Nigeria’s sovereign debt market maintained its upward trajectory last week, with continued investor interest driving down average bond yields by 19 basis points to 18.38% from the previous week’s 18.57%.

The positive momentum was primarily fueled by robust buying activity in longer-term securities. The JAN-35, MAR-27, and APR-32 bonds experienced significant yield declines of 64, 39, and 36 basis points respectively, as investors capitalized on improved market conditions and moderating inflation concerns.

The rally wasn’t universal, however. Some profit-taking emerged in select instruments, with the APR-32 and JUN-33 bonds seeing their yields rise by 36 and 13 basis points. Financial analysts view this mixed performance as evidence of strategic positioning by large investors awaiting clearer policy direction.

Primary Market Activity Shows Strong Appetite

The Debt Management Office’s June bond auction revealed compelling investor demand despite a scaled-back offering. The agency presented N100 billion in Federal Government bonds—a substantial reduction from the typical N300 billion monthly allocation.

Investor response was overwhelming, with subscription levels reaching N602.86 billion, though final allotments totaled just N99.99 billion. The seven-year tenor attracted particular attention, accounting for over 93% of all submitted bids.

Final clearing rates were set at 17.75% for the APR-29 maturity and 17.95% for the JUN-32 bond, levels that closely matched secondary market pricing at the time.

Treasury Bills Join the Rally

Short-term government securities also participated in the positive trend, with Treasury Bill yields dropping 29 basis points to average 20.23%. The most significant declines occurred in the APR-26 (-136 bps), MAY-26 (-97 bps), and JAN-26 (-86 bps) instruments, demonstrating broad-based demand across the yield curve.

Some consolidation was evident in the NOV-25 and MAR-26 bills, where yields edged up by 8 and 5 basis points respectively due to limited selling pressure.

International Bonds Benefit from Global Flows

Nigeria’s dollar-denominated Eurobonds also attracted increased investment, with average yields falling to 8.61% from 8.97% in the prior week. The SEP-33, FEB-32, and SEP-28 issues led the compression with yield declines of 45, 44, and 39 basis points respectively.

This performance reflects growing international investor confidence in emerging market debt as global risk sentiment improves and investors search for yield opportunities in developing economies.

The Nigerian Meteorological Agency has predicted thundery, rainy weather activities from Monday to Wednesday across the country.

NiMet’s weather outlook released on Sunday in Abuja predicted thunderstorms (with or without rains) during the early morning hours over parts of Sokoto, Kebbi, Zamfara, Taraba, Adamawa and Kaduna States in the northern region.

According to the agency, the rest of the region will be sunny with patches of cloud.

“Thunderstorms with rains are expected during the afternoon or evening hours over parts of Adamawa, Taraba, Borno, Jigawa, Yobe, Kano, Katsina, Gombe, Sokoto, Kebbi, Zamfara and Kaduna States.

“In the central region, morning thunderstorms with rains are expected over parts of Niger, Plateau and the Federal Capital Territory while the remaining parts of the region are anticipated to be sunny with cloud patches.

“Isolated thunderstorms (with or without rain) are expected over parts of Plateau, Federal Capital Territory, Benue, Nasarawa, Kogi and Niger States during the afternoon or evening periods,” it said

NiMet envisaged cloudy skies over the southern region with prospects of morning light rains over parts of Ogun, Lagos, Cross River and Akwa Ibom States.

It anticipated afternoon or evening thunderstorms with light rains over parts of Ogun, Lagos, Ondo, Oyo, Imo, Ebonyi, Enugu, Anambra, Abia, Edo, Delta, Rivers, Bayelsa, Cross River and Akwa Ibom States.

“For Tuesday in the northern region, sunny skies with patches of clouds are expected in most of the region with chances of morning scattered thunderstorms with heavy rains over parts of Adamawa, Taraba, Borno, Yobe, Sokoto, Jigawa, Bauchi and Kaduna States.

“Thunderstorms with light rains are expected during the afternoon or evening hours over parts of Taraba, Adamawa, Gombe, Borno, Kano, Katsina, Jigawa, and Bauchi States,” it said.

According to NiMet, morning thunderstorms with light rains are anticipated over parts of the Federal Capital Territory, Niger, Kogi and Benue States in the central region.

The agency envisaged thunderstorms with light rains over parts of Nasarawa, the Federal Capital Territory, Benue, Kogi and Plateau States later in the day.

