As Mark Twain almost said, labour market history, if not repeating itself, has certainly rhymed. This should come as no surprise. As in the mid-19th century, this is a time of huge change in the jobs market. Rarely a day passes without concerns about job prospects in some of the UK’s most iconic industries, from steel to oil and gas to cars. And rarely a week passes without evidence of jobs and industries being fundamentally reshaped by globalisation and technology, be it the digital economy, the sharing economy or even the Second Machine Age. There is no shortage of explanations for these searing developments. They are part cyclical, as the global economy continues to recover from a financial crisis which is likely to be the most costly since the Great Depression. But these changes are also in part structural given tectonic shifts in demography, inequality and technology, to name but three. None of these challenges is of course entirely new either. My own interest in economics was spawned in the early 1980s by just such a challenge. At that time, more than 3 million people were unemployed in the UK, or almost 12% of the working population. In Yorkshire, where I grew up, the unemployment rate peaked at close to 13%, hit by a double whammy of deep recession and a contraction in steel, textiles and coal-mining. Unemployment at that stage was not for me a statistic. Nor was it the bloodless theorising I would go on to study at university.

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