Why Are Geniuses Destroying Jobs in Uganda? | Center For Global Development

As I rode the Boston Red Line yesterday from the Kendall Square/MIT station I saw the poster above. Amazon is recruiting some of the global top talent, MIT engineers, to create robots. That same day I was talking to a development practitioner who argued the biggest and hardest challenge facing Uganda was creating sufficient jobs for its youth bulge—about three quarters of the population is under 30 and 18-30 year olds make up 64 percent of the unemployed. These two come together because the last time I was in Uganda the airport had switched to an all automated pre-paid parking system. The parking lot booth no longer employed anyone to collect payment. This juxtaposition makes my head explode: Why are the world’s scarcest economic resources devoted to economizing one of the world’s most abundant economic resources? The world’s scarcest economic resources are people with entrepreneurial and technical ability that can transform ideas and technology into scaled profitable production. We kn

As I rode the Boston Red Line yesterday from the Kendall Square/MIT station I saw the poster above. Amazon is recruiting some of the global top talent, MIT engineers, to create robots. That same day I was talking to a development practitioner who argued the biggest and hardest challenge facing Uganda was creating sufficient jobs for its youth bulge—about three quarters of the population is under 30 and 18-30 year olds make up 64 percent of the unemployed. These two come together because the last time I was in Uganda the airport had switched to an all automated pre-paid parking system. The park