# Literate, Yet Jobless

Author: Pramod Prasanth
Published: 2026-08-05
Canonical: https://pramod.ch/essays/literate-yet-jobless
Description: Keralam produced degrees more successfully than it produced people whom high-productivity firms can hire. From a series asking what Keralam 2040 would have to be.

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Drive through almost any small town in Keralam on a Friday evening and the same scene repeats. Outside the tea stall, young men in their twenties and early thirties sit on motorbikes nicer than their employment. Most are graduates. Some have a B.Tech. Some are studying for the Public Service Commission exams. Most are technically employable on paper and not employed in any way that uses what they were taught. The bikes show what a degree was supposed to be worth. The labour market is paying a different price.

Keralam's miracle is half-finished: the human-development achievement is real, the productive economy that should match it is not. Keralam produced literacy and degrees more successfully than it built the firms that know what to do with them.

This essay stays with three pieces of that picture: why degrees became a queue, why educated women are the most under-used cohort, and what a 2040 vocational system would have to look like.

### Degrees as a Queue

By the standard measures, Keralam's labour market does not look like a state with India's best human development indicators. The 2023-24 round of the Periodic Labour Force Survey put Keralam's overall unemployment rate at 7.2% for persons aged fifteen and above, against an all-India figure of 3.2%.[^2] Among persons with secondary-or-above education, Keralam's rate climbs to 12.3%, against an all-India 7.1% on the same measure. The figure that drives the difference is gender. Educated men in Keralam face 7.5% unemployment, modestly above the all-India male figure of 5.9%. Educated women in Keralam face 18.9%, against 10.6% for India, nearly 1.8 times the national rate.[^2] Among young men aged fifteen to twenty-nine with secondary or higher education, the India Employment Report 2024 puts unemployment in 2022 at 31.29% in Keralam against 20.28% all-India.[^14]

The numbers describe what the Friday evening scene shows: degrees translate into a queue.

What sustains the queue is a stack of overlapping incentives. The years of preparation already invested are a sunk cost most aspirants will not write off. A government posting carries wage and benefit terms that small private firms in Keralam cannot match. Marriage prospects are tied to it, sometimes openly, more often through the household calculus that makes a clerk's job a more legible signal of arrival than a private engineer's salary. And every year the queue does not move is one more year in which exiting to migration or to a low-margin private job feels like accepting the original investment was wasted.

*Figure: Unemployment in Keralam climbs steeply above the secondary level and peaks among graduates at 21.3%, against 13.0% nationally. Below secondary level it stays under 2%, which inverts the intuition that more schooling means more work. Usual-status unemployment rate, persons aged 15 and above. Source: MoSPI, Periodic Labour Force Survey 2023-24 (Annual Report).*

The queue itself is institutionally telling. The state Public Service Commission recruits for government clerical and lower-administrative posts, and for many educated young people in Keralam a government job is the goal. A study of the state's educated unemployment puts it bluntly: "The general mindset of an average educational youth is to get a government job." The preference is understandable, because high-productivity private firms in Keralam remain scarce.[^3] It is also a symptom. A state that channels its best-educated citizens toward clerical posts has not built an economy that can absorb them.

### The Under-Used Cohort

The most under-reported part of this story is what happens to Keralam's educated women after they graduate. Keralam's female labour force participation rate, 40.8 per cent, sits below Tamil Nadu's and the national average and only just above Karnataka's, although a larger share of Keralam's women hold a degree than in either neighbour: nearly one in five.[^1][^2] Tertiary completion among Keralam women is high. In the 2024 Plus Two results, girls took about three-quarters of the full A+ grades (29,718 of 39,242). Women dominate enrolment in many Keralam undergraduate programmes.[^4] And the trajectory diverges from the men's: educated Keralam women who do not enter government employment, teaching, or healthcare have limited routes into the broader economy. The result does not appear on any budget line. It is a large, well-educated female workforce that the state is not deploying.

> Keralam's under-used female workforce is not a welfare statistic. It is the deepest talent pool any firm trying to build here can draw on.