It forecast cloudy skies over the southern region with chances of morning rains over parts of Akwa Ibom and Cross River States.

The agency predicted thunderstorms with light rain over the southern region during the afternoon or evening periods.

“For Wednesday, morning thunderstorms are anticipated over parts of Zamfara, Kebbi, Borno, Yobe, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Jigawa, Gombe, Bauchi and Sokoto states in the northern region.

“Thunderstorms with heavy rains are expected over parts of Borno, Yobe, Bauchi, Kano, Katsina, Kaduna, Jigawa, Taraba and Adamawa States during the afternoon to evening periods.

“For the central region, cloudy skies are anticipated over the region during the morning hours.

“Thunderstorms with moderate rains are expected across the region in the afternoon to evening periods.

“For southern region, there are prospects of light rains across the entire region throughout the day,” it said.

According to NiMet, strong winds may precede the rains in areas where thunderstorms are likely to occur.

The public should take adequate precautions and ensure that loose objects are fastened to avoid collision.

“Driving under heavy rain should be avoided. Disconnect electrical appliances from electrical sockets. Stay away from tall trees to avoid impact from falling branches and broken trees.

“Airline operators are advised to get airport-specific weather reports (flight documentation) from NiMet for effective planning in their operations.

Armed bandits on Sunday launched another deadly assault on Benue State, killing at least four Mobile Police officers in Udei community, Guma Local Government Area.

The attack, which began around 11 a.m., first targeted Asha community where the assailants fired sporadically, forcing farmers to flee. The violence quickly spread towards Ortese, a settlement housing thousands of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs).

Witnesses said the intervention of military personnel, who deployed armoured vehicles and engaged the attackers in the bush for over an hour, prevented the bandits from overrunning Ortese.

“They started pursuing people from their farms at Asha and it escalated to Ortese,” said Matthew Mnyan, a community leader and former acting chairman of the Benue State Universal Basic Education Board. “Soldiers engaged them with two armoured trucks, pushing them back into the bush. But they later advanced towards Dudu, near Daudu.”

Around 2 p.m., in what appeared to be a coordinated operation, the bandits struck Udei, where four Mobile Policemen lost their lives in a fierce gun battle.

Mnyan, who was in touch with security authorities, said: “When I got the information, I called the Divisional Police Officer who moved in with his men. Sadly, four policemen were killed. The bandits even reappeared at Ortese later in the evening. People are terrified, including the IDPs who are pleading for more security.”

This latest assault comes just over two weeks after a massacre in nearby Yelewata community left more than 200 people dead, dozens injured, and hundreds displaced.

Efforts to reach Benue State Police spokesperson, Udeme Edet, for comments were unsuccessful, as calls and text messages went unanswered.

With reports from Vanguard

WESTERN PERSPECTIVE

Ukraine F-16 pilot killed in large-scale Russian attack, Zelenskiy calls for US help

A Ukrainian F-16 fighter pilot died in a crash while repelling a Russian air attack that involved hundreds of drones, cruise and ballistic missiles, authorities said on Sunday, as Moscow intensifies night-time air barrages in the fourth year of war.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy praised the pilot, Maksym Ustymenko, and bestowed upon him posthumously the title of Hero of Ukraine, the country's highest decoration.

He also called for more support from Washington and Western allies to bolster Ukraine's air defences after the attack, which damaged homes and infrastructure across the country and injured at least 12 people, according to local authorities.

In Kyiv, families huddled in metro stations for shelter after air raid sirens rung out. Machine-gun fire and explosions were heard across the capital and in the western city of Lviv, where such attacks are less common.

The governor of the Lviv region, bordering Poland, said the raid targeted critical infrastructure.

Ukraine has now lost three F-16s since it began operating the U.S.-made jets last year. Kyiv has not revealed the size of its F-16 fleet, but they have become a central and heavily used part of Ukraine's defences.

The pilot flew the damaged jet away from a settlement but had no time to eject before it crashed, the Ukrainian Air Force said.

"The pilot used all of his onboard weapons and shot down seven air targets. While shooting down the last one, his aircraft was damaged and began to lose altitude," the Air Force said on Telegram.

Ukrainian military expert Roman Svitan, speaking earlier this month, said the F-16 was not ideally suited to all tasks in the war, particularly repelling drones which swarm Ukrainian cities, as it is better used against higher-speed targets.

