Episode 18: Will Your Job Disappear by 2024?

e X, dot com, futures, options and spots. Trading involves risk and may not be appropriate for all investors. Hi, and welcome back to Bloomberg Benchmark, a podcast about the global economy. It is Wednesday, December. I'm Tori Stiwell and economics reporter with Bloomberg News, and I am in New York work today with Dan Moss. And we're also joined by Aki Edo, our editor for Benchmark in San Francisco. Guys, Hiaki, are you feeling all lonesome out there? I am, I am,

I wish. Yeah. We're having a big party here in New York with the producers Crazy. Today we're going to be looking forward, not just next year, but to the coming decade. We're going to offer everyone a sneak preview far out into the future. What does the American labor market look like a decade from now? And we have a great guide with us, which is this giant set of projections that the US Labor Department published this month.

It's got info on the fate of hundreds of different kinds of jobs by the year, and it's a pretty fascinating look into the future. Gosh, I just love this report. I've used it for my own reporting, and I like it for myself to you know, thinking about where I want my own career to go. Uh Tori, what will your life look like? And ideally I will be on a farm making homemade cheese. And that's the dream just in overalls, Yeah, retirement at age six. Now I'm going

to be a farmer. I'm gonnas how farmers are going to do real quick? Farmers are going to lose jobs. Yeah, yeah, we're moving away from an agricultural economy. You'll be one of the very few. You'll be really special, excellent, It'll be like an artisanal farm. To help us make sense of this brave new world, and we have Heidi Sherholtz on the line. She is the chief economist at the Labor Department. Hello Heidi, Hi, thank you for having me. Heidi. This is a huge report that you guys have put out.

So let's start with very broad, five thousand foot view of the labor market. What are the main changes that we are going to see in the demographic makeup of our workforce over the next nine tennis years. Yeah. So this is the report that the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts out every two years where they do these massive projections of what employment will be like for the next ten years. They look at not just occupations and industries

that will be growing, but also demographic changes. And one of the sort of the theme we see from these numbers is not a surprise. The labor force is going to continue to get older. We're seeing more of the just broad aging of the population that will sort of start tapering off at the end of this window, at the end of this tenure window they're looking at, but we are seeing the labor force continuing to get older. And then the other thing that we're seeing is increasing

diversity of the labor force. We see bigger share of the labor force are racial un ethnic minorities, and so those two key things are sort of important dynamics going forward. And one one thing I should say though, is none of that is changing incredibly rapidly. Deetographic trends tend to move pretty slowly, but that's the direction they're going in

right now. I want to I want to zoom in on the on the kind of aging piece of this because I thought it was really interesting in the report, you guys say that the labor force participation rate, which is the share of the working age population that is either employed or at least looking for a job, that rate for the sixty five years old and older age group is going to rise to one point seven percent from eighteen point six percent. And I think that's just

it's astounding. It's a it's a really big increase in I think really illustrates what you just said very well. Yeah, it's a fascinating dynamic. So we see workers workers who are older or people who are older are more likely to be in the labor force than they used to be, and that trend is continuing. So some of that so we're never going to retire at all. I do I do plan on retiring myself, and I believe you all will also be able to have a period of retirement.

But people are um starting to delay that more than they used to. So we're starting to see workers over age sixty five and larger numbers continue being in the labor force. But you will note those numbers you cited are still quite low. It's not like they're compared to younger workers. Yes, and one of the dynamics we're seeing is the um the overall labor force participation rate is

actually dropping. Interestingly enough, because when you even though you have this increase in labor force participation of older workers, their overall numbers are lower. It's growing, but from sort of a very low base. And so as we have the aging of the workforce, you're aging people into this

category that has a lower labor force participation rate. Let's talk about this older population, and you know, as our population ages, that really means that some jobs are going to be in huge amen and other jobs aren't going to be in demand at all. So, Dan, do you want to walk us through some of those numbers. We'll be seeing big increases in healthcare across the board. Someone has to take care of this aging population. The job that's going to see the most growth over the next

decade is a thing called personal care aids. These are people who take care of everyday stuff when you can't do it yourself. This job is going to employ almost half a million more people in compared with last year. That's a lot of people. And there are tons of other jobs in healthcare that are also going to win pretty big registered nurses, home health aids, nursing assistance, medical assistance. So let's say I'm squeamish. I don't like to see blood.

