This is a component 1 of a two-part MIT News feature examining recent job creation within the U.S. since 1940, based on recent research from Ford Professor of Economics David Autor. Part 2 is obtainable here.
In 1900, Orville and Wilbur Wright listed their occupations as “Merchant, bicycle” on the U.S. census form. Three years later, they made their famous first airplane flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. So, on the subsequent U.S. census, in 1910, the brothers each called themselves “Inventor, aeroplane.” There weren’t too a lot of those around on the time, nevertheless, and it wasn’t until 1950 that “Airplane designer” became a recognized census category.
Distinctive as their case could also be, the story of the Wright brothers tells us something vital about employment within the U.S. today. Most work within the U.S. is recent work, as U.S. census forms reveal. That’s, a majority of jobs are in occupations which have only emerged widely since 1940, based on a significant recent study of U.S. jobs led by MIT economist David Autor.
“We estimate that about six out of 10 jobs persons are doing at present didn’t exist in 1940,” says Autor, co-author of a newly published paper detailing the outcomes. “A number of the things that we do today, nobody was doing at that time. Most contemporary jobs require expertise that didn’t exist back then, and was not relevant at the moment.”
This finding, covering the period 1940 to 2018, yields some larger implications. For one thing, many recent jobs are created by technology. But not all: Some come from consumer demand, comparable to health care services jobs for an aging population.
On one other front, the research shows a notable divide in recent new-job creation: Throughout the first 40 years of the 1940-2018 period, many recent jobs were middle-class manufacturing and clerical jobs, but within the last 40 years, recent job creation often involves either highly paid skilled work or lower-wage service work.
Finally, the study brings novel data to a tough query: To what extent does technology create recent jobs, and to what extent does it replace jobs?
The paper, “Recent Frontiers: The Origins and Content of Recent Work, 1940-2018,” appears within the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The co-authors are Autor, the Ford Professor of Economics at MIT; Caroline Chin, a PhD student in economics at MIT; Anna Salomons, a professor within the School of Economics at Utrecht University; and Bryan Seegmiller SM ’20, PhD ’22, an assistant professor on the Kellogg School of Northwestern University.
“That is the toughest, most in-depth project I’ve ever done in my research profession,” Autor adds. “I feel we’ve made progress on things we didn’t know we could make progress on.”
“Technician, fingernail”
To conduct the study, the students dug deeply into government data about jobs and patents, using natural language processing techniques that identified related descriptions in patent and census data to link innovations and subsequent job creation. The U.S. Census Bureau tracks the emerging job descriptions that respondents provide — just like the ones the Wright brothers wrote down. Each decade’s jobs index lists about 35,000 occupations and 15,000 specialized variants of them.
Many recent occupations are straightforwardly the results of recent technologies creating recent types of work. As an illustration, “Engineers of computer applications” was first codified in 1970, “Circuit layout designers” in 1990, and “Solar photovoltaic electrician” made its debut in 2018.
“Many, many forms of experience are really specific to a technology or a service,” Autor says. “That is quantitatively an enormous deal.”
He adds: “After we rebuild the electrical grid, we’re going to create recent occupations — not only electricians, however the solar equivalent, i.e., solar electricians. Eventually that becomes a specialty. The primary objective of our study is to measure [this kind of process]; the second is to indicate what it responds to and the way it occurs; and the third is to indicate what effect automation has on employment.”
On the second point, nevertheless, innovations usually are not the one way recent jobs emerge. The wants and wishes of consumers also generate recent vocations. Because the paper notes, “Tattooers” became a U.S. census job category in 1950, “Hypnotherapists” was codified in 1980, and “Conference planners” in 1990. Also, the date of U.S. Census Bureau codification isn’t the primary time anyone worked in those roles; it’s the purpose at which enough people had those jobs that the bureau recognized the work as a considerable employment category. As an illustration, “Technician, fingernail” became a category in 2000.
“It’s not only technology that creates recent work, it’s recent demand,” Autor says. An aging population of baby boomers could also be creating recent roles for private health care aides which might be only now emerging as plausible job categories.
All told, amongst “professionals,” essentially specialized white-collar staff, about 74 percent of jobs in the world have been created since 1940. Within the category of “health services” — the private service side of health care, including general health aides, occupational therapy aides, and more — about 85 percent of jobs have emerged in the identical time. In contrast, within the realm of producing, that figure is just 46 percent.
Differences by degree
The indisputable fact that some areas of employment feature relatively more recent jobs than others is certainly one of the key features of the U.S. jobs landscape over the past 80 years. And some of the striking things about that point period, when it comes to jobs, is that it consists of two fairly distinct 40-year periods.
In the primary 40 years, from 1940 to about 1980, the U.S. became a singular postwar manufacturing powerhouse, production jobs grew, and middle-income clerical and other office jobs grew up around those industries.
But within the last 4 a long time, manufacturing began receding within the U.S., and automation began eliminating clerical work. From 1980 to the current, there have been two major tracks for brand new jobs: high-end and specialized skilled work, and lower-paying service-sector jobs, of many sorts. Because the authors write within the paper, the U.S. has seen an “overall polarization of occupational structure.”
That corresponds with levels of education. The study finds that employees with a minimum of some college experience are about 25 percent more more likely to be working in recent occupations than those that possess lower than a highschool diploma.
“The true concern is for whom the brand new work has been created,” Autor says. “In the primary period, from 1940 to 1980, there’s a variety of work being created for people without college degrees, a variety of clerical work and production work, middle-skill work. Within the latter period, it’s bifurcated, with recent work for faculty graduates being an increasing number of within the professions, and recent work for noncollege graduates being an increasing number of in services.”
Still, Autor adds, “This might change rather a lot. We’re in a period of doubtless consequential technology transition.”
In the intervening time, it stays unclear how, and to what extent, evolving technologies comparable to artificial intelligence will affect the workplace. Nonetheless, this can be a significant issue addressed in the present research study: How much does recent technology augment employment, by creating recent work and viable jobs, and the way much does recent technology replace existing jobs, through automation? Of their paper, Autor and his colleagues have produced recent findings on that topic, that are outlined partly 2 of this MIT News series.
Support for the research was provided, partly, by the Carnegie Corporation; Google; Instituut Gak; the MIT Work of the Future Task Force; Schmidt Futures; the Smith Richardson Foundation; and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.
