This is the first of two parts MIT News Based on new research by Ford Economics Professor David Autor, the special study examines the number of new jobs created in the United States since 1940. Part 2 is available here.
In 1900, Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright listed their occupations on the U.S. Census as “Businessman, Bicycle.” Three years later they made the famous first flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Thus, in the next U.S. census in 1910, both brothers called themselves “aircraft inventors.” However, there were not many such people at the time, and it was not until 1950 that “aircraft designer” became a recognized census category.
While the case of the Wright brothers may be unique, their story tells us something important about employment in America today. As the U.S. Census tables show, most jobs in the United States are new. A major new study of U.S. employment led by MIT economist David Autor shows that most jobs are in occupations that have only become widespread since 1940.
“We estimate that about 6 out of 10 jobs that people currently hold did not exist in 1940,” said Autor, co-author of a newly published paper detailing the results . “A lot of the things we do today, no one was doing at the time. The expertise required for most contemporary work didn’t exist at the time and was irrelevant.”
The discovery, which covers the period from 1940 to 2018, has some larger implications. On the one hand, many new job opportunities are created by technology. But not all: Some come from consumer demand, such as efforts to provide health care services for an aging population.
On the other hand, research shows a significant difference in recent job creation: In the first 40 years between 1940 and 2018, many of the new jobs were middle-class manufacturing and clerical jobs, but in the past 40 years , new job creation often involves high-paying professional jobs or low-paying service jobs.
Finally, this study uses novel data to address a thorny question: To what extent does technology create new jobs, and to what extent does it displace jobs?
The paper “New Frontiers: The Origins and Content of New Works, 1940-2018” appears in quarterly journal of economics. Co-authors include Autor, Ford Professor of Economics at MIT; Caroline Chin, a doctoral student in economics at MIT; Anna Salomons, professor at the School of Economics at Utrecht University; Bryan Seegmiller SM ’20, PhD ’22, Northwestern University Assistant Professor, Logue College.
“This is the most difficult and in-depth project I have ever done in my research career,” O’Toole added. “I feel like we’re making progress on some things that we didn’t know we could make progress on.”
“Technician, Nails”
To conduct the study, the scholars dug deep into government data on employment and patents, using natural language processing techniques to identify relevant descriptions in patents and census data to link innovation to subsequent job creation. The U.S. Census Bureau tracks new job descriptions provided by respondents—just as the Wright brothers wrote. Each decade’s employment index lists approximately 35,000 occupations and their 15,000 professional variations.
Many new careers are the direct result of new technologies creating new forms of work. For example, “Computer Applications Engineer” was first codified in 1970, “Circuit Layout Designer” was first codified in 1990, and “Solar Photovoltaic Electrician” was first codified in 2018.
“Many, many forms of expertise are actually specific to a technology or service,” Autor said. “This is a big deal in terms of numbers.”
He added: “When we rebuild the grid, we will create new careers – not just electricians, but careers in solar energy, solar electricians. Eventually this becomes a profession. The first goal of our research is to measure [this kind of process]; The second is to show what it responds to and how it happens; the third is to show the impact of automation on employment. “
On the second point, however, innovation is not the only way new jobs can emerge. Consumer demand has also given rise to new professions. As the paper points out, “tattoo artist” became a U.S. Census job category in 1950, “hypnotherapist” was codified in 1980, and “meeting planner” in 1990. Additionally, the date compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau is not the first time someone has worked in the United States. These roles; the Bureau of Labor considers a job a significant employment category only when enough people are doing it. For example, “Technician, Nails” became a category in 2000.
“It’s not just technology that creates new jobs, it’s new needs,” Autor said. The aging baby boomer population may be creating new roles for personal health care assistants that are only now becoming plausible job categories.
All told, since 1940, about 74% of the region’s jobs have been created among “professionals” (essentially specialized white-collar workers). In the “medical services” category—the personal services side of health care, which includes general health aides, occupational therapy aides and more—about 85 percent of the jobs are available at the same time. In comparison, in the manufacturing sector, the figure is only 46%.
degree difference
The creation of relatively more jobs in some areas of employment than in others has been one of the main features of the U.S. employment landscape over the past 80 years. One of the most striking things about this period in terms of employment is that it consisted of two quite different 40-year periods.
For the first 40 years, from 1940 to around 1980, the United States became a postwar manufacturing powerhouse, with production jobs growing and middle-income clerical and other office jobs growing around these industries.
But over the past four decades, U.S. manufacturing began to decline and automation began to eliminate paperwork. From 1980 to the present, there are two main tracks of new jobs: high-end professional jobs and low-wage service industry jobs, with a wide variety of types. As the authors write in their paper, the United States has seen a “general polarization of occupational structures.”
This corresponds to education level. Research has found that employees with at least some college experience are about 25% more likely to enter a new career than those with less than a high school diploma.
“The real concern is who the new work is being created for,” O’Toole said. “The first period, from 1940 to 1980, created a lot of jobs for people without college degrees, a lot of clerical and production jobs, middle-skill jobs. In the later period, there was a divergence, new jobs for college graduates Increasingly, there is a shift to professional fields, while new jobs for non-college graduates are increasingly in the service sector.”
Still, Otto added, “This is likely to change a lot. We are in a period of potentially significant technological transformation.”
Currently, it is unclear how and to what extent evolving technologies such as artificial intelligence will impact the workplace. However, this is also a major question that the current study addresses: To what extent do new technologies increase employment by creating new jobs and viable jobs, and to what extent do new technologies replace existing jobs through automation?In their paper, Otto and colleagues present new findings on this topic, which are outlined in the second part of this article MIT News series.
This research was supported in part by the Carnegie Corporation; Google; the Gak Institute; the work of the MIT Futures Task Force; Schmidt Futures; the Smith-Richardson Foundation; and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.