computer science course. I put that in. Help me find a computer science course. Spits back three or 4,000 courses in schools. I don't have time to look. I don't want three or four. The point of all that is just how poor these systems are in many, many places. So we are big fans of what Colorado's doing with the Markle Foundation. I see Kale's a sponsor. Kale's done some really great work in, I believe, in New York City around finance jobs and tech. We need to make these systems incredibly easy, like Amazon Prime easy. Was that a here, here? Yes. All right, good. Not a boo. No. All right. And then embrace more fun. I heard really some great examples here, but we need to really keep up on that. Probably the most radical one is the proposal we had of the report we did called the Disrupting Higher Education, I think. What we proposed was really radical, which is, number one, employers should stop demanding BA degrees, not BS degrees, but BA degrees. We no longer require a bachelor's degree for any position at ITIF. No, in reality, if you don't have it, you're probably not going to know enough. But we want to sort of set a model there. We've argued that OPM, the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government, should lead the way and just stop requiring that. You should require that people know enough and have the background and the skills and the capability to do the job. But it's interesting, a number of companies are doing this. IBM now is doing this for most of their CS jobs. They're just taking away that because many people in CS are taking alternative paths to do that. Somebody told me that one of the big public, maybe it was Random House, but I remember one of the big publishing arms was doing this. But we need to really begin to get employers to just abandon that. And then that would open up space for these alternative forms, where, frankly, I think you ought to be able to mix and match and say, I've got what is equivalent to a bachelor's degree in something, whether it's sale or university courses or community college or all a mix of all the like. And with that, I will stop. And I don't know if we have any time for questions or not. So thank you so much. So keeping on the BS theme, there's a book out now called Bullshit Jobs. And it basically is the counterargument that says that the reason we haven't seen the dramatic decline in positions is that we've artificially created a lot of jobs, the inspectors of the inspectors, and things like that. So I'm just curious whether you think how you resolve that critique with the framework that you put forward. Yeah, I don't really buy that. I mean, no rational order. I mean, maybe some government bureaucracies with heavy unions create bullshit jobs because the unions make them do it or something like that. But companies don't create jobs just for the sake of creating jobs. They have every incentive to actually create as few jobs as possible because they want to be as efficient as possible. I think the much bigger problem or a bigger problem is we haven't raised the minimum wage in 20 years. I have a new piece coming out next week in the thing called the Democracy Journal, arguing that progressives are making a fundamental mistake by arguing for the minimum wage on equity grounds, which it is clearly the higher minimum wage is clearly an important equity tool. But they're ceding all the grounds to the conservatives and the anti-minimum wage people by not saying it also, by the way, drives productivity. The evidence is very clear. One of the reasons why we have so many BS jobs, not bachelor's or science jobs, is because we have such a low minimum wage that it's just so easy to throw workers at the problem rather than what you see in Germany, where they don't really have a minimum wage. But by definition, the wage is a lot higher for social, political, and union reasons. In Germany, they actually put engineers on the problem. How do we automate jobs? How do we move to high performance work organizations? So yeah, we do have a lot of jobs like that, but we could get rid of some and automate some if we had a higher minimum wage. There's actually a lot of evidence on that. Restaurants, for example, now are beginning to think more about automations and wage levels have gone up. As an economist, do you ever speculate on what might happen with the massive college endowments and all the real estate that colleges own as we start to move to a place where people can create their own degrees in different ways? I mean, because that's a big pool of money. We could open up shopping malls, maybe, but yeah. So I think the real question is, how I would frame your question is, if you look at many information industries, which is what higher education is, it's an information industry, have been pretty disrupted by technology. So think about travel agents. They went up in that last thing, but you go look at travel agents in 2000 to 2016, and they're down significantly. There's a lot of occupations that could be disrupted or automated or changed by technology. One of them, by the way, is finance. I think in 10, 15 years, we're gonna get a very different finance system in the US, much more streamlined, much more efficient through what's called fintech. You're gonna be able, you want me to give you 20 bucks? I've just given you 20 bucks that easy. And by the way, you were in Greece at the time. So that's what's gonna happen in fintech, and it's gonna really dramatically shift it. That is possible in higher education, and at least it's possible for significantly higher productivity in higher education. I'm thinking, if we do that, I'm not a higher education expert, but here's how I would view the world in that, is that the bottom 20% of schools just go out of business. The demand for seats just goes down, because now I don't need to be in a seat for four years, for four classes a term, I can be there for two classes a term for three years and still get a degree or a credential. So I think the weakest colleges just, they go out of business because nobody wants, just there's not enough bodies to fill them all, so they go out of business. I think the elites still stay in business and do quite well because everybody still will wanna go to Harvard and Princeton. I think it's in that middle tier, a lot of the states, big nicer, not nicer, better state schools, where you just might see some of that disruption. Having said all that, the industries are super good at resisting disruption. Why do we still have so many real estate agents in the US? That's an industry that really should have been disrupted by technology. In fact, if there's a potential, the DOJ case coming up, and that's because they've used the laws and other rules and their monopoly power to just basically disrupt online real estate transactions. Higher ed has real powers here for a lot of different ways and I think largely wanna resist this change. So I think eventually all these changes, eventually you can't resist the changes. They're like the Borg and they just will take over, but you can slow them down and I don't know how long it'll be slowed down. All right, good, thank you so much.