26 August 2025. Work | Cognition

Why fewer people will be in work // The physical nature of problem solving // [J2T#648]

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1: Why fewer people will be in work

Laetitia Vitaud has a post on her Laetitia@Work Substack about why too few people will be working in the future. What I liked about it is that from the off she largely parked both the question of AI and the issue of demographics and the ageing population and instead focussed on issues that are to do with the structure of labour markets.

She focuses on four issues:

• Insufficient childcare and support for working mothers

• Housing crisis trapping workers

• The caregiving time bomb

• Deteriorating health of workers.

She summarises them:

These are four interconnected reasons that have little to do with "personal choices" and everything to do with the collective institutions that we're allowing to weaken and crumble, even as we should be celebrating their anniversaries.

There’s a mixture of American and French data in her piece (probably because US data is still reasonably easy to come by, at least until Trump fires the rest of the National Statistics Bureau for producing data that does not support his Panglossian worldview), and, from memory, because she lives in France.

But these issues seem to me to be common across the rich world. And they fit into something that I have discussed here before: that capital in general, and cities in particular, are finding it hard to reproduce themselves, economically and socially.

(Maquettes by William Kentridge. From The Pull of Gravity exhibition, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 2025. Photo: Andrew Curry, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

So let me just parse her arguments on each of these points, maybe with a diversion or two into her links.

#1. Insufficient childcare and support for working mothers

In the US, working mothers helped to drive the recovery of the economy post-pandemic, but have been leaving the workforce again over the past year. Some of this is down to so-called ‘Return to office’ [RTO] mandates, which are uneven but make it harder for working mothers to work.¹

Vitaud quotes a US economist, Misty Heggenness, who likens it the moment in the Barbie movie where Ken takes control:

“It’s become harder for women, particularly those with caregiving responsibilities, to thrive in this job market... It’s clear that we’re backsliding in the Ken-ergy economy, that the return-to-office chest pounding is having a real ripple effect.”

Of course, one of the reasons for this is that childcare costs have increased, so losing the flexibility of some homeworking creates immediate financial problems, no matter how buoyant the labour market is. Although it seems likely that the result of imposing RTO mandates is that companies become less competitive in the labour market, it will be hard to see that in very noisy business data any time soon.

One of the consequences that is harder to see in the data, both at an individual level and for the economy as a whole, is under-employment: women taking jobs they are over-qualified for because they are closer to home or give them more childcare flex.

The ripple effects extend across entire industries and the entire economy. It also means lower growth. Of course, there are also huge implications for the women themselves—their lifetime earnings will be lower, they will most likely return to jobs that don't pay the salaries they were making when they left.

Of course, focussing on the US may not be helpful: it’s an outlier in terms of childcare and in sectors that are more obsessed with RTO. But it’s also worth noting, as she does, that the issue of hybrid working seems to have been added to the culture wars checklist by the right in other countries as well.

#2. Housing crisis trapping workers

The costs of housing have ballooned, especially in cities, pretty much everywhere in the rich world. And this has consequences for everything else:

Housing scarcity is an invisible hand shaping nearly every aspect of working lives, social structures, and even our most personal decisions about careers and family formation.\

Vitaud’s preferred theory for this is that the growth of services and knowledge work effectively untethered desirable work from locations, so they gravitated to big cities where people wanted to live. This is a good enough theory that you can trace back through the work of John Urry and Scott Lash, and Diane Coyle, over the years, but it’s at least as likely that the cost of housing is high because of [1] deregulation of housing markets and [2] the asset bubble triggered by the billions-worth of quantitative easing that was injected into the world’s richer economies in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The problem this creates goes like this:

For every well-paid person in knowledge work who can theoretically work anywhere, there are approximately five people in service work who usually earn significantly less. These "essential" workers—in hospitality, restaurants, elderly care, childcare, healthcare, and other service sectors—serve knowledge workers, care for their children, clean offices, and prepare meals. Unlike knowledge workers, they cannot work remotely and must live within reasonable distance of where the work is located.

And so people end up either being unable to afford to live near their work, or the move further way and, once again, do work for which they are over-qualified. Or they stay in the city and pay a premium for housing that takes a disproportionate share of their income. Good for landlords, not good for the general economy (or for social equity).

#3. The caregiving time bomb

The French data projects that by 2030 one in four French workers will responsible for caring for an elderly relative. That’s a big number, and it’s quite soon, although I’d want to see a bit more detail on how ‘care’ is defined.

Again, the people who end up doing this work are more likely to be women, because

even in households with supposedly “equal” divisions of labour, the burden of elder care falls disproportionately on them (or at least the “choice” to give up paid work for care work is overwhelmingly theirs to make).

Many of these women are unlikely to return to the labour force. Vitaud says that currently about half of the unpaid carers to older adults are employed, but juggle work with their care of duties. And just looking at this for a moment through a narrow economic lens:

the danger is what happens before the loss [of a parent] —when caregiving responsibilities pull thousands of skilled, experienced people out of the workforce for years at a time. Without collective action, this silent drain of talent will accelerate, weakening our economies and worsening gender inequality.

