Do you know what a falconer is? What about a chimney-sweep or a daguerreotypist?

As you may have guessed, a falconer was a medieval hunter who used falcons to catch his prey. A chimney-sweep, was someone who inspected and cleaned chimneys, while a daguerreotypist was an early type of photographer. Some of these jobs have completely disappeared over the centuries while others have changed dramatically along with the skills required to perform them.  

If you watch the news you may hear all these gloomy stories about how manufacturing jobs will be lost the coming years as people will be replaced by robots. But someone must design, program and maintain the functionality of these robots, right? Thus, new jobs will be created. Technological advancement may lead to the extinction of certain jobs but will also result to the creation of new ones! Online shopping, for example, may have resulted in fewer jobs for human workers in retail outlets, but it created jobs in the development of websites, shipping and packaging goods. The introduction of ATM’s may have led to less tellers per bank branch but also led to more branches being opened as a result of the lower operating costs, which in turn  maintained the overall number of bank tellers to more or less the same. Technological change doesn’t necessarily destroy jobs; it just shifts them from one sector of the economy to another.