*Figure: Keralam's female labour force participation, 40.8%, sits just below the all-India average and below Tamil Nadu, even though a larger share of Keralam's women hold degrees than in either. Vietnam, an industrialising economy, mobilises its women at nearly 69%. High female education has not translated into high female employment. Indian figures: usual-status participation, ages 15+, PLFS 2023-24. Vietnam: World Bank modelled ILO estimate, 2024; the methodologies differ, so the international comparison is directional rather than exact.*

A frequently cited statistic from the 2023 Kerala Migration Survey is the share of degreed emigrants. 71.5% of female Keralam emigrants now hold a degree, against 34.7% of male emigrants.[^5] The figure is sometimes read as straightforward evidence Keralam is exporting its most talented women. Two effects sit inside it. First, Keralam does not run a low-wage female emigration channel like Sri Lanka or the Philippines. The survey does not split emigrants by occupation, but Keralam women, on the whole, do not migrate as domestic workers, and the missing low-wage channel inflates the degree share at the upper end. Second, Keralam's resident female population genuinely outperforms the resident male population in higher-education attainment, so the degreed female pool inside the state is large to begin with. Both effects are operating.

Taken together, the resident and emigrant numbers point in the same direction. The under-use is structural, not a statistical artefact, and the state can measure it.

This is also where 'employability policy' diverges from the usual debates about more colleges and more courses. Care infrastructure (childcare, eldercare, accessible public transport, workplaces designed for women who carry the disproportionate weight of household coordination) is the labour-market enabler in this framing, not the amenity it is usually treated as. Treating it as welfare misclassifies a structural input. Treating it as economic infrastructure aligns the policy lever with what it is doing.[^6]

The sector alignment makes this argument less abstract. The World Economic Forum's 2025 projections expect care-economy jobs to grow significantly over the next five years, while technology roles grow fastest in percentage terms.[^15] Keralam's female educational pipeline, its deep health sector institutional base, and its already-advanced ageing demographic (the highest 60+ population share among Indian states)[^1] describe a precise match that the current employability policy has not engaged with.

### Designing for 2040

The half-finished miracle is clearest in this gap. Educated unemployment in Keralam is not primarily a problem of job scarcity. It is a series of gaps between what graduates know how to do and what employable adults need to be able to do, and a separate gap between what they are calibrated for and what the local economy is calibrated to use.

The first gap is the absence of apprenticeship as a norm. In most Keralam undergraduate programmes, the formative years are spent inside lecture halls. The student finishes a degree without ever having worked on a problem someone else needed solved.

This is true of arts and commerce graduates, and increasingly true of engineering graduates from the lower tier of Keralam's many engineering colleges. The second gap shows up even among those who do gain applied practice (the better engineering interns, the polytechnic graduates with hands-on training, the medical and nursing graduates): the firms in Keralam set up to use that training are few. The educated worker often leaves. The firm set up to use them is in Bengaluru, in Mumbai, or in the Gulf.[^7]

A useful contrast lives in two countries that have not solved everything about young people and work, but have solved more of the deployment problem than India has. In Germany, around half of young people begin a dual apprenticeship at some point (50.7% in 2021). Apprentices spend part of the week in a vocational school and part in a firm that has agreed to train them under chamber-of-commerce-supervised standards.[^8] The firm is building its own future workforce on state co-funding and an industry-co-designed curriculum. Switzerland runs the same kind of system, where around two-thirds of young people go through vocational education and training.[^9]

What I have watched on the floor of Swiss industrial firms is the same intelligence as Keralam's, arranged around a different system. A worker barely out of her teens, two or three years into an apprenticeship at a precision-engineering firm, will set up a complex machining job to spec, check her own tolerances, and tell you why the previous run drifted, all before the shift lead has walked over. She is not the exception there. She is what the system reliably produces. Each time, what stayed with me was the contrast with the Keralam graduate of the same age, often with the greater raw ability, who has read about the process and can write a clean report on it, and has never once been handed the actual part. The trained machinist or chemical technician arrives on the job knowing how to set up a piece of work and finish it. The graduate arrives knowing how to write about it.

Two features of the dual system are doing the work that classroom education on its own cannot do. The first is that the curriculum for the in-company training is written by employers' associations and trade unions with the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training, BIBB, so the firms that will employ the graduates help decide what is taught. The school teaches what the industry needs, not what a syllabus committee in a state capital decided was relevant a decade ago. The second is that the certification mechanism, administered by chambers and recognised across the country, gives an apprenticeship qualification a consistent meaning in the labour market. An employer hiring a graduate of a Swiss federally certified apprenticeship knows precisely what that person can do.

