The Market for Doom: Why We Keep Predicting the End of Work

Roger Partridge asks why generation after generation makes the same mistake — predicting technological unemployment — and why warnings about AI destroying work are untenable. The essay traces a lineage of failed doomsayers, develops a theory of static vs. dynamic economic reasoning, and inverts the "dismal science" label: economists who take scarcity and adaptation seriously have been the optimists all along.

The Doomsayer Lineage

Jeremy Rifkin's The End of Work (1995) predicted automation would leave most workers jobless within a generation. "Global unemployment stands at about five per cent" and employment-to-population ratios are at or near record highs across the OECD.

Predecessors: Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1968), the Triple Revolution memorandum to President Johnson (1964), and the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth (1972). Each "was made with confidence, marketed with skill and falsified within a generation."

On present-day AI: "Tech-sector layoffs in the first quarter of 2026 ran 40 per cent ahead" of 2025, with firms attributing acceleration to AI, yet "aggregate employment has not noticed." Daron Acemoglu, the 2024 Nobel laureate, told an interviewer in mid-May 2026 "that the macroeconomic data still shows no material impact on employment from AI."

The Static Mind

Partridge argues receptiveness to doomsday predictions is "cognitive before anything else." Each prediction "takes the world as it is, identifies a class of human activity about to be displaced, and projects forward an economy with that activity removed."

The doom prediction extrapolates the chart forward without them. The actual economy adds the labour and capital that the displacement releases.

The ATM case: ATMs were predicted to eliminate bank tellers. Instead, "Banks opened more branches, each needing people to handle the work the ATM could not." By 2010, the U.S. "employed more bank tellers than it had in 1980."

He invokes Karl Popper's The Poverty of Historicism — "the future cannot be predicted in detail because the knowledge that will shape it has not yet been generated" — and Frédéric Bastiat's distinction between "what is seen and what is not seen."

Doom merchants are described as "usually credentialled and often distinguished in an adjacent field, precise about the displacement and vague about the absorption," benefiting from Daniel Kahneman's availability heuristic.

The Economy in Three Dimensions

Partridge's first law: "Human wants exceed available resources, always, and at every level of material progress." The 1600 peasant wanted shoes; the 2026 citizen wants "broadband, dental care, foreign holidays and a yoga class."

The agricultural revolution (1700–1850) displaced workers "on a scale that dwarfs any subsequent change." The English agricultural workforce fell from a clear majority to about a fifth. Real wages roughly doubled between 1820 and 1900, with new occupations "that had barely existed at the start of the century."

The manufacturing-to-services transition (1950–2000) saw U.S. manufacturing fall from a third of employment to under 15%. Ewan Clague (1935) and Wassily Leontief both predicted displacement would outrun reabsorption; both were wrong. The information transition beginning in 1995 was forecast in The End of Work as the breaking point; instead, U.S. employment rose from 124 million to 158 million by early 2020.

Horses, who could not retrain, are the only species in the record where the doom prediction came true.

The Future Doom Merchants Cannot Frame

Acemoglu's warning is described as "conditional, prospective and policy-shaped," while the work of Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt (2025 Nobel laureates) is "empirical, historical and mechanism-based."

Anticipated human wants include: "better care for the elderly, more attentive teaching for our children, more skilled trades for our houses." The nail bar "now employs tens of thousands of people in work no central planner specified," as did the software engineer and professional gamer.

The new occupations of 2050 are invisible to us for the same reason.

Partridge predicts: "the good barista may earn more than the junior lawyer. The displaced cognitive worker retraining as a physiotherapist 'is not stepping down. She is stepping into work the next generation will pay more for.'"

The real warning: "The fifty-year-old compliance officer at a London bank whose work is absorbed by AI in 2028 has a real problem." This is the worry the doom merchant is "too distracted to notice: not that AI will be different, but that we will."

The adjustment mechanism requires "secure property rights, open markets, the rule of law, the freedom to start a firm and the freedom to leave one." Where those preconditions hold, "the mechanism works, transition after transition." Where suspended — Venezuela, Cuba, planned economies — "the mechanism stops."

The Real Dismal Science

Partridge argues the label "dismal science" stuck to the wrong discipline:

The economists who took scarcity, comparative advantage and dispersed knowledge seriously have been the optimists of the past two centuries.

The doom merchants "are on one side of the ledger," while Schumpeter, Bastiat, Mokyr, Aghion, and Howitt are on the other.

Closing: "Economics is not the dismal science. Humanity is the dismal species." Economists "are the ones reminding us why the dismal is almost always wrong – and what we must defend to make it right."