#4. Deteriorating health of workers

There are two issues here: both the generally poorer health of an ageing workforce, and the increasing prevalence of mental health issues, including depression and anxiety. She also notes that we don’t yet understand the long-term health effects of sedentary screen-dominated work. French and German data suggest high rates of absence through sickness already, with few workplaces designed for older workers.

The averages also conceal important differences:

Averages conceal the truth that health outcomes are tightly bound to education and income. Poorer workers face multiple, compounding health risks that make consistent employment harder to sustain, triggering a vicious cycle: poor health leads to reduced earning power, which in turn worsens health.

Vitaud concludes that these four effects are all consequences of the weakening of collective institutions, which in turn is turning social problems into personal issues:

The real failure lies in cutting back foundational protections without building new ones for our era’s most pressing challenges—elderly care, affordable housing, lifelong professional reinvention, and resilience in the face of climate change. The pattern repeats across all these issues.

And while I agree with the description of what’s happening, and the future-facing issues that are emerging quite quickly, I think we need a bit more systemic analysis here.

The people who have written best about this, in my view, are writers on the left who have focussed on the economics of care and the consequences for ‘social reproduction’—the ability of societies and cities to sustain themselves over time.

This piece is already long, so I’ll be brief, but the pattern of the last 40 years is that whole areas of care have been turned into cash machines by innovative parts of capital with the connivance of government.² In short, capital, and capitalism, always has a tendency towards crisis by undermining the things that are necessary to sustain capitalism. (The more theoretical version of this is explained here by Nancy Fraser.)

But the underlying argument here is that over a period of 50 years—and accelerating since the 2008 crisis—we have seen a process whereby increasing areas of the economy have been turned into places run according to the rules of finance capital. Initially this involved running private sector businesses according to financial rules.

As Rebecca Carson argues in her recent book Immanent Externalities, this now extends into all of the spaces that are essential to our reproduction as human beings. These spaces, which include housing, schools, childcare, eldercare, and health practices, have become new sources of profit. In other words, if we are going to address the issues that Laetitia Vitaud identifies, we don’t just need new institutions. We need innovation in new forms of ownership—social, public, communal, non-profit—that take these institutions back outside of financially-driven management systems.

2: The physical nature of problem solving

I follow the work of Alex Pang, and although he's better known these days for books such as Sleep and Rest, I came across his work first through an essay published in World Futures Review called 'Paper Spaces'. This was written about the relationships between the work done in workshops, the creativity of those involved, and the physical way in which those ideas were expressed:

Ideas are embodied in materials; they become cognitive and physical spaces that literally surround groups; and the process of creating those spaces can promote a sense of group identity and common vision for the future.

The essay was based on around 100 workshops that Pang was involved in at the Institute for the Future, and another boutique futures consultancy:

We are used to thinking of things made of paper as physical objects whose qualities help shape the experience of reading, but it’s useful to pay attention to their spatial and architectural qualities as well. Large visuals aren’t just things: they are spaces that possess some of the qualities of desks or offices.

Even in 2010, when he wrote the piece, the idea of using paper in workshops was regarded by some clients as hopelessly old-fashioned--I'd see briefs inviting suggestions about how digital engagement might improve workshop exchange (usually by making it easier to score things)--and I warmed to 'Paper Spaces because it celebrated the special affordances of paper that tended to get overlooked because paper was a familiar technology:

Paper doesn’t fail unexpectedly. Everyone knows how to write. Just as important, they are excellent social technologies. They serve as a group memory, make it easier for people to collaborate on tasks, and develop a common vision of the future.

And I think it’s interesting to see—now that so much more facilitation is done online—that the digital metaphor that seems to have stuck in applications such as Miro and Mural is essentially a digital version of a paper space.

This is an extended introduction to a post Alex Pang has just published on some research on the way that mathematicians seem to use blackboards as ‘chalk spaces’. His post is an extended riff on the work of the psychologist Shadab Tabatabaeian, whose research question was: why do mathematicians work at blackboards?

(Cartoon by Sidney Harris—one of many he has done about mathematicians and blackboards. Courtesy of CartoonStock.)

On the face of it, mathematics would seem to be so abstract that the work could be done anywhere. But in practice, says Tabatabaeian, it is hugely embodied work. This is from Pang’s account:

“Despite mathematics’ reputation for silent reflection,” Tabatabaeian writes in one article, in reality “its practice is almost always a form of manual labor — scribbling, sketching, erasing, gesturing.” Indeed, as she puts it in another article, when you watch how they work, “mathematical practice appears to be a species of physical labor.”... “Real-world mathematical cognition involves a lot of writing,” Tabatabaeian writes in one article.

Indeed, mathematicians do so much blackboard work that there is even reverence for a particular brand of chalk: Hagoromo's Fulltouch. Pang’s gloss on this is that “mathematicians think with blackboards.”