Keralam already has this track. Its Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs), run under the national Craftsman Training Scheme the Government of India started in 1950, and its polytechnics were the parallel vocational route. They lost grounding for traceable reasons. The curriculum is written in New Delhi, by the Directorate General of Training, and the state delivers it. Firms rarely co-owned the pipeline. Outside a dual-training channel that enrolled about 45,000 trainees across India in 2023, against more than 26 lakh ITI seats, they were customers of the output, not partners in its design. Social stigma kept the degree route as the status route, which made the ITI track a fallback rather than a choice.[^10]

> The ITI system was the right idea. What it lacked was a firm co-owning the outcome.

*Figure: Keralam's government ITIs enrol a steady 22,000 or so each year, but recorded placements run far below that and swing from about 7,100 in 2023 to 2,700 in 2024. The Economic Review does not express placements as a share of those trained, so this is a comparison of levels, not a placement rate. Enrolment is government ITIs, academic years 2018-19 to 2023-24; placements are government ITIs by calendar year, as reported by the Industrial Training Department; the 2024 figure was unchanged in the 2025 Review. Source: Kerala Economic Review 2024 (Industrial Training Department).*

*Figure: In Germany employers' associations and trade unions help write the curriculum with the federal VET institute, the firm pays the apprentice while it trains them, and the chamber issues a certificate that means the same thing nationwide. In India the Directorate General of Training in New Delhi writes the ITI curriculum and Keralam's ITIs deliver it, and the firm stays a customer of the output rather than a partner in its design. The missing arrow, the firm into the curriculum, is what the 2040 reform has to add.*

Run the old ITI script with new slogans and you get the same result. The 2040 script has to be different.

The skills environment any 2040 system has to design for is already in motion. The World Economic Forum's 2025 projections put 39% of current skill sets as needing significant change before 2030.[^15] Stanford's empirical data from the United States shows that entry-level employment in high-AI-exposure roles fell 6% between late 2022 and September 2025; software developers aged twenty-two to twenty-five are down nearly 20% from their late-2022 peak.[^16] The pattern is directionally clear even where the magnitude is contested: early-career roles where AI automates the work are being compressed fastest, while care roles and experienced technical roles hold or grow.

Physical AI is moving into manufacturing lines, hospital diagnostics, marine systems, and agricultural processing fast enough that the basic competence a Keralam apprenticeship has to teach is no longer craft skill in isolation. It is AI-enabled problem-solving in the loop with physical AI: operating, troubleshooting, adapting, redesigning. Keralam has the foundation for this. The literacy and numeracy that the half-finished miracle built sit well for it. What is missing is the apprenticeship system that turns that foundation into the new core competence.

For Keralam's apprenticeship design, this changes one thing in the German template: the content half-life. In Germany a training regulation is revised when employers report that the work has changed, and the process of agreeing the new one is meant to take no more than a year. A 2040 Keralam system cannot wait to be asked. It has to review its content on a fixed cycle of two to three years, or the trained worker graduates into a labour market that has already moved. The structural architecture (firm co-ownership of the curriculum, earn-while-you-learn, sector councils) is the right template. Deciding when content gets reviewed, instead of waiting for someone to ask, is the design challenge the template does not automatically solve.

The shape of that system is easiest to see in one sector. Take medical devices. A Keralam Medical Devices Apprenticeship Council would seat the device manufacturers, the major hospital networks, and the state directorate, with a small certification body run jointly. The council would set the curriculum for clinical engineering technicians, ISO 13485 compliance roles, and biomedical equipment maintenance. Apprentices would rotate on a defined cycle: six months in the vocational school, twelve months on a manufacturing line, six months in a hospital biomedical engineering department. The certification, when carried, would mean a specific named thing to every employer on the council.

That architecture, applied beyond medical devices, needs four things to hold that the existing system does not have.

1. **Sector councils.** Apprenticeship councils co-governed with firms in named industries (medical devices, marine industries, specialty foods, applied software), replacing the centralised state directorate as the curriculum authority for those sectors.
2. **Status by wage signal.** Vocational graduates reframed first through firms paying and promoting them visibly well, not first through public campaigns.
3. **Retention-linked incentives.** Training credits that vest only if apprentices stay three years, so a firm that trains a worker and loses them to Bengaluru does not unintentionally subsidise another state's workforce.
4. **Gender design from the outset.** Default arrangements (transit, dormitories, expected trades) configured so women are not silently filtered out.

