Most Work Is New Work, Long-Term Study of U.S. Census Data Shows

Source: Peter Dizikes, MIT News, April 1, 2024

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So, o things we didn’t know we could make progress on.”
“Technician, fingernail”
To conduct the study, the scholars dug deeply into government data about jobs and patents, using
natural language processing techniques that identified related descriptions in patent and census data to link
innovations and subsequent job creation. The U.S. Census Bureau tracks the emerging job descriptions that
respondents provide — like the ones the Wright brothers wrote down. Each decade’s jobs index lists about
35,000 occupations and 15,000 specialized variants of them.
Many new occupations are straightforwardly the result of new technologies creating new forms of
work. For instance, “Engineers of computer applications” was first codified in 1970, “Circuit layout
designers” in 1990, and “Solar photovoltaic electrician” made its debut in 2018.
“Many, many forms of expertise are really specific to a technology or a service,” Autor says. “This
is quantitatively a big deal.”
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He adds: “When we rebuild the electrical grid, we’re going to create new occupations — not just
electricians, but the solar equivalent, i.e., solar electricians. Eventually that becomes a specialty. The first
objective of our study is to measure [this kind of process]; the second is to show what it responds to and
how it occurs; and the third is to show what effect automation has on employment.”
On the second point, however, innovations are not the only way new jobs emerge. The wants and
needs of consumers also generate new vocations. As the paper notes, “Tattooers” became a U.S. census job
category in 1950, “Hypnotherapists” was codified in 1980, and “Conference planners” in 1990. Also, the
date of U.S. Census Bureau codification is not the first time anyone worked in those roles; it is the point at
which enough people had those jobs that the bureau recognized the work as a substantial employment
category. For instance, “Technician, fingernail” became a category in 2000.
“It’s not just technology that creates new work, it’s new demand,” Autor says. An aging population
of baby boomers may be creating new roles for personal health care aides that are only now emerging as
plausible job categories.
All told, among “professionals,” essentially specialized white-collar workers, about 74 percent of
jobs in the area have been created since 1940. In the category of “health services” — the personal service
side of health care, including general health aides, occupational therapy aides, and more — about 85
percent of jobs have emerged in the same time. By contrast, in the realm of manufacturing, that figure is
just 46 percent.
Differences by degree
The fact that some areas of employment feature relatively more new jobs than others is one of the
major features of the U.S. jobs landscape over the last 80 years. And one of the most striking things about
that time period, in terms of jobs, is that it consists of two fairly distinct 40-year periods.
In the first 40 years, from 1940 to about 1980, the U.S. became a singular postwar manufacturing
powerhouse, production jobs grew, and middle-income clerical and other office jobs grew up around those
industries.
But in the last four decades, manufacturing started receding in the U.S., and automation started

eliminating clerical work. From 1980 to the present, there have been two major tracks for new jobs: high-
end and specialized professional work, and lower-paying service-sector jobs, of many types. As the authors

write in the paper, the U.S. has seen an “overall polarization of occupational structure.”
That corresponds with levels of education. The study finds that employees with at least some
college experience are about 25 percent more likely to be working in new occupations than those who
possess less than a high school diploma.
“The real concern is for whom the new work has been created,” Autor says. “In the first period,
from 1940 to 1980, there’s a lot of work being created for people without college degrees, a lot of clerical
work and production work, middle-skill work. In the latter period, it’s bifurcated, with new work for
college graduates being more and more in the professions, and new work for noncollege graduates being
more and more in services.”
Still, Autor adds, “This could change a lot. We’re in a period of potentially consequential
technology transition.”
At the moment, it remains unclear how, and to what extent, evolving technologies such as artificial
intelligence will affect the workplace. However, this is also a major issue addressed in the current research
study: How much does new technology augment employment, by creating new work and viable jobs, and
how much does new technology replace existing jobs, through automation?