Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:
Editor:
Andrew Siegrist argues that J.D. Vance “is fighting for … the little guy or gal in the heartland whose job” is now at unusually high risk of being destroyed by technological change (Letters, August 17). The presumption is that the pace of economic change in recent decades has accelerated to a level unacceptably high.
If this battle is really the one Mr. Vance is waging, he’s defending Americans from an imaginary foe. In a May 2017 study, Robert Atkinson and John Wu found that
when we actually examine the last 165 years of American history, statistics show that the U.S. labor market is not experiencing particularly high levels of job churn (defined as the sum of the absolute values of jobs added in growing occupations and jobs lost in declining occupations). In fact, it’s the exact opposite: Levels of occupational churn in the United States are now at historic lows. The levels of churn in the last 20 years – a period of the dot-com crash, the financial crisis of 2007 to 2008, the subsequent Great Recession, and the emergence of new technologies that are purported to be more powerfully disruptive than anything in the past – have been just 38 percent of the levels from 1950 to 2000, and 42 percent of the levels from 1850 to 2000.
And updating these figures on job churn using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on “Layoffs and Discharges,”I find that this churn has only further slowed. From 2001 through 2016 the average number of monthly nonfarm “Layoffs and Discharges” was 1,930,000. But during the period 2017 through June 2024 (excluding the pandemic years of 2020 through 2022) this number fell to 1,736,000.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
