{"id":2503,"date":"2026-06-29T19:45:30","date_gmt":"2026-06-29T19:45:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=2503"},"modified":"2026-06-29T19:45:30","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T19:45:30","slug":"the-most-reassuring-argument-about-ai-and-jobs-quietly-explains-why-gen-z-cant-get-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=2503","title":{"rendered":"The most reassuring argument about AI and jobs quietly explains why Gen Z can\u2019t get one"},"content":{"rendered":"
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But the best explanation for why AI won\u2019t kill off jobs across the economy comes, perhaps unexpectedly, from a Dutch software company that sells its products to law firms. It also explains why the entry-level market hiring struggle is painfully real.<\/p>\n

Read more Nancy Pelosi brings her legendary congressional knowhow to a new Berkeley institute with $35 million in funding<\/a><\/p>\n

Wolters Kluwer is a 183-year-old Dutch information services company that sells AI-powered software to law firms. In a piece published earlier this month, the company cited two economic concepts: the \u201clump of labor fallacy\u201d and the Jevons Paradox.<\/p>\n

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The \u201clump of labor fallacy\u201d was coined by English economist David Frederick Schloss in 1891, as he noted that many workers and employers believed there was a fixed amount of work to be done in an economy. You can see this everywhere over the past four years, even among the AI kingpins such as Amodei and Altman, as they warned that if AI eliminates a category of tasks, the workers who performed those tasks would simply be displaced with nowhere to go.<\/p>\n

Wolters Kluwer alluded to the fallacy by noting that AI is freeing up attorneys to spend more time on strategy, counseling, and judgment-driven work, but it\u2019s not isn\u2019t resulting in smaller legal teams.<\/p>\n

\u201cLegal teams are increasingly looking for junior professionals who arrive AI-trained and ready to work alongside these tools,\u201d it said. \u201cThey need people who can validate AI output, manage workflows, and apply their expertise to the outputs rather than the inputs.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Jevons Paradox is an even older bit of economic lingo. Coined in 1865 by the English economist William Stanley Jevons, it has been invoked regularly by Apollo Global Management Chief Economist Torsten Slok to argue that AI will create more jobs, not less. Amodei even referenced it himself in May while retreating from his own AI jobpocalypse claims.<\/p>\n

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This paradox applies when a resource becomes cheaper or more efficient to use, total consumption of it tends to rise, not fall. When steam engines became more fuel-efficient in the 19th century, coal consumption didn\u2019t drop \u2014 it multiplied, because cheaper engines proliferated everywhere. <\/p>\n

Applied to legal work, Wolters Kluwer said AI that cuts the cost of research and document review doesn\u2019t reduce demand for legal services, but rather expands the universe of what clients expect law firms to deliver. Efficiency creates appetite, not surplus.<\/p>\n

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\u201cEfficiency gains driven by AI are likely to increase expectations about the work you can produce rather than reduce demand,\u201d the firm argued, calling AI a \u201ctask machine, not a job machine.\u201d <\/p>\n

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Wolters Kluwer added that AI \u201cexcels at completing individual workflows but lacks the judgment required to perform an end-to-end job as a person would,\u201d citing internal research findings that AI produced professional-quality output on individual tasks roughly 50% to 60% of the time across various roles. When tasked with executing a complete project end-to-end, though, the success rate drops to around 2%.<\/p>\n

Read more Target is starting to track employees\u2019 unexcused lateness and absences with a points system\u2014and if they rack up 12, they\u2019re fired<\/a><\/p>\n

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This perfectly fits the pattern of a labor market where the entry-level workers who do one task at a time struggle to get hired, and the rest of the AI jobpocalypse just doesn\u2019t really show up in the data.<\/p>\n

The question the webinar doesn\u2019t ask<\/h2>\n

The entry-level job market is the worst it has been in 37 years. Entry-level positions across professional services have dropped 29% since January 2024. Finance and information services \u2014 the industries that have historically provided the on-ramp for most college graduates \u2014 shed an average of 9,000 jobs per month since 2023, compared to adding 44,000 per month before the pandemic. A Stanford study found workers aged 22 to 25 in highly AI-exposed occupations experienced a 13% drop in employment since 2022. Before walking it back, Amodei warned that AI could eliminate roughly half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years.<\/p>\n

Gen Z is not struggling because of bad attitudes or unrealistic expectations. The first rung of the career ladder is structurally disappearing. And the Wolters Kluwer framework explains why \u2014 although it declines to say so.<\/p>\n

The document frames AI\u2019s impact as a pyramid: AI handles tasks at the base, humans retain judgment at the top. Legal teams are growing, it notes, by hiring professionals who can validate AI outputs and focus on higher-value strategic work. It also describes a profession that has decoupled entry-level hiring from its own growth.<\/p>\n

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Firms don\u2019t need fewer senior lawyers \u2014 they need more of them, better-leveraged, handling more sophisticated work for more demanding clients. While Wolters Kluwer sees demand expanding, it doesn\u2019t look closely at where in the value spectrum that is the case. Compounded across an industry over a decade, it describes a profession that has stopped training its own replacements.<\/p>\n

PwC calls this \u201cseniorization,\u201d based off an analysis of more than 1 billion job postings. The Big 4 firm\u2019s\u00a02026 AI Jobs Barometer found that entry-level roles in highly AI-exposed occupations have become 7x more likely to require skills that have historically appeared later in a worker\u2019s career. These are skills like strategic decision-making, stakeholder management, leadership and judgment.<\/p>\n

This is not a new pattern. It is the oldest pattern in economic history.<\/p>\n

The medieval plow dramatically increased agricultural output across Europe. Peasants didn\u2019t benefit \u2014 the surplus went to build cathedrals. The spinning jenny automated textile production and led to longer hours at lower wages for the workers it was supposed to liberate. The internet created more wealth than any technology in modern history and concentrated it among a small number of platform companies while generating, for most workers, gig roles, delivery routes, and content moderation queues. <\/p>\n

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The question has never been whether technology creates wealth. It is always who captures it, and under what political and institutional conditions productivity becomes broadly distributed.<\/p>\n

Read more 2 more NBA players indicted who \u2018turned professional basketball into a criminal betting operation\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s not just the Jevons Paradox \u2014\u00a0it’s also the lump of labor fallacy. But there’s no God-given right for entry-level work to exist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2502,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[132],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-disruption"],"yoast_head":"\nThe most reassuring argument about AI and jobs quietly explains why Gen Z can\u2019t get one - Cross Country Moving Team<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=2503\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The most reassuring argument about AI and jobs quietly explains why Gen Z can\u2019t get one - Cross Country Moving Team\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"It's not just the Jevons Paradox \u2014\u00a0it's also the lump of labor fallacy. 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