Creative Class

In my last post, I mapped the projected growth in service jobs across America’s metro regions. Today, I look at a subset of those higher-paying, higher-skill jobs for knowledge, professional, and creative workers that make up the creative class. More than 35 million people are currently employed in creative class work in fields like science, technology, and engineering; business, finance, and management; law, health care, and education; and arts, culture, media, and entertainment. The creative class makes up roughly a third of total employment and accounts for more than half of all wages and salaries in America. Creative class employment has seen relatively low rates of unemployment during the course of the economic crisis. Creative class jobs will make up roughly half of all projected U.S. employment growth – adding 6.8 million new jobs by 2018. (more…)

The past week or so, I’ve been tracking where new jobs will be created in America. Today, I look at the sector of the economy that accounts for the largest share of all jobs – the service class. More than 60 million American workers do this kind of low-skill, low-wage, routine service work, making up 45 percent of the work force. These service class jobs are projected to make up more than roughly half of all projected new jobs out to 2018 – 7.1 million new jobs, including 835,000 projected new home health and personal care aides, 400,000 new customer service positions, 400,000 new food preparation workers, and 375,000 new retail sales clerks. (more…)

The United States has seen a steady erosion of blue-collar work over the past several decades. We define blue-collar, working class jobs as those which primarily make use of physical skill or manual labor. These occupations include not only factory work or production occupations, but jobs in construction, materials moving, transportation, installation, and repair. Blue-collar, working class jobs currently account for 23 percent of all U.S. employment. Blue-collar occupations and the regions that specialize in this kind of work have seen the highest levels of unemployment and the greatest vulnerability to the economic crisis. The decline of high-paying, blue-collar jobs for lower-skilled workers has caused considerable concern that the U.S. is losing an important source of good, family-supporting jobs, and that the American labor market is becoming more uneven and increasingly split between higher-paying knowledge work and lower-paying routine service work. But what will the geography of blue-collar work look like in the future? (more…)

Last Friday, my list of the 20 metros with the fastest-growing jobs was posted over at The Daily Beast. Jobs are the second-biggest issue facing the United States – second only to the economy, according to a recent Gallup poll – and a pending referendum on the Obama administration in the upcoming mid-term elections. As I noted:

The United States has lost an estimated 7.4 million jobs since the onset of the economic crisis. But, the economy is on track to create some 15.3 million new jobs looking out to 2018, according to projections done by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). And more than 50 million total jobs will come open, as older workers retire and many switch jobs and careers. Total U.S. employment is projected to grow by 10.1 percent over the period, according to the BLS forecast, considerably better than the 7.4 percent growth rate for previous decade (1998-2008), and roughly in line with population growth of 10.7 percent.

But where will the new jobs be located? Which places will grow the most jobs and, conversely, which will see the biggest job losses?

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After a long drive up to the shores of Lake Michigan, I opened my laptop to check up on a day or so of lost e-mail, and in my in-box were a slew of messages reporting on the passing of Chris Freeman. It’s apt that I sit here writing this feeling the cool breezes off the gorgeous clear blue lake on this magnificent August day thinking back on his work and life.

Chris Freeman was one of the greatest thinkers and scholars of innovation and the dynamics of the capitalist economy. Born in 1921, the same year as my own father, Freeman not only studied capitalist innovation and dynamics, he lived them. As a young boy, he watched the world lapse into depression, he watched England be eclipsed as an economic power, and he watched the tremendous power of innovation propel post-war growth and prosperity. He saw the rise of the corporate R&D lab and the bureaucratization of innovation that Schumpeter had written about, and then he saw the surge in entrepreneurial venture capital financed innovation in the late 20th century. He witnessed firsthand the bursting forward of innovation in great bunches and bundles, pushing capitalism forward and changing its stripes as it did so. But he was never, ever a technological determinist. Throughout his work, he called attention to the complex and nuanced interplay between technology and organization in shaping both economy and society.

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Here’s some video from my CNBC StreetSigns appearance with Robert Shiller.

Check out my new piece in The New Republic:

Speaking at a health care reform rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, in July 2009, President Obama declared that the worst of the recession was over. “We have stopped the free-fall. The market is up and the financial system is no longer on the verge of collapse,” he said proudly.

A year or so later, with midterm elections looming and an electorate that is as fearful and angry as any in memory, the stock market has risen, but even a breath of bad news can send it tumbling. As dismal as housing prices continue to be, they have yet to hit bottom in some places. Unemployment remains frozen at an overall level of nine-plus percent, and job creation has been anemic. If the crisis belonged to George W. Bush, the recovery has been Obama’s—and it has been a fragile and tentative one at best. Along with billions of dollars in stimulus payments, the president has spent down most of his political capital. So what is his next step?

Read the full article here.

Via Marginal Revolution

Last week, I posted on a Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report on the metro regions with the highest-paying jobs in nine major occupations. But this report only listed the top two regions in each category. So I decided to take a closer look at the underlying BLS data to compile a more comprehensive mapping of regional pay. With the help of my colleague, Charlotta Mellander, we looked at the pay levels for three types of jobs – high-skill, high-pay, creative class jobs; traditional, blue-collar, working class jobs; and lower-skill, lower-pay service jobs.

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Across the world, two in 10 households have access to the Internet at home, according to a just released Gallup survey. Internet access at home was far greater in more economically advanced countries: Nearly eight in 10 people (78 percent) in countries where gross domestic product (GDP) is more than $25,000 have Internet access at home. Home Internet access drops off steeply in less affluent, less developed nations, according to the Gallup survey, especially in countries with less than $10,000 in per capita GDP. The survey is based on telephone and face-to-face interviews with approximately 1,000 adults, aged 15 and older in 116 countries, and was conducted in 2009.

The map above, by Zara Matheson of the Martin Prosperity Institute, shows the percentage of households with Internet connectivity, highlighting the top 10.

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