How Will Your Kids Make Money in The Future?

In ways that don’t exist today

During the late 1800s to the early 1900s five great life changing events happened.

Electricity, automobile, flight, telephone, radio, and TV appeared on the scene together.

Our lives were changed forever. People moved off farms and into cities and the industrial revolution was off and running.

There became new ways of making money that did not exist before those five inventions became commonplace.

But it didn’t happen overnight.

There were some growing pains that went along with these advancements.

Working conditions, wages, labor and taxes all went through a metamorphosis of improvement that took nearly 100 years to accomplish.

Fast Forward to 2022

Internet and cell phones have virtually driven newspapers, books, and magazines to extinction.

Advances in medicine happen daily.

The total knowledge of the entire human race doubles — it doubles — every 13 months.

Where are we today? A large portion of manufacturing has moved offshore. New markets are being opened on every continent.

And that was not possible just a few years ago.

Wages in developing countries are advancing to the point where they can now afford our products and companies are expanding daily into these new markets.

Companies are no longer making things overseas to ship back and sell in the US; they’re making them to sell in the countries where their factories are located.

Look at the advancements of cell phones and computers in recent years. We can now communicate around the world as never before.

You have more computing power in your current cell phone than astronauts had to make 13 trips to the moon. Now that’s scary.

All these ways of making money did not exist just a few short years ago.

Are We Beating a Dead Horse?

Why do we worry so much about how money used to be made and ignore the opportunities to make even more money today?

That makes no sense to me.

Was Medium around a few years ago?

A ten-year-old is making six figures doing toy reviews on YouTube.

Instead of making washing machines in some huge factory, we make something else just as profitable in a smaller physical footprint with fewer people.

We can 3-D print machine parts and even whole houses and buildings.

Physical labor will always be needed but not to the extent that it was 50 years ago. Backhoes have replaced 100 men with shovels.

A single farmer can do more in a field in a day than a farmer used to do in a month.

Automobiles come off the assembly line in seconds — not hours.

Some Final Thoughts

The point is this. There’s no reason to fear the loss of jobs or income from any single industry when it will clearly be replaced by another industry that might not even be discovered yet.

The great thing about this country is that innovation is unstoppable.

Progress will come despite our best efforts to curtail it. It’s a tsunami of prosperity just offshore out of sight.

The best buggy whip maker in the world is no longer around. Not because of their quality or price but because of their need and demand.

If there are still buggy whips they’re probably made in China.

If Henry Ford had asked people in the 1900s what they wanted most they would have probably said, “We want bigger stronger horses!”

Horses used to be indispensable in the field. Today you’d be hard-pressed to find one out outside of an Amish community.

What if Henry had listened? Today your buggy might have heated cupholders.

We’re simply passing through another evolutionary process on our way to the next level.

Your children and grandchildren will be living a lifestyle we can only dream of.

Today’s college freshmen will be asked to solve problems in four years that don’t exist today.

If you could teleport someone to 2022 from 1922 how amazed would they be? Imagine if we could go to 2122 and look around a little bit?

If we could do that there would be one indisputable fact. An entire world of clean air and water and virtually no poverty.

And I’m ready for all those who want to dispute my prognostication. I can’t prove I’m right, but you can’t prove I’m wrong.

Note to parents for your child’s future vocation. Consider either designing robots or repairing them. I suggest the latter will produce more income.

Good luck.