I think that Karl Smith is onto something in his recent posts analyzing the evolution of employment in our economy, first in the recession and recovery, then going back earlier and charting that development since 1939, and finally with a log graph since 1970.
Writing about the recession and recovery he observes:
Here I basically split the labor market into two parts: Goods and Government and everything else.
Everything else hit a wall in 2008 but as you can see it was a nice natural V. It was not even the job-less U of 2000. And since the beginning of 2010 everything else has been growing just as fast as the last recovery. As we moved into 2012 job growth seems to be speeding up faster than anything we saw last time around.
The difference this time was goods and government. To cut it down to the micro-level I like we are largely talking about construction workers, metal and automotive workers, and school teachers.
See, in particular, this graph. However, as I’ve said before in other contexts this analysis is a bit like a fan dancer’s fan: while apparently revealing it’s actually concealing. Rather than the dichotomy that Dr. Smith illustrates, I’d really like to see three growth series: goods and government, healthcare spending, and everything else.
We are not going to see a big increase in manufacturing numbers, but we should eventually see construction rise. In spite of the GOP war on teachers, they remain popular at the local level. I can see them coming back, but I dont see the group as a whole making up the difference.
One of the commenters broke it down into goods, government and everything else. The big drop is in goods.
Steve
I’m sorry, but I have made a living and become quite wealthy by successfully and better than the average bear, Boo-Boo, analyzing data for 25 years.
I have no effing clue what this man is trying to say, based on the graph titles.
I’m with Drew: what the hell is Smith’s point?
I can only tell you how I interpret what he’s saying. He’s divvying employment growth among government and the goods-producing sectors of the economy on the one hand and “everything else” on the other. He finds that employment growth in government and goods-producing has been pretty flat for quite a while while it’s been growing in “everything else”.
In comments Stewart Rubinstein breaks it down even farther into three classifications: goods-producing, government, and “everything else”. Using those classifications employment in the goods-producing area has plummeted, government has remained flat, and “everything else” has skyrocketed.
I suspect that if you break out healthcare employment you’ll find that it accounts for a good bit of the growth in employment in “everything else”.
Karl Smith seems to think that employment in primary and secondary education is included under government. I’m skeptical but I’ll need to poke into it a bit more to find out.
In some ways he’s just saying that for the last 80 years we have increasingly become a services economy.
The data appear to be derived from the BLS Employment Situation reports. Consequently, “government” does include education and does not include military.
He is saying that government employment is flat. In the area of making stuff, we have had major losses, especially in construction and manufacturing. Everything else is growing at the same rate as it did after our last recession. The rate of growth in health care is down a bit since the Great Recession. It is probably not the dominant factor in that group. (This is talking about employment.)
Steve
Well, Steve, healthcare employment has doubled as a percentage of total employment over the period of the last twenty years (it’s now around 10% of total employment), and it’s continued to increase during the recovery.
See here. Also here.
Some generalizations:
Goods Producing — Unionized
Government — Unionized
Service Sector — Not Unionized
Where would number of jobs be greatest?
Don’t want to put words in your mouth, PD, but the only inference I could draw from that guys graphs was that service sector was growing. Well, duh.
Employment is not a relevant metric for measuring government vs. private sector growth. What matters is how much and what kinds of products is government buying from the private sector compared to the share consumed BY the private sector, what sort of distortive effects (if any) are those purchases having and is the government crowding out private sector wealth creation by spending too much and triggering inflation or spending to little and reducing available monetary supply. The technological advancements which are reducing manpower needs throughout our economy also enable government to do more without hiring more workers. That doesn’t mean it is having less of an effect.