With the obvious caveat that economic predictions must be taken with more than a dash of salt, my answers are: probably not, not necessarily, hard to say, and almost certainly no.

This isn’t just pure speculation. I’m aided by one of my favorite government reports: the Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Projections (and, yes, I know this sounds perhaps a touch nerdy). The BLS gathers estimates of all the relevant growth variables, both economic and demographic, and guesses how many and what kind of jobs will be gained and lost over the next decade.

AD

AD

The BLS has a decent track record, though technology and unforeseen downturns trip it up. A few decades ago, the bureau thought that because there were more elderly households, which tend to travel more, we’d need more travel agents. But then all those travel websites came along. Also, nobody can predict the timing or depth of recessions. Where it tends to do best is in predicting sectoral employment shares, and that provides useful insights about the future (e.g. because of downturn, the BLS might get the numbers of jobs in say, construction, wrong, but it still tends to get close in terms of the share of construction jobs; see charts 9-11 here).

First, what do the predictions say about automation? While no one can foresee some new, game-changing innovation (and, most importantly, what the innovation will mean for labor demand; automation kills old jobs and creates new ones!), there’s not much evidence for accelerated displacement. In fact, while some of the fastest-growing jobs are in advanced tech, many of the biggest gainers, in raw numbers, are in low-end, labor-intensive services.

Check out the figure below (h/t Somin Park!). On the left, you see the 10 fastest-growing jobs, with each bar representing their median pay last year. Solar panel installers are expected to double over the next decade, but in raw numbers, that means going from 11,000 to 23,000. In a labor force that’s expected to number 170 million by 2026, that’s a minuscule share of employment. Same with wind turbine workers; the BLS predicts they’ll almost double, too, from about 6,000 to 11,000. There are highly welcome changes over tiny bases.

The right panel shows where the most jobs are expected to be added, and here you see less of the “new” economy. Personal-care workers, like home health aides, help older people with daily living activities, disabilities and chronic illnesses. Together, these occupations are expected to add over a million jobs. And note that both are relatively low-paying and require, according to the BLS, no more than a high school education (note also that these jobs make both lists; they’re growing quickly off a large base). Most of the other occupations adding the most jobs share these characteristics.

AD

AD

It’s a little tricky to wax on about the new, disruptive, IT-driven U.S. economy when the occupations predicted to add the most jobs in this future economy include food-prep workers, home health aides, waitpersons, janitors and material movers, with median earnings between $20,000 and $25,000.

Such observations may dampen automation alarmism, but the low median pay rates of occupations adding the most jobs raise real concerns about the living standards of non-college-educated workers in these lower-end, service jobs, too often without any union representation. Tight labor markets will help, as persistently low unemployment pressures low-wage employers to raise wage offers. There are also two simple, tried-and-true policy solutions to raise low pay: higher minimum wages and a much expanded earned-income tax credit.

The BLS expects manufacturing jobs to fall by 700,000 over the next decade, which would actually be an improvement, as the figure below reveals. While it’s common to tag automation vs. offshoring for manufacturing job loss, in some periods, particularly the 2000s, that’s wrong. In those years, trade deficits in manufactured goods were economically large and not offset by other measures to help displaced workers.

Which brings us to the last question — will Trump save coal jobs? — and the political implications of these projections. The BLS expects coal mining to continue to shrink over the next decade, from about 50,500 jobs to 47,100 jobs. I suspect it is right. More broadly, in the New York Times write-up of the projections, economist Jed Kolko from the job-search site Indeed.com points out that the worse-predicted job outcomes tend to be in counties that Trump won.

AD

AD

Candidate Trump convinced a lot of people in those areas that he’d reverse these trends. You can argue that they should have known better than to believe such an obvious huckster (though I’d disagree), but by the time he runs for reelection, if analysts like me are doing our job, the truth that he has no intention to help those left behind should be clear. Just look at his proposed tax cut, which, by 2027, is expected to deliver 80 percent of its benefits to the top 1 percent.