Zelenskiy, speaking in his nightly video address, said Ustymenko had been flying missions since the time of a campaign that began in 2014 against Russian-financed separatists who had seized parts of eastern Ukraine.

"He mastered four types of aircraft and had important results to his name in defending Ukraine," he said. "It is painful to lose such people."

The Ukrainian military said in total Russia launched 477 drones and 60 missiles of various types to Ukraine overnight. Ukrainian forces destroyed 211 of the drones and 38 missiles, it said, while 225 more drones were either lost due to electronic warfare or were decoys that carried no explosives.

Writing earlier on X, Zelenskiy said: "Moscow will not stop as long as it has the capability to launch massive strikes." He said Russia had launched around 114 missiles, 1,270 drones, and 1,100 glide bombs just in the past week.

Russia's state-run RIA Novosti news agency said one person was killed by a Ukrainian drone in the Russian-controlled part of Ukraine's Luhansk region. Both Ukraine and Russia say they do not attack civilian targets.

POLITICAL WILL

Ukraine says recent attacks highlight the need for further support from Washington, which under President Donald Trump has not committed to new military aid for Ukraine.

Trump said he was considering a Ukrainian request for more Patriot missilebatteries after he met Zelenskiy at a NATO summit last Wednesday.

"This war must be brought to an end - pressure on the aggressor is needed, and so is protection," Zelenskiy said in his X post. "Ukraine needs to strengthen its air defence - the thing that best protects lives."

He said Ukraine was ready to buy the American air defence systems and it counts on "leadership, political will, and the support of the United States, Europe, and all our partners."

Russia has launched large-scale strikes on Ukrainian cities every few days in recent weeks, causing widespread damage, killing dozens of civilians and injuring hundreds more.

During the latest barrage, explosions were heard in Kyiv, Lviv, Poltava, Mykolaiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Cherkasy and the Ivano-Frankivsk regions, witnesses and regional governors said. The Ukrainian military said air strikes were recorded in six locations.

Eleven people, including two children, were injured in the central Cherkasy region, the regional governor said on Telegram. Three multi-storey buildings and a college were damaged. One woman was injured in western Ivano-Frankivsk region.

Rescuers evacuated residents from apartment blocks in Cherkasy that had charred walls and broken windows.

RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE

Russia launches ‘massive’ strike on Ukrainian defense industry – MOD

Russian forces carried out a large-scale overnight strike on Ukrainian industrial facilities involving long-range weapons and drones, the Defense Ministry in Moscow reported on Sunday. The Ukrainian authorities and media confirmed the attack, with some suggesting it was one of the largest since the escalation of the conflict in 2022.

In a statement reporting the operation, the Russian Defense Ministry said that its forces had “conducted a massive strike, involving high-precision long-range air-, sea- and land-based weapons, including the aeroballistic hypersonic Kinzhal missile system, as well as unmanned aerial vehicles, targeting Ukraine’s military-industrial and oil-processing facilities.” 

The ministry didn’t provide any further details, but stated that the “strike goals were achieved. All designated targets were hit.”

Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky confirmed the attack in a post on Telegram, claiming that it involved 477 Russian explosives-laden drones and 60 missiles of various types. He used the occasion to once again call on Kiev’s Western backers to provide it with more air defense systems.

Zelensky also revealed that Kiev lost a Western-supplied F-16 fighter jet while attempting to fend off the attack. The pilot perished in the incident.

Meanwhile, in a post on X, Ukrainian MP Mariana Bezuglaya accused the country’s military leadership of “murdering” fighter pilots by allegedly failing to develop effective anti-drone protocols.

According to the Ukrainian military’s tally, more than 20 incoming rockets and 40 UAVs made it through the country’s air defenses during the strike.

In a post on Facebook, Stepan Kulinyak, the head of the military administration in the city of Drohobych in Lviv Region in Western Ukraine, said that “as a result of the air attack, a fire broke out at an industrial infrastructure facility.” Officials in the region stated that the strikes did not cause any casualties but that critical infrastructure was hit.

In Poltava Region, an industrial site in the city of Kremenchuk reportedly came under attack. 

While Ukrainian officials have not provided any details about the type of facilities hit and the extent of the damage inflicted, some local media outlets have pointed out that there are oil-processing plants in both Drohobych and Kremenchuk, and that they were likely the targets of the strikes. 

