What this document is
Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained is a November 2017 report from the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, examining how automation is likely to reshape employment over the following decade. The analysis covered roughly 800 individual occupations across 46 countries, a scale meant to let the authors compare how automation risk plays out differently across labor markets at different income levels rather than generalizing from any single economy.
Its headline estimate is a wide range: between 400 million and 800 million jobs worldwide could be displaced by robotic automation by 2030, depending on how quickly the technology is adopted. The report also found that the risk is not evenly spread, noting that jobs in wealthier, more developed countries face comparatively higher automation risk, a pattern the researchers linked to the greater capital available in those economies to fund automation investment.
The width of the projected range reflects genuine uncertainty in the underlying modeling rather than a single confident forecast, and the report frames its numbers as a spread of plausible outcomes rather than a prediction of what will happen.
Where to find it
No current copy from McKinsey Global Institute is linked here.