A legendary economist says Gen Z will have to ‘work a lot harder’ to survive the AI era

Gary Shilling.

A. Gary Shilling & Co.

Gary Shilling says young people need to grind in the AI era and may be worse off than their parents.
The veteran forecaster said they need to work hard at learning and building skills to get ahead.
Shilling, 88, told BI he has no plans to retire as he believes working is key to longevity.

Young people are “going to have to work a lot harder” than they might think to succeed in the AI era — and many will end up worse off than their parents, a renowned forecaster has warned.

Gary Shilling, known for calling the dot-com and housing bubbles, told Business Insider it’s “probably a genuine concern” that AI will displace some workers and leave them “selling hamburgers on the corner.”

Shilling — who left his job as Merrill Lynch’s first chief economist to start his own economic consulting and investment advisory firm, A. Gary Shilling & Co., in 1978 — said young people need to “adapt to the realities” of the modern world.

“The world does not owe any of us a living,” he said.

Shilling said young people will have to hustle to find learning opportunities and areas where they can “add value” and boost productivity, as that’s what “ultimately counts” in raising living standards.

Their lives are likely to “involve a lot of hard work and limited incomes and purchasing power,” he said, adding that many fear they’ll never be as wealthy as their parents, and “that may be true.”

One hurdle is they “don’t seem all that convinced that they’ve got to really dig in,” Shilling said.

Shilling blamed that mentality for mounting speculation in riskier assets such as meme stocks and crypto, as buyers expect “things are going to come very easily — and it never quite works out that way.”

“When people have that expectation, then they get lazy, they get sloppy,” he added.

Shilling is nearly 90 but has no plans to retire

Shilling, 88, has been running his firm for almost 50 years. He told Business Insider that he has no plans to step down.

“If I retired then what would I do?” he asked, adding that, despite some physical limitations, he still does many things he “probably should have thrown in the towel on years ago.”

He added that working was key to longevity and that he was still an amateur beekeeper and a “do-it-yourselfer.”

Read the original article on Business Insider

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