Social media users have been posting videos purportedly depicting the Russian strikes and their aftermath in several Ukrainian regions.

Reuters/RT

“On matters of security, the bulk (sic) stops at the President’s table.” – Bola Ahmed Tinubu, April 2014

On 26 January 2009, Mamman Bello Ali died. He was the governor of Yobe State in north-east Nigeria. At around the same time, an anti-terrorism campaign by the government of Nigeria in Yobe State and its neighbour, Borno State, was about to make a murderous transition into a full-blown insurgency. As Governor Mamman Ali made his earthly transition in a Florida hospital, his deputy, Ibrahim Gaidam assumed office on the same day as the new governor of Yobe State. Today, as minister of Police Affairs in the federal government, Gaidam, whose life in politics has included a stint as a member of the Senate, has high responsibility for policing the country. He is so ineffectual in this role that few Nigerians notice his existence.

Around 9 November 2014, a suicide-bomber dressed as a student detonated himself in the middle of school assembly at the Government Boys Secondary School in Potiskum, Yobe State. The police confirmed that the attack “left 47 people dead, including the suicide bomber. Another 79 were wounded. Dozens of students were injured so severely medics were unable to save them.” It was a tragedy on an unspeakable scale. The blame for the attack fell on Jama’atu Ahlis-Sunna Lidda’Awati Wal-Jihad (the Islamist insurgency better known as Boko Haram). Gaidam was still governor.

The following day, President Goodluck Jonathan’s campaign was in full swing as he sought the support of the country for his re-election in 2015, under the banner of the then ruling Peoples Democratic Party. The All Progressives Congress, then newly formed as an opposition alliance, was quick to take political advantage. It described Jonathan’s campaign launchas “insensitive and callous” and accused him and the PDP of “dancing on the graves of the pupils as well as of all the victims of Boko Haram insurgency.” The APC took the opportunity to recall another mass-casualty bombing incident in Nyanya on the outskirts of Abuja in April 2014 and said that following that incident, “President Jonathan went dancing ‘Azonto’ in Kano less than 48 hours later.”

In the period from 2009 to 2014, when Islamist violence of Boko Haram in north-east Nigeria transitioned into a full-blown insurgency, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was in power. Educational infrastructure bore a major brunt of the attacks by the group, which built a brand in murderous violence by campaigning against Western education. The worst-affected states – Borno and Yobe – happened to be outside the orbit of the ruling party. In the half-decade to 2014, the violence accounted for at least 611 teachers reportedly killed and another 19,000 forced to flee. In 2014 alone, the insurgency killed over 6,644 persons in the affected states.

In May 2014, the United Nations Security Council listed Boko Haram as a terrorist organisation. Three years earlier, the Gaji Galtimari Presidential Committee on the Security Challenges in the North-East Zone of Nigeria had reported that the group “started as an innocuous non-violent group” around 2003.

This rise in Boko Haram’s campaign of mass-casualty violence was both new and shocking. The response of the then ruling government appeared slow, ponderous, and mal-adapted. It was also political season. The escalation in the attacks and killings from the Islamist insurgency in north-east Nigeria in 2014 coincided with the run-up to Nigeria’s 2015 general elections.

For the PDP in power at the time, it was a struggle to manage the optics of campaigning in the midst of growing carnage. The APC, then a new opposition formation, relished in its role, making political capital out of the situation. Its forceful critique of the PDP’s management of the Boko Haram insecurity or lack of it was central in ensuring the defeat of the ruling party in the 2015 election.

The popular narrative of Muhammadu Buhari, the APC candidate for the presidency in 2015, as a no-nonsense soldier, did more than any other thing in reassuring Nigerians that the party would bring competence to the handling of the crisis of insecurity in the country. Instead, since then, insecurity in Nigeria has metastasised under the successive presidencies of President Muhammadu Buhari and his successor, Bola Tinubu. The violence, which was mostly confined to the states of the north-east one decade ago, has become hydra-headed under various nomenclatures all over the country.

In its latest Conflict Barometer (2024) report, the Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research identified at least 10 sites of active, conflict-related killings in Nigeria, at least five of which fall into the highest classifications of seriousness.

In the north-east, Boko Haram has mutated into a confederacy of mass murder under different appellations, each seeking supremacy in an Olympiad of mass casualty violence.

