James Manyika

What has happened is that across most countries, we've actually grown jobs despite the recession, I guess the recession in 2001, but also the bigger one in 2008.

We've actually grown jobs.

So there are actually more jobs now than there were at the start of the 21st century.

However, what has happened is that many of those jobs don't pay as well.

So the wage associated with that picture has actually shifted quite a bit.

The other thing about what's happened with work is it's becoming a little bit more brittle in the fact that job certainty has certainly gone down.

There's much more income and wage variability.

So we've created more fragile jobs relatively to what we had at the start of the 21st century.

So you could say for workers,

It's a mixed story, right?

Job growth, yes.

Wage growth, not so much.

Job certainty and job fragility has gone up.

When you look at people as consumers and households, it also paints an interesting story.

And the picture you see there is the fact that

You know, if households and consumers are consuming things like, think about buying cars or white goods products or electronics or basically things that are globally competed and traded, the cost of those has gone down dramatically in the 21st century.

So the 21st century, in that sense at least, globalization has been great because it's delivered these very cheap products and services.

But if you look at other products and services that households and consumers consume, such as education, housing, health care, and in some places, depending on which country or place you're in, transportation, those have actually gone up dramatically, far, far higher and faster than inflation, far higher and faster than wage growth.

In fact, if you are

in the bottom half of the social income scale, those things have come to dominate your income in terms of what you spend money on.