Stat of the Week

Posted Apr 22, 2024

If your job would baffle your great-grandmother, you’re not alone. About six out of every 10 jobs people do today didn’t exist in 1940, according to a new analysis of US census data from 1940 to 2018 led by an MIT economist. While many of those jobs were created by new technologies, some came from changing consumer needs. And while in the first 40 years of that nearly 80-year period most of the new jobs, which included many manufacturing and clerical positions, were scooped up by the middle class, the more recent jobs have tended to be either highly paid white-collar roles or lower-wage service jobs.