In North-Central Nigeria, the party chose to mis-characterise as “farmer-herder” clashes, a methodical campaign of land-grabbing by people described by the government mostly as “foreigners.”

Under the watch of the APC government, in 2021, the north-west overtook the northeast in mass casualty atrocities. Unable to manage the situation in the region, the government took to labeling the perpetrators of the atrocities in the north-west as “bandits.”

Unlike the north-east, where improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and suicide-bombers were major features of the insurgency and insecurity, the major items in the violence in the north-west are motor bikes and Kalashnikovs. Yet, the government cannot account for how these bikes and guns get into the hands of those who use them to habitually liquidate Nigerians on an industrial scale.

Kaduna was central in this shift. Installed in power in 2015 in the APC Tsunami as the new APC governor of strategically significant Kaduna State, Nasir El-Rufai was voluble in promoting mass murder as profitable, incredibly proclaiming on national television how he paid the killers of Nigerians in order to encourage them to stop killing. The casual malevolence of his proferred justification was beyond shocking: “We got a group of people that were going round trying to trace some of these people in Cameroon, Niger and so on to tell them that there is a new governor who is Fulani like them and has no problem paying compensations for lives lost and he is begging them to stop the killing.”

Even worse, the mis-management of the insecurity under the government of the APC has smacked of a level of indifference, cynicism, and lack of empathy that the PDP would never have dreamed of. In Benue State last week, all of this was on show. Forced by public opinion finally to re-route himself to visit victims of mass liquidation in Benue State, in Nigeria’s Middle Belt, Tinubu first had children line up in the rain to be splashed with mud by his majestic convoy, before the obligatory serenading from uniformed women living in internal displacement from the violence. It was right out of the manual of political narcissism jointly authored by Louis VIX and Marie Antoniette.

While the country burns, the president has curiously eloped to Saint Lucia, a territory of about 179,000 persons described by the Global Organised Crime Index as “a key Caribbean transit hub for cocaine shipments bound mainly for the US, Europe or Canada.” To the Nigerians concerned about the optics of all this, it is as if all he can offer is the middle finger.

The only thing more abysmal than the indifference of the ruling APC government to the current crisis of mass murder across the country has been the disgraceful abdication by the political opposition. In the midst of all this carnage, little has been heard from them. Instead, opposition politicians have been hyper-active in the political transfer season herding into the APC.

Those who expect the police, armed and security services to shoot the country out of this crisis are unlikely to get their wish. The durability of Nigeria’s insecurity crisis is essentially a crisis of irresponsible political leadership. The security services can only implement a strategy set by the politicians. At the moment, the politicians are fixated on 2027. By then, in many parts of Nigeria, there may be no voters left and many of those in place would have been displaced from their voters cards. But the politicians do not have to care because they do not need voters to get into office. That is the original sin of insecurity in Nigeria.

** Odinkalu, a professor of law, teaches at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and can be reached through This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Rose Horowitch

The job of the future might already be past its prime. For years, young people seeking a lucrative career were urged to go all in on computer science. From 2005 to 2023, the number of comp-sci majors in the United States quadrupled.

All of which makes the latest batch of numbers so startling. This year, enrollment grew by only 0.2 percent nationally, and at many programs, it appears to already be in decline, according to interviews with professors and department chairs. At Stanford, widely considered one of the country’s top programs, the number of comp-sci majors has stalled after years of blistering growth. Szymon Rusinkiewicz, the chair of Princeton’s computer-science department, told me that, if current trends hold, the cohort of graduating comp-sci majors at Princeton is set to be 25 percent smaller in two years than it is today. The number of Duke students enrolled in introductory computer-science courses has dropped about 20 percent over the past year.

But if the decline is surprising, the reason for it is fairly straightforward: Young people are responding to a grim job outlook for entry-level coders. In recent years, the tech industry has been roiled by layoffs and hiring freezes. The leading culprit for the slowdown is technology itself. Artificial intelligence has proved to be even more valuable as a writer of computer code than as a writer of words. This means it is ideally suited to replacing the very type of person who built it. A recent Pew study found that Americans think software engineers will be most affected by generative AI. Many young people aren’t waiting to find out whether that’s true.

“It’s so counterintuitive,” Molly Kinder, a Brookings Institution fellow who studies AI’s effect on the economy, told me. “This was supposed to be the job of the future. The way to stay ahead of technology was to go to college and get coding skills.” But the days of “Learn to code” might be coming to an end. If the numbers are any indication, we might have passed peak computer science.

