2014's Job Growth by Major Industry

Another way to study the cumulative effect of various industries on the overall rate of job creation is to measure the rate that they're growing rather than the total jobs they're adding.

Health care, for example, sparked growth according to that first graph. But the health industry—including doctors, nurses, and home heath aides—is actually growing slower than the overall economy for the first time in many years (see graph below). Mining, on the other hand, isn't a major contributor to jobs, particularly outside of a handful of energy states, but as an industry, it's expanding considerably faster than the rest of the economy. In the following graph, red industries are growing faster than the overall rate and blue industries are growing slower.

2014's Job Growth by Major Industry (%)

Pull back the lens to January 2008, the month after the Great Recession began, to see why it's so misleading to talk about "the economy" as a monolith rather than a bundle.

Health care added 2.1 million jobs in the six post-recession years, more than leisure, hospitality, professional services, and education, combined. Construction and manufacturing, however, are still wallowing in their own recessions. (As the previous graph showed, construction has been digging its way out of the trough for the last 12 months.)

The Two (or 12, or 20) Economies

McKinsey Global Institute

Good reporters will point out all the downsides of today's otherwise promising jobs report. The sleeping beast of inflation is still sleeping. Wage growth is dormant. The participation rate is still slipping.

So the labor force is partying like it's 1999, mostly on the strength of white-collar workers, cheap food services jobs, and the slow-and-steady growth of retail. Living through the "Best Year of Job Creation of This Century" might be a bit like finding the warmest ice pack in the freezer, but in this economy, there's no shame in settling.

*Although 2014 is on pace to create more jobs than in 2005, it's not clear that the labor force will expand at a higher rate, since the base number of jobs is higher.