With different firms and different roles, the same structure can carry marine industries, specialty foods, and applied software.

Keralam has a precedent for the kind of reframing the vocational status problem requires. The "God's Own Country" tagline dates from the late 1980s, and Kerala Tourism still uses it. Between 2008 and 2019, domestic tourist visits rose from 7.6 million to 18.4 million and foreign visits from about 600,000 to 1.19 million.[^11]

> God's Own Country worked because Kerala Tourism committed to one phrase and held it. Vocational rebranding requires the same institutional stubbornness.

The asset is harder. The natural beauty of Keralam did not require improvement. The "God's Own Country" campaign rebranded what already existed. A vocational rebrand requires the underlying capability to be there too. ITI graduates need to be reliably trained before any campaign claims they are.

The narrative campaign is the third step, not the first.

One further reason to draw the precedent carefully: the God's Own Country brand succeeded. The planning did not keep pace with the tourism it attracted. In Wayanad, homestays and resorts spread across fragile hill terrain, often without serious environmental scrutiny, Down To Earth reported in 2025, and a citizens' scientific study called the 2024 landslide a direct consequence of reckless human interference with fragile ecosystems.[^12] It is a cautionary example of what happens when narrative is treated as the job rather than the preface to institutional redesign. Reframing is the right tool; institutional infrastructure has to follow it.

The employability problem in Keralam is often dismissed as one that all-India reform has to solve first. The division of authority is more granular than that. The ITI curriculum is set in New Delhi, but Keralam controls enough to start redesigning the school-to-work transition on its own. It can stand up sector-specific apprenticeship councils within its current authority. It already owns a body the national regulator lists as an awarding body, ASAP Kerala (the Additional Skill Acquisition Programme), through which those councils can design qualifications with firms and submit them for national approval.[^10] Its ITIs can sign the dual-training agreements that put trainees on a shop floor during the course. And it can turn state procurement into a wage signal by prioritising contracts for firms that hire and retain apprenticeship graduates. What genuinely needs Delhi is narrower but real. Rewriting the national ITI trades is the Directorate General of Training's job, and every new qualification still needs the national qualifications committee's approval. The central scheme for upgrading ITIs requires a state share, ₹20,000 crore of its ₹60,000 crore outlay, which makes experimentation expensive for a state with no fiscal room. Delhi also decides whether Keralam certifications are recognised in central employment and contracting, and that recognition is the wage premium the whole reframing argument leans on.[^13] Keralam can begin without waiting for any of it.

The first essay argued that Keralam's economic future runs through precision: a few sectors chosen, each built deep, rather than scale chased across the board. That precision only pays if the workforce feeding those sectors is built with the same deliberateness, skill by skill and sector by sector, instead of produced by the thousand and left to find its own use.

Solving the employability problem will not, by itself, solve Keralam's structural employment shortage. A trained workforce is a necessary input. The economy that uses that workforce (the firms, the clusters, the productive specialisations Keralam chooses to build) is the question the next essay opens. Keralam does not get to keep its young people parked outside tea stalls indefinitely, regardless of how well any curriculum is reformed. It has to give them somewhere to go. The standard answer is to attract big manufacturers, build industrial parks, chase foreign investment. It sounds obvious. The next essay argues it is the wrong script for Keralam's geography, labour force, and starting conditions.

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### Sources

[^1]: [Kerala State Planning Board, "Economic Review 2025," Volume 1 (labour market overview, sectoral employment, female workforce participation)](https://spb.kerala.gov.in/sites/default/files/2026-01/ER%202025%20Volume1%20Eng%20final.pdf). On the elderly share, p. 16: "As per the 'India Ageing Report, 2023', UNFPA, Kerala has the highest elderly population among Indian States with 16.5%".

