Ok, no big surprises here. Education, Health Care and Social Assistance employment grow steadily with the population because the need grows with the population and is accelerated with downturns which drive up the misery index.
Leisure and Hospitality go up as long as there is a market because when we travel we are made happier to be taken care of by a person.
Retail is flat or growing more slowly than the population as Amazon et al displace in-person retail. One retiree working in a 'fulfillment center' replaces a lot of bored sales clerks.
Manufacturing is down because the marginal contribution of labor to value has gone down for 200 years. And its a good thing that we don't have to pay a weeks wages to buy a shirt.
Construction is rebounding from the gross over-production just before the GOP created economic crash but if the population declines (as it is doing in Japan and Europe) the equilibrium level of construction will re-set at a lower level.
Leisure and Hospitality go up as long as there is a market because when we travel we are made happier to be taken care of by a person.
Who is paid peanuts and could never afford to travel for leisure.
One retiree working in a 'fulfillment center' replaces a lot of bored sales clerks.
Who will then be laid off, and those left are paid peanuts.
Manufacturing is down because the marginal contribution of labor to value has gone down for 200 years.
aka, transfered to the country with the cheapest labor.
ETA
USA manufacturing brought millions up to the middle class (one could argue it created the middle class). Stagnation or decline of it will (and has) pushed people out of the middle class.
oldr_n_wsr wrote:
USA manufacturing brought millions up to the middle class (one could argue it created the middle class). Stagnation or decline of it will (and has) pushed people out of the middle class.
What has pushed people out of the middle class is the fact that most of the money that made the middle class "middle" has been transferred to the top 1% over the last 35 years. The decline of manufacturing employment -- like the decline of agricultural employment before it -- was an inevitable product of advancing technology and a perpetually evolving economy. But it is the increasing concentration of wealth at the top that is sucking the middle class dry and pushing it to lower and lower standards of living. We now have the greatest inequality in wealth distribution since the Great Depression, and that's what's most directly killing the middle class -- so the rich can be even richer.
