2. Unemployment
UN Ranking: 8
WEF Ranking: 3
Average Score: 5.5
Without jobs, people not only are a drag on their society, but they can’t contribute to its growth and build on the services cycle, which is why tackling unemployment is so important, as it tends to be a snowball effect as it heads in either direction. While fears are that innovation will actually lead to less jobs, as robots and drones take over jobs that could’ve been handled by people, those robots and drones also require labor to build them (unless it’s robots building robots, in which case we’re toast). While a universal income has been posited as a possible solution to tackle unemployment and poverty as more and more robots create “free” taxable wealth, in which case the robots would essentially be working for all of us, it’s more likely that other services will continue to pop up to replace departing ones, in one way or another. A good example is the rapid growth in app development upon the success of a completely separate product, the smartphone. The number of app publishers on Google’s Android platform surged from a few thousand to nearly 400,000 in the span of just 4 years, from 2010 to 2014, creating millions of new jobs during that time.
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