The new issue of BusinessWeek (December 22) finds economist, Michael Mandel digging into the jobs data. What he finds is very interesting: jobs in manufacturing, transportation, construction, and extraction are tanking – what he calls the “tangible sector” and we call the “working class” have cratered, but jobs in professional fields, management, and science and technology – he calls them the “intangible sector,”we say “creative class” – continue to grow. The U.S. economy has lost nearly two million jobs in the past year, close to the 2.2 million jobs lost in the 1973-75 recession (we’ll go past that benchmark soon if we haven’t already), and unemployment (as officially defined) stands at 6.7 percent. But unemployment in manufacturing is 9.4 percent and even higher, 12.1 percent in construction and extraction. Here’s the rub. Of nearly all the 1.9 million jobs lost, 1.8 million of them were tangible sector jobs. The intangible sector actually added 515,000 jobs. The economic effects of the crisis remain very uneven for socio-economic classes and for regions.