Chris Gropp, a doctoral student at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, has spent eight months searching for a job. He triple-majored in computer science, math, and computational science at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and has completed the coursework for a computer-science Ph.D. He would prefer to work instead of finishing his degree, but he has found it almost impossible to secure a job. He knows of only two people who recently pulled it off. One sent personalized cover letters for 40 different roles and set up meetings with people at the companies. The other submitted 600 applications. “We’re in an AI revolution, and I am a specialist in the kind of AI that we’re doing the revolution with, and I can’t find anything,” Gropp told me. “I found myself a month or two ago considering, Do I just take a break from this thing that I’ve been training for for most of my life and go be an apprentice electrician?”

Gropp is contending with a weak job market for recent college graduates in general and the tech sector in particular. Although employment for 22-to-27-year-olds in other fields has grown slightly over the past three years, employment for computer-science and math jobs in that age group has fallen by 8 percent. Not long ago, graduates from top comp-sci programs—such as those at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon—would have been fending off recruiters from Google and Amazon. Now, professors at those schools told me, their graduates are having to try much harder to find work. Gropp’s dad, William Gropp, runs the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “I can say, as the father of a computer-science master’s degree holder with expertise in machine learning who is still looking for a job, that the industry is not what it used to be,” he told me.

In the ultimate irony, candidates like Gropp might be unable to get jobs working on AI because AI itself is taking the jobs. “We know AI is affecting jobs,” Rusinkiewicz, from Princeton, told me. “It’s making people more efficient at some or many aspects of their jobs, and therefore, perhaps companies feel they can get away with doing a bit less hiring.”

The best evidence that artificial intelligence is displacing tech workers comes from the fact that the industry that has most thoroughly integrated AI is the one with such unusually high unemployment. Tech leaders have said publicly that they no longer need as many entry-level coders. Executives at Alphabet and Microsoft have said that AI writes or assists with writing upwards of 25 percent of their code. (Microsoft recently laid off 6,000 workers.) Anthropic’s chief product officer recently told The New York Times that senior engineers are giving work to the company’s chatbot instead of a low-level human employee. The company’s CEO has warned that AI could replace half of all entry-level workers in the next five years. Kinder, the Brookings fellow, said she worries that companies soon will simply eliminate the entire bottom rung of the career ladder. The plight of the tech grads, she told me, could be a warning for all entry-level white-collar workers.

Not everyone agrees that AI is causing the turbulence in the job market. The tech industry frequently goes through booms and busts. The biggest companies exploded in size when the economy was good. Now, with high interest rates and the specter of new tariffs, executives are likely holding off on expanding, and workers are reluctant to leave their job, says Zack Mabel, director of research at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Companies have an incentive to blame layoffs on AI instead of forces within their control, David Deming, an economics professor at Harvard, told me. “Before we see big changes from AI in the labor market, companies have to internalize this new capability and change what they ask for. And that’s the thing that I have not seen very much of,” he said. “It could be AI, but we just don’t know.”

Enrollment in the computer-science major has historically fluctuated with the job market. When jobs are scarce, people choose to study something else. Eventually, there aren’t enough computer-science graduates, salaries go up, and more people are drawn in. Prior declines have always rebounded to enrollment levels higher than where they started. (And some universities, such as the University of Chicago, still haven’t seen any enrollment drops.) Sam Madden, a computer-science professor at MIT, told me that even if companies are employing generative AI, that will likely create more demand for software engineers, not less.

Whether the past few years augur a temporary lull or an abrupt reordering of working life, economists suggest the same response for college students: Major in a subject that offers enduring, transferable skills. Believe it or not, that could be the liberal arts. Deming’s research shows that male history and social-science majors end up out-earning their engineering and comp-sci counterparts in the long term, as they develop the soft skills that employers consistently seek out. “It’s actually quite risky to go to school to learn a trade or a particular skill, because you don’t know what the future holds,” Deming told me. “You need to try to think about acquiring a skill set that’s going to be future-proof and last you for 45 years of working life.”

Of course, when faced with enormous uncertainty, many young people take the opposite approach and pursue something with a sure path to immediate employment. The question of the day is how many of those paths AI will soon foreclose.

The Atlantic