ALMOST everyone agreed that the mid-2010s were a terrible time to be a worker. David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, coined the term “bull**** jobs” to describe purposeless work, which he argued was widespread. With the recovery from the global financial crisis of 2007-09 taking time, some 7 per cent of the labour force in the OECD club of rich countries lacked work altogether. Wage growth was weak and income inequality seemed to be rising inexorably.

How things change. In the rich world, workers now face a golden age. As societies age, labour is becoming scarcer and better rewarded, especially manual activity that is hard to replace with technology. Governments are spending big and running economies hot, supporting demands for higher wages, and are likely to continue to do so. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence (AI) is giving workers, particularly less skilled ones, a productivity boost, which could lead to higher wages too. Some of these trends will reinforce the others: where labour is scarce, for instance, the use of advanced tech is more likely to increase pay. The result will be a transformation in how labour markets work.

To understand why, return to the gloom. When it was at its peak in 2015, so was China’s working-age population, then at 998 million people. Western firms could use the threat of relocation, or pressure from Chinese competitors, to force down wages. David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and colleagues estimate that this depressed American pay between 2000 and 2007, with a larger hit for those on lower wages. Populist politicians, not least Donald Trump, took advantage, vowing to end China’s job “theft”.