kitchen table math, the sequel: jobs

Friday, November 11, 2011

Interesting short video at the WSJ.

The video documents a massive loss of manufacturing jobs but doesn't discuss where those jobs went or why.

Linda Seebach said...: The jobs didn't go *where* (mostly); they went *when* -- into the past, along with farm labor and assembly-line work.

Arnold Kling writes

"The proportion of employment classified as “clerical and kindred workers” grew from 5.2 percent in 1910 to a peak of 19.3 percent in 1980. (However, by 2000 this proportion had edged down to 17.4 percent.)1 Overall, workers classified as clerical, professional workers, technical workers, managers, officials, and proprietors exceeded 50 percent of the labor force by 2000.

"Corresponding declines took place in the manual occupations. Workers classified as laborers, other than farm or mine, peaked at 11.4 percent of the labor force in 1920 but were barely 6 percent by 1950 and less than 4 percent by 2000. Farmers and farm laborers fell from 33 percent of the labor force in 1910 to less than 15 percent by 1950 and only 1.2 percent in 2000. By the 1930s, a marginal farm hand could not produce enough to justify his employment. Sharecropping, never much better than a subsistence occupation, was no longer viable."

http://american.com/archive/2011/november/what-if-middle-class-jobs-disappear; November 16, 2011 at 8:29 AM

kitchen table math, the sequel