[^2]: [Government of Kerala, "Economic Review 2024," Volume 2, Appendices 7.2.1 and 7.2.2 (state-wise unemployment rates by gender and by education level, citing PLFS 2023-24)](http://www.niyamasabha.org/codes/15kla/session_13/Economic%20Review/Economic%20Review_2024%20Eng_Vol%202.pdf); see also [Department of Economics & Statistics, Government of Kerala, "Ecostat News" Vol 1, Issue 2 (November 2024), "Comparative Study of trend in Labour Force Participation Rate and Unemployment Rate based on different levels of education for people in Kerala and India" (PLFS 2017-18 to 2022-23 trend, gender-disaggregated)](https://www.ecostat.kerala.gov.in/storage/publications/1734.pdf); primary source: [MoSPI, "Annual Report, Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) 2023–24"](https://mospi.gov.in/publication/annual-report-periodic-labour-force-survey-plfs-2023-24), Appendix A: Table (16), labour force participation by state, ages 15 and above, and Table (8), highest level of education completed, ages 15 and above.

[^3]: [Centre for Public Policy Research, "The problem of educated unemployment in Kerala"](https://www.cppr.in/archives/the-problem-of-educated-unemployment-in-kerala); see also [IJCRT, study on educated unemployment in Kerala (PDF)](https://ijcrt.org/papers/IJCRT2205642.pdf).

[^4]: [Shahina KK, "Kerala girls outnumber boys in higher education, but lose lead in job front," The Federal (17 March 2022); B.Sc 68% female, MBBS 66% female, B.Tech completion 70% female against 48% male](https://thefederal.com/states/south/kerala/girls-outnumber-boys-in-higher-education-but-sluggish-on-job-front); see also [Onmanorama, "Kerala Plus Two results 2024" (girls took roughly three-quarters of all-A+ grades)](https://www.onmanorama.com/career-and-campus/top-news/2024/05/09/Kerala-plus-two-vhse-results-2024-live.html). Underlying enrolment data: the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE), which records Kerala's female higher-education Gender Parity Index as the highest among Indian states.

[^5]: [S. Irudaya Rajan, "Kerala Migration Survey 2023," Kerala Economy 5(3), Gulati Institute of Finance and Taxation, 2024 (71.5% of female emigrants hold a degree against 34.7% of male emigrants)](https://www.gift.res.in/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Kerala-Migration-Survey-Report-2023-Irudaya-Raj.pdf); reported in [The Federal, "Kerala report: 'No lessons learned from 50 years of emigration'" (16 June 2024)](https://thefederal.com/category/states/south/kerala/kerala-no-lessons-learned-from-50-years-of-emigration-says-report-127809).

[^6]: [International Labour Organization, "Care work and care jobs for the future of decent work" (care infrastructure as economic infrastructure framing)](https://www.ilo.org/publications/major-publications/care-work-and-care-jobs-future-decent-work); see also [OECD, "Investing in care work: A pathway to gender equality"](https://www.oecd.org/gender/Enabling-Women%27s-Economic-Empowerment.pdf).

[^7]: [Isha Gupta, "Kerala's silent crisis: Educated youth, but locked out of work," Ideas for India (28 August 2025)](https://www.ideasforindia.in/topics/human-development/kerala-s-silent-crisis-educated-youth-but-locked-out-of-work); see also [A.V. Jose, "Employment challenges in Kerala," Kerala Economy 1(1), Gulati Institute of Finance and Taxation (2020)](https://www.gift.res.in/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Employment-challenges-in-Kerala_A.V.-Jose.pdf).

[^8]: [Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB), "Datenreport zum Berufsbildungsbericht" (annual data on Germany's dual system; the VET Data Report 2023 gives 50.7% of young people beginning dual VET at some point, for the 2021 reporting year)](https://www.bibb.de/datenreport/en/datenreport.php); see also [German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), Vocational Education and Training overview](https://www.bmbf.de/EN/Education/VocationalTraining/vocationaltraining_node.html).

[^9]: [State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SBFI/SERI), Switzerland, "Vocational and Professional Education and Training" ("Two-thirds of young people in Switzerland benefit from the solid foundation provided by vocational education and training")](https://www.sbfi.admin.ch/en/vocational-education-and-training-vet); see also [Federal Statistical Office (BFS), education indicators](https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/education-science.html).

