20-Year Prospect
Anthropologists will still be around twenty years from now—not because the college students in this country have risen up as one to demand more anthropology classes, but because industry wants to hire these observers of human behavior as corporate shills.
How do people behave in the workplace and why? How do consumers use a particular product and why? These are the kinds of questions anthropologists love to dig into, and companies are willing to pay for answers. Nokia, Xerox, and furniture maker Herman Miller employ or have employed anthropologists; firms like Intel and Motorola have something like one anthropologist for every 10,000 engineers on their payrolls. It took anthropologists to help Adidas figure out that their customers bought their products, not out of a love of athletic competition, but out of a desperate desire to keep the fat away.
Of course, just because these behavioral scientists are off the soon-to-be-extinct careers list doesn't mean there will be an explosion of anthropologists going forward. There are currently fewer than 7,000 anthropologists in the United States; even with lots of corporate love, that number won't go up by more than a few hundred.