I get a bit uneasy around sick people. Makes me sad. You know, I'm not a huge guy in terms of guzzling medicine or administering medicine. So what else could I do when I get old? We've got other jobs for you, I promise, Thank god there are You were really emphatic there. That was great. Over the next ten years, it's expected that will add almost ten million jobs. Around a quarter of those jobs are indeed expected to be in healthcare, so that's a huge share, but it's still only a

quarter of those jobs. So even though it's a fast growing industry, there's going to be a lot of other jobs growing. So there's a lot of other jobs. There's a lot of other high paying jobs that are going to be added. Outside of the health care industry. You see a lot of growth and business and financial operations,

computer and mathematics occupations, management occupations. One of the category that's growing strongly that is a good paying job that doesn't necessarily require a college degree are installation, maintenance and repair occupations. And that's one of the categories where the

aging of the workforce factors in. Is that like the guy who comes in and puts in your cable box at his or the plumber who comes in and compares that that when you sort of think of installation and repair, that that's a catch all for all of those skilled, in many cases very skilled trades. And we're seeing many of the workers in those jobs are getting older and so as you see retirements happening, it's going to open up a lot of jobs. And I just have to

mention this category because it's jumping out of me. You've listed as an industry offices of dentists and they're supposed to do really well. Yeah, I don't have anything specific to say about the offices of that dis although one thing I can say is that now that I've become chief Economists at the Department of Labor, the job involves such stress that I now grind my teeth at night.

Did you get a nightguard? I have a nightguard. Now help health employ more than this, But I, UM, I do think it's part of the broader We're going to need more people in healthcare. I like. I also like the occupation you guys have here. It's the fastest growing occupation, even though it employees a relatively small number of people, wind turbine service technicians. That makes me so the story behind that. You're right, it's small, but it sticks out

as the fastest. Yeah, it is because it's been around ten or so years when we started, since we started to see a big investment in wind turbine and now they're coming due for repair, and so we're we are now seeing we're going to continue to see the need for more of those of repair technicians. That's interesting because I still think of them as being a failing new phenomenon. But you're signing the replacement cycles already here. Yeah, we've really we started to see, um that investment pick up

five ten years ago. So over the next ten years they're gonna start to need to be fixed. Let's let's bum everyone out for one second. Which jobs are disappearing a CD of those numbers for us? Yeah, so the postal service as an industry is going to lose a whole lot a hundred and sixty five thousand jobs. Uh, and we're probably going to see really big losses in the number of federal government jobs. To other than that, our economy is going to continue to make more progress

into becoming a service oriented economy. So we're gonna lose a lot of manufacturing jobs. Um, these jobs are going to move to countries with cheaper labor, or they're going to be replaced by robots altogether, HAIDI. I worry that we may already know the answer to this, but we've got to ask anyway, what do our prospects as journalists look like? So one of the journalists, it's tricky. It is one of those industries where it's evolving so quickly that one way people consume news to day may not

be the way they consume news the next day. But I think the key thing is they're still consuming news like you know, people are always going to be hungry for the information, and so you guys are doing the right thing by being creative about different ways to try to get the news to people. Are not like regular journalists were cool journals you are. I think she's saying we're lucky we were exactly. Well that's a ringing endorsement from the US government itself. Yeah, well, we've gone through

lots of winners and losers. Let's jump into a broader discussion about the future of the job market and what we can do to be ready for that future. After a word from our sponsor, what do traders want to limit risk? Access every opportunity and trade on a level playing field. Nate x binary options let you set your maximum profit and loss before the trade, so your risk

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and swaps. Trading involves risk and may not be appropriate for all investors. So in a previous episode, we talked about how advances and artificial intelligence are allowing engineers to make software do all these things that only humans could do before. And one of my pet favorites has been driverless cars because I don't really like driving and this

would presumably displace human taxi drivers. So Heidi, you know, what are your thoughts on the technological progress that we've seen so far are and it's impact on the job market and where do you think that's going. So while I remain extremely excited about the prospect of driverless cars, I do think that there's an important context for thinking

about how fast things are changing right now. There's a sort of breathless conversation out there about this pace of change, But there's actually a way we can look at, like like sort of measure how fast things are changing, and

it's productivity growth. So if robots really were stealing all our jobs, that means that before something that took you know, ten people to do, now it takes one person to sort of supervise for lack of a better word, ten robots and so that one human hour of work they get the same amount done, where before it took ten human hours to do the work. So that kind of

