Where Did the Jobs Go?

It’s amazing to look at the shifts over time. The move from manufacturing to services is well known, but that’s only the start of the story.

mattstiles:

After 72 years, the U.S. Census Bureau today released data from its decennial count in 1940. The release includes a fascinating graphic about how Americans have changed over time. Here’s just one section, comparing our workforce: 

There’s much more in the graphic: housing, demographics, etc. Check it out. 

(Source: mattstiles)

Over the last half-century, the United States (along with the rest of the Western world) moved to a service economy. And services are usually provided where the people are, as you can see in this chart of projected growth in service jobs by geography.

There’s at least one plus here, which is that the majority of service jobs aren’t going overseas. Most, but certainly not all, require face-to-face contact. But as Richard Florida noted in The Atlantic, where this chart appeared, whether or not these are the kinds of jobs that can support a middle-class life is another question.

The Economist’s Graphic Detail blog sums up the oddity of Facebook: huge, with an enormous customer base, yet with relatively few employees. Well, maybe not so odd. This sums up one of the fundamental ways Internet technology is changing the workforce: more production, fewer workers. In fact, in many cases the customers are doing things that companies used to have to hire people to do (like create content and solve technical issues).

However, this chart doesn’t cover the jobs Facebook created that aren’t actually on Facebook’s payroll. There was no such thing a few years ago as a social media coordinator, or an app developer. And let’s not forget Farmville. That’s harder to nail down.

The Financial Times Alphaville blog posts a chart to back up the quote marks behind the headline “US unemployment ‘progress.’”

This goes to a serious issue with the official unemployment statistics: if you stop looking for work, the government stops counting you as unemployed. That’s a problem because all the indications are that we have a significant number of people who are “discouraged workers,” people who want to work but have given up looking, at least for the moment. As the FT points out:

But what is striking about the broken line above isn’t where it now ends — at 10.3 per cent — but rather the lack of any meaningful, sustained improvement for more than two years.

There’s no question: the latest jobs report is an improvement, and the best report we’ve seen for a while. But here’s the challenge: we have to create enough jobs to (a) make up for those lost in the Great Recession and (b) to keep up with population growth. If the economy isn’t creating new jobs, we aren’t standing still, we’re actually losing ground.

As Derek Thompson at The Atlantic points out, we’ve got to do a lot better than this:

If we create 200,000 jobs a month, as we did in December, we’ll fill the jobs gap by about 2024.