Your Livelihood in the Future Survey
 What We Have Learned ... Thus Far

The Sustainable Livelihoods survey shows that people are optimistic about their own careers with 85% stating what they do will be in demand in five years. Contributing to this belief is more than half (56%) say their job or work serves a non-discretionary basic need in their or a nearby community. About the same number (58%) believe they readily barter their skills.
 

Other findings include: 

1. Three in four people state they can work virtually, that is serve an employer or clients and customers located anywhere.

2. A similar number (77%) state their work can be done from home.

 3. One out of five people are concerned their work might be subject to being replaced by technology or being off-shored, but four out of think their work is not vulnerable to these forces.

4. Seven in ten people say what the supplies and materials they need to their work are available locally and affordably.


Arguably the most important lesson we can learn from the Great Economic Let Down is to tattoo into our consciousness  a point made by Economist John Maynard Keynes that we’re not good at predicting the economic future.   “We don't know what the future will bring.” The biographer Robert Skidelsky cited Keynes as saying, “the inherent precariousness of knowledge, that when we estimate the future we're only disguising our ignorance." 


For example, if the economy continues to stagger from rising unemployment and home foreclosures and the cost and availability of energy, food, and water deteriorate, using the criteria we developed for what are sustainable livelihoods in tough times, then while four out of five people believe their current work and training will be in demand five years from now, this is most likely overoptimistic for three out of four people.

Three reasons for this disparity, or gap, is so large may be because of misperceptions about the needs of a less complex, locally-based, lower energy future. For example: 


1. While respondents' work might be considered necessary now, it could well become discretionary in the future. Restaurants at all price levels are experiencing this shift now even while the economy is technically growing. 

2. Work respondents find to be barterable now are less likely to be under changing economic conditions.

3. Supplies and materials respondents are using may be available locally and affordably now but less so in the future.

The upside from these finding is that if people recognize the imperative to begin changing as quickly as possible to more sustainable ways of working and living nearly two-thirds could adapt or morph their work and training to sustain themselves in a more localized, lower-energy, less complex future.

We will be describing this more in our Eco-nomic Wellbeing blog and webinars. including our upcoming course Sustainable Livelihoods: Now, in Transition, and for the Future.  

 

You can still take the survey. It's not too late.