For her research, Tabatabaeian has clearly spent a lot of time watching mathematicians at work, and one of the advantages of a blackboard is that it is big:

“A blackboard lets you write a lot of stuff, then step back and survey what you’ve written. For mathematicians, the blackboard and surrounding workspace becomes like “an ecosystem, with mathematicians actively constructing their own ‘notational niches’ within which they can reason by inscribing (e.g., sketching, writing, erasing), gesturing (e.g., pointing to connect two inscriptions), and looking (e.g., shifting gaze from one inscription to another).”

In other words, their cognitive activity is also physical activity. And in her latest article Tabatabaeian zooms in on the types of physical activity that are involved, and how these relate to cognition:

Writing, stepping back, looking around, pointing at different places may look at first like “aimless wandering,” but she argues that it’s not. “Movement changes the information that is visually accessible, and this change in visual information can hint at unexpected connections”... And if you watch carefully, you can literally see when mathematicians have found a solution to a problem by how they move.

Pang notes that the four-stage model that we broadly use to think about problem solving is a century old, and derives from Graham Wallas, who came from Sunderland and is largely forgotten these days:

• Preparation-- the conscious work of identifying a problem, sketching it out, assembling evidence, etc;

• Incubation-- a period of subconscious reflection an exploration;

• Illumination-- the "a-ha" moment where suddenly (It feels) we see the answer;

• Verification-- the follow-up work of proving that the insight stands up.

To test the notion that cognition is embodied, Tabatabaeian set up an experiment that was designed to see if mathematicians moved physically in different ways as they crossed from Incubation to Illumination, since that was, in effect, the point where the system becomes unstable.

And it turns out that they do.

"their blackboard interactions (e.g., writing, gesturing) became increasingly unpredictable before an insight, analogous to the critical fluctuations that anticipate transitions in physical and ecological systems... Surprisal [i.e., novel movement, looking at different parts of the board than they had before, gesturing to different things] ramped up gradually in the minutes before the insight, peaked after the moment of insight, and then decreased precipitously.”

There’s a long history of blackboards in knowledge work, it turns out, and Pang discusses it towards the end of his piece. But this research is also an important proof of the importance of embodied knowledge in cognition, and maybe of the value of writing—physical writing—as part of that process of creative discovery.

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UPDATE ON PALESTINE

In a comment on last piece, on the protests associated with the proscription of Palestine Action, David Bent pointed me towards a phenomenal piece by Jeremy Till, who was among those arrested in what is apparently the largest mass arrest in British history. One telling detail is that the charge sheets had been pre-printed.

He reflects on the politics of the proscription, and this is worth quoting at a bit of length:

Two circles of despair currently haunt me and many others: the Palestinian genocide and the collapse of democracy. The proscription of Palestine Action as a ‘terrorist’ organisation brings these two circles together in an almost perfect Venn diagram. A third circle - that of climate breakdown - has obsessed me in recent years, and this too is present in the other two. An appalling ecocide accompanies the genocide, while the collapse of democracy is an intentional act of the carbon state, allowing corporatist power to overwhelm the rights of individuals in the face of the polycrisis. Joining the protest was therefore a simple decision for me, even knowing it would almost certainly lead to arrest.

I also enjoyed—because it underlined the absurdity of the proscription, and the inability of the police to deal with the related civil disobedience—an account of a man arrested at the same protests for wearing a T-shirt saying ‘I Support Plasticine Action’. (He was discharged: the police office even managed to be embarassed about his mistake.)

(Pickering is selling the T-shirts to raise money for medical aid to Palestine, by the way.)

More broadly, I noticed a short but powerful poem in a review of David Constantine’s 2024 book A Bird Called Elaeus, by the poet Sheenagh Pugh. It includes his translations of selected poems from the Greek Anthology—as far as I can tell, the collection that gave us the word ‘anthology’—and also some poems by Constantine in the same style. Here’s one of his own poems in full:

Laws of war

We too had laws of war: don’t poison wells

Don’t fell the olive trees (they take so long to grow)

Don’t bomb the schools, don’t bomb the hospitals …

Stranger seeking our monument, look around you.

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j2t#648

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1. Worth noting briefly here that Return to Office mandates have no effect on productivity—they appear to worsen it—and tend to be pushed through by male bosses in sectors with higher levels of macho management: banking, technology, the US government etc.

2. ‘Innovative’ here is not meant in a good way. As Simon Caulkin wrote recently, “What [Private Equity] does care about is industries or sectors that share certain characteristics. They have guaranteed demand, an assured income stream, and are small in scale – qualities that make them particularly susceptible to PE’s blunt instruments of consolidation or ‘rollup’, leverage and debt financing. So yes, PE loves vet practices, funeral services, human care homes and dental surgeries – with the love felt by killer whales for seals and penguins or crocodiles for small deer or wild pigs.”