Race to the Top

Rick Ballard, the proprietor of Yargb, has a terrific post up attacking the discouragingly vibrant meme that the U.S., by being uncompetitive in manufacturing, is headed toward a vanishing middle class and nothing but McJobs. He took the trouble of looking up Bureau of Labor Statistics data on U.S. occupational trends. The picture below shows what he found:



(A less blurry version can be found at the original post.) Manufacturing is stagnant, resource-extraction is down, but professions and management are up substantially. Exactly what product-lifecycle thinking would predict: the U.S. prospers in a world of free commerce by moving up to the jobs where the money is the greatest, and handing off many lower-wage jobs to lower-wage countries. (With good policy they too one day will move on up.)