scenario describes a big acceleration of productivity growth. But if you look historically, productivity has typically grown around two percent per year. It's sometimes faster, sometimes slower, but that's sort of been its long run growth rate. It is, if anything, a little slower than that over the last ten years than it was before. So we are not seeing a massive acceleration and productivity growth that would signal that robots

were stealing all of our jobs. And our listeners will know from our very first episode it is the US economies silent menace. Yeah, I I. One of the things about that long run productivity growth is that that's happened in times of prosperity and times of recessions, but that

but mostly it's happened in times of prosperity. In times of prosperity is when there's a lot of innovation going on, and productivity tends to accelerate because there's sort of a lot of action out there and investments and innovation and people people having the opportunity to try new things that can lead to productivity growth um that goes hand in hand with a lot of job growth, a lot of good things happening, So it doesn't necessarily spell it doesn't

in my view, productivity growth doesn't spell menace. Um. You know, robots will steal some jobs, but the people who then benefit from that productivity growth have more income. They buy nude things that generates demand for other things that people get employed in other places. So there's there's sort of there could be adjustment pain as there's one occupation or industry that gets subsumed by robots, but it, you know, it sort of balloons out elsewhere and there's something else

at growth. One thing I thought was really interesting in projections is participation by youth in the labor force. So people ages sixteen to twenty four, and right now they make up about almost four of the labor force, but that's projected to decrease. So I think it's it's fascinating You've got this dynamic where the participation by older adults is increasing and the participation by the youngest adults is decreasing. What's going on there? Shouldn't the the young ones be

the ones that are most highly engaged? Is it's solely because they're going to college. What what's what's thee you put your finger on it. So the UM the there's been a long term decline in labor force participation of younger people, workers under the age of people under the age of and that is a huge chunk of that is attributable to people staying in school longer. So it's people.

You know, even high school graduation rates are going up, and then college graduation rates going up, people going and getting master's degrees and even higher levels of professional degrees. The incidents of that, the share of young workers that are continuing on in school is just going up. So that um, that piece of the clin mine in labor force participation among young people is actually really good news. It's people making investments that will set them up to

get higher earnings going forward. And when you finished this report and you sat back and you went home at night, did anything keep you up anything? He'd really worry us, you know, none of what maybe not in the sense that it was what we see wasn't a surprise. The even though there's changes, all we were seeing sort of things like the fastest growing jobs are going to be in healthcare, that there are. The labor market is evolving all the time, but it tends to evolve pretty slowly.

If you look out in the world and you see the jobs that people do, it's you know, it's this. It doesn't evolve all that fast. We still have unless there's a shock, right, unless we get another another accession, oh right right, that would be indeed a uh that that I do not want to have happened. And that's the stand of mixed in and for as long as is absolutely possible. Um. So the thing about these projections

is that they don't factor that in. These projections come out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and we we certainly it is not their job to try to predict when the next recession will be. And so they just assume that things are going to be humming along at

a at a sort of a happy place. And so I do get worried about the prospect of another recession, but that is not what these numbers are about it right right, um, you know, how do you Before a break, we talked about the not very encouraging future of print journalism at least um so a newspaper, the newspaper and periodicals industry is projected to lose more than one thousand jobs over the next decade UM. For for people like us who are in these potentially losing industries, UM, what

do you think we should be thinking about it? It is tricky because you the well I keep saying things evolved slowly, but there's some occupations and industries where things are evolving quickly, and journalism in point of those. You just see this, it's sort of lightning pace of the way people absorb news just seems to be changing all the time, really rapidly. But I think you just can go back to we know they're still taking a news. People are still really hungry for this information, and so

it will be out there. So the best advice is to do what you're doing, experiment, be flexible, be you know, sort of able to to um looking forward into how people are consuming it and trying to go in that direction. Wonderful. Well, thank you Heidi so much for joining us. It's been great getting all this wonderful insight from you. It's been my pleasure. Happy New Year, you guys, thanks again for

listening to Bloomberg Benchmark. We will be back next year were and until then you can find us on the Bloomberg Terminal and Bloomberg dot Com, as well as on iTunes, pocketcast, stitch your Google Play, and while you're there, please take a minute to rate and review the show. Some more people can find us and let us know what you thought of the show. You can talk to us and follow us on Twitter at seven at Tori Stillwell and at Daniel Moss DC. Happy New Year, We'll see you in.

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