It’s too bad that the Wall Street Journal is preaching to the choir. From The Future of Jobs: New Ones Arise, Wage Gap Widens:
Each generation considers its own time to be unique. Today’s popular demon is foreign competition. Forty years ago, it was automation. In March 1964, three dozen liberal luminaries wrote Lyndon Johnson that ‘the combination of the computer and the automated self-regulating machine’ was creating ‘almost unlimited productivity capacity which requires progressively less human labor.’ Without massive government spending, they warned, the U.S. would suffer mass joblessness and poverty.Since then, the U.S. economy has added 72 million jobs, an increase of 125%. Compared to a counterpart of the same age and schooling, the typical full-time male worker’s wages have risen by 18% after adjusting for inflation; for women, wages are up 37%. Today’s unemployment rate is almost exactly where it was in 1964. Computers in the factory and in the office have replaced humans. But jobs lost were replaced by jobs unimagined in 1964.
Even the Bureau of Labor Statistics has trouble guessing which jobs will come and go:
Precisely identifying jobs that will replace those now disappearing is impossible. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, as good as anyone at this exercise, shows just how difficult it is.In 1988, the agency predicted that the number of gas-station attendants would rise from 308,000 to 331,000 in 2000. When 2000 arrived, there were only 140,000. “Most gas stations are now self-service only,” BLS economists Andrew Alpert and Jill Auyer explained in a candid retrospective the agency published. The BLS didn’t see that coming.
In 1988, the BLS also projected travel agents would be among the 20 fastest-growing occupations, their ranks growing by 54% by 2000. Wrong again. The number of travel agents fell by 6.2%. Government prognosticators foresaw an increase in travel — but not the explosion of online booking.
Of 20 occupations that the BLS predicted in 1988 would suffer the greatest losses between 1988 and 2000, half actually grew. The agency predicted that the number of assemblers in electrical and electronic factories would drop by 173,000, a 44% decrease. Twelve years later, there were 45,000 more, an 11% increase. Neither outsourcing nor robots made as much of a dent as the BLS expected.