[^10]: [Directorate of Industrial Training, Government of Kerala, "Industrial Training Department" (106 government ITIs offering 117 courses)](https://det.kerala.gov.in/?page_id=643&lang=en); see also [Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, Government of India, "Annual Report 2023-24"](https://www.msde.gov.in/static/uploads/2024/11/4f71465f72e9f90ff079f76ca2e374a9.pdf). In that report: §4.1 (the Directorate General of Training's roles include "Designing new curricula" and "Revising course curricula"), §3.1.4 (45,039 trainees enrolled under the Dual System of Training in session 2023), §5.5.9 (ITI "total seating capacity 26.29 lakhs in session 2023"), §4.2 ("NSQC approves the qualifications submitted by various submitting Awarding bodies") and Annexure-4, List of Awarding Bodies (Dual), which includes "Additional Skill Acquisition Programme, Kerala (ASAP)". Also [Kerala State Planning Board, *Economic Review 2025*, Volume 1](https://spb.kerala.gov.in/sites/default/files/2026-01/ER%202025%20Volume1%20Eng%20final.pdf), p. 419: the state's Industrial Training Department is "the State-level nodal agency for implementing" the DGT's schemes, and "The Craftsman Training Scheme was introduced by the Government of India in 1950".

[^11]: [Susheela Nair, "A brand voyage," *Deccan Herald* (27 June 2015)](https://www.deccanherald.com/features/a-brand-voyage-2136577) ("In the late 80s, when the late Walter Mendez, National Creative Director of Mudra, scripted the tagline, 'God's Own Country', Kerala Tourism initiated a trend in state tourism marketing"). For the growth, see [Department of Tourism, Government of Kerala, *Kerala Tourism Statistics 2019* (PDF)](https://www.keralatourism.org/tourismstatistics/tourist_statistics_2019_book20210306071249.pdf), Table 3.5: domestic tourist visits 7,591,250 in 2008 and 18,384,233 in 2019; foreign tourist visits 598,929 and 1,189,771.

[^12]: [Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel ("Gadgil Report") and subsequent High-Level Working Group ("Kasturirangan Report") on ecological strain in Kerala's tourism zones](https://moef.gov.in/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/wg-23052012.pdf); see also K A Shaji, ["Kerala ignored warnings before Wayanad's deadly landslide, says new report," Down To Earth (13 September 2025)](https://www.downtoearth.org.in/natural-disasters/grey-rhino-in-the-western-ghats-kerala-ignored-warnings-before-wayanads-deadly-landslide-says-new-report), which ties resort and homestay expansion across fragile terrain to the disaster.

[^13]: [Press Information Bureau, "Cabinet approves National Scheme for Industrial Training Institute (ITI) Upgradation and Setting up of Five National Centres of Excellence for Skilling" (7 May 2025)](https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2127416); see also [The Wire, "Public Finance at a Crossroads: Federal Promises, Central Priorities, and Kerala's Fiscal Challenges"](https://thewire.in/economy/public-finance-at-a-crossroads-federal-promises-central-priorities-and-keralas-fiscal-challenges).

[^14]: [Institute for Human Development and International Labour Organization, "India Employment Report 2024: Youth Employment, Education and Skills"](https://www.ilo.org/sites/default/files/2024-08/India%20Employment%20-%20web_8%20April.pdf), Appendix Table A2.18b (2022: Kerala 31.29%, India 20.28%); also reported in [ThePrint, "Despite highest wages across India, Kerala's young males are among most unemployed in the country" (2 April 2024); it rounds Kerala's figure to 31.28%](https://theprint.in/india/despite-highest-wages-across-india-keralas-young-males-are-among-most-unemployed-in-the-country/2024230/).

[^15]: [World Economic Forum, "The Future of Jobs Report 2025" (January 2025). The 39% skill-set change projection appears in the Executive Summary (p. 5) and Section 3, "Skills Outlook" (p. 32, Fig. 3.1); care-economy jobs are "expected to grow significantly over the next five years" and technology roles are "the fastest-growing jobs in percentage terms" (Executive Summary, p. 5)](https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/).

[^16]: [Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen, "Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence," Stanford Digital Economy Lab (13 November 2025)](https://web.archive.org/web/20251115135732/https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/publications/canaries-in-the-coal-mine/) (archived copy; the live page now carries an August 2026 revision with different figures); see also [Stanford HAI, "2026 AI Index Report," Economy chapter](https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report/economy).