Wired for this : Chapter 3: The Economy Changed Without Telling Anyone

Nobody sent a memo.

There was no announcement, no national conversation, no moment where employers collectively agreed that the skills they had been rewarding for a century were no longer the ones they needed. The shift happened gradually, then suddenly, driven by forces that most people only noticed after the fact, if they noticed at all. And by the time the research caught up with what had already happened, the labour market had been fundamentally restructured in ways that most education systems, most organisations, and most diagnostic frameworks had not begun to account for.

Understanding what changed, why, and when it hardened into something permanent is not an abstract economic exercise. It is the missing context behind a workforce full of people who were told, in one way or another, that they were not performing correctly, when the more honest explanation is that the performance metrics themselves had shifted.

The term economists use is job polarisation: the pattern by which employment in routine, middle-skilled occupations declines while jobs at both the higher and lower ends of the skill distribution grow. The landmark research on this in Europe was carried out by Maarten Goos, Alan Manning, and Anna Salomons, whose studies across 16 Western European countries, covering the period from 1993 to 2010 and published in the American Economic Review, documented the pattern clearly. The employment shares of managers, professionals, and low-paid personal service workers increased across this period, at the expense of the employment shares of middling manufacturing and routine office workers. This process, which economists call routinisation, the conversion of jobs into sets of fixed, repeatable rules that a machine can then be programmed to follow, was confirmed as the single most important factor behind the shift, with offshoring playing a secondary but real role.

Ireland sits within this picture, though not in the way many people might assume. The Eurofound European Jobs Monitor, produced by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, which is headquartered in Dublin, has tracked these shifts across European countries over multiple periods. Ireland’s pattern has shifted across periods rather than following one steady line. In the expansion from 1997 to 2007, the country showed what researcher call job upgrading , with employment growth concentrated in mid-high and high-quality paid work . During the financial crisis, the workers hardest hit were those in the middle of the wage structure, producing a more polarised pattern in Ireland , Spain and France. What has stayed consistent across both phases is the direction of demand at the upper end. The pull toward higher-level , non routine cognitive work has not reversed.

The forces driving this are the same two identified in the European research: technology, specifically the progressive computerisation of tasks that can be defined by rules, and globalisation, specifically the offshoring and trade dynamics that reshaped where routine production and processing work was done. Neither of these forces operated on a neat timeline. They reinforced each other, accelerated during periods of disruption, and were locked in most decisively not during boom years but during downturns.

This is the detail that most discussions of workforce change miss, and it matters for understanding the urgency of what follows in this series.

Research by economists Nir Jaimovich and Henry Siu, examining US labour market data across multiple recessions, found a consistent pattern from the early 1990s onward: routine occupations that disappeared during economic downturns stopped coming back during the subsequent recoveries. In earlier recessions, the 1970s and 1980s, routine jobs contracted and then returned as economies grew again. From the 1991 recession onward, they contracted and did not return. Employers used the pressure of a downturn to make permanent the automation and restructuring decisions they might otherwise have deferred. Each recession, including the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 and the disruption of the pandemic years, accelerated and hardened a shift that was already underway.

The implication is significant. This is not a transition that is still in process, one that might yet reverse or stabilise around a new equilibrium that looks like the old one. The research evidence suggests that the structural shift away from routine, rule-following, compliance-based work has been embedding itself for more than thirty years, and each major economic disruption has pushed it further rather than pausing it. What remains, and what is growing, is predominantly work that requires judgment, adaptability, pattern recognition, novel problem-solving, and the capacity to operate effectively in conditions that are not fully specified in advance.

Take a moment with that last sentence.

Judgment over instruction-following. Adaptability over compliance. Pattern recognition and novel problem-solving as core requirements rather than pleasant extras. The ability to operate in ambiguous, under-specified conditions without defaulting to a fixed script.

These are not descriptions of what a Prussian-era classroom was designed to produce. They are also, as the next chapter will examine in detail, a reasonable description of what research now identifies as the cognitive strengths associated with ADHD and autism: hyperfocus on problems of genuine interest, divergent thinking that does not default to the expected pathway, the capacity to hold complex systems in mind and identify patterns that linear thinkers miss, and a relationship with novelty and uncertainty that neurotypical workplace design tends to pathologise rather than recognise.

The economy did not restructure itself to need neurodivergent minds. It restructured itself in a direction that happens to align more closely with certain neurodivergent strengths than the economy of the previous century did. And it did so at precisely the same time that late diagnosis rates for ADHD and autism began to climb, that women in midlife began presenting to clinical services in numbers that outpaced all prior trends, and that the gap between the minds the workforce needs and the minds the workforce is actually supporting became impossible to ignore.

This is not a coincidence worth dismissing. It is a structural convergence that deserves serious attention. The skills the modern economy rewards were always present in a significant proportion of the population. The question is why, in a labour market that now needs them more than ever, so many of the people who have them are still being left out.

Iris Walshe is an AuDHD equestrian athlete, ADHD/AuDHD coach, and founder of NeuroWave Coaching. She has competed across showjumping, eventing, and dressage, and holds ADDCA, PAAC CACP, and ICF credentials. She works with neurodivergent athletes and high-performing adults at neurowavecoaching.com.

Goos, M., Manning, A., Salomons, A. (2014). Explaining Job Polarization: Routine-Biased Technological Change and Offshoring. American Economic Review, 104(8), 2509–2526.

Goos, M., Manning, A., Salomons, A. (2009). The Polarization of the European Labor Market. American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings, 99(2), 58–63.

Eurofound / Fernández-Macías, E. (2013–2021). European Jobs Monitor. Publications Office of the European Union. Eurofound is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland.

Hurley, J. et al. (2023). Employment Shifts in Europe from 1997 to 2021. Eurofound.

Jaimovich, N., Siu, H.E. (2012). Job Polarization and Jobless Recoveries. NBER Working Paper No. 18334.