Updates and questions to start off 2022
A move by bike, intriguing charts, and more!
Hello world! It’s been a little longer than I expected but I thought I would kick off the new year with some updates.
I took most of November off from my research into the history of the workweek to move to the north side of Chicago… by bike:
After settling in, I got back to work, looking specifically at the changes (or lack thereof) in the workweek from 1940 to 1970. But I realized I was getting close enough to the present that I needed to take a closer look at more recent years too. Here are a few interesting tidbits I found from looking at things from the very long run.
Jobs past their peak?
Two of the fastest growing job sectors in the postwar era were administrative and food service workers. But as a percentage of the population, these jobs have likely seen their peak.
(OK, I will have more serious commentary on these charts later!)
But if these sorts of jobs are in decline, where were new ones being created?
One acronym, just one acronym: STEM!
Growth was remarkably consistent and exponential in STEM fields from 1870 to 1970. Then in the 1970s, it suddenly stopped, followed by some linear growth from 1980 to the dotcom bubble of 2000. Since 2005, we are back to even more exponential growth in this field compared to before. I do wonder though, at what point might it hit a wall again like it did in 1970?
We can see that STEM job growth as a whole leveled off when growth in physical engineering jobs stopped, but IT was still too small of a category to make up the difference. It seems reasonable to expect that if there is ever a similar end to growth in software engineering jobs we will see this pattern repeat. With the rise of the globally distributed office in the 2020s and the ability of people to learn and apply their software engineering skills from anywhere, could U.S. growth in this sector come to an end sooner than we might otherwise expect?
Healthcare is another sector that is growing quickly albeit linearly. The rate of growth is even slowing somewhat. Will we see a plateau here within the next generation?
And if growth in both of these fields does plateau at some point, will it shift to another sector? Will declines in other fields stabilize by then? Or will we start seeing a significant reduction in overall hours worked as robots finally fulfill their promises of taking our jobs?