When Vanguard Group founder Jack Bogle joined Wellington Management in 1951, brokers phoned the accounting department twice a day to quote the prices of the Wellington Fund’s stocks and bonds. Accountants recorded the data in a leather-bound ledger and used 10-key adding machines to calculate the fund’s net asset value . Jack Bogle occasionally pitched in, double-checking the math with his slide rule.
The accountants scoured those printouts for missing prices and calculation errors. They pulled data from five reports to calculate a fund’s net cash holdings, scratching out the math with mechanical pencils. At 5:30 sharp, they keyed the NAVs of 45 Vanguard funds into a Nasdaq terminal, which beamed them to the Associated Press for distribution.Within a few years, technology eliminated data retrieval and entry.
Accountants now spend their time on “deeper analysis” — developing controls to prevent errors, investigating exceptions and solving new problems that the evolution of the capital markets and asset classes has created. In other words, they’re putting their time to better — more human — use. We could say the same about the other workers whose jobs appear on the visual.A bigger problem than a future without work might be a future without workers. Even as some industries struggle with labor shortages, the percentage of working-age Americans in the labor force has declined. The working population may not be ready to perform the uniquely human tasks that are increasingly driving economic growth.
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Source: CNBC - 🏆 12. / 72 Read more »