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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Most big productivity increases have been in the manufacturing and agriculture areas. Those have been so successful that they now employ only 9.5% of the US workforce. The areas with strong productivity increases shrink, while the ones with low or no productivity increase come to dominate employment.

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There's a formal statement of that, essentially an analogue of Amdahl's Law. As you optimise labour in certain parts of the economy, you're left with the bits that cannot have their productivity increased.

Unfortunately I cannot for the life of me remember what it's called or where I read it. Good odds it's in Robert Gordon's new book (The Rise and Fall of American Growth) or related discussion. Or somewhere in William Ophuls' Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity discussing technology, or Carlotta Perez's Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital.

Light reading.…

Baumol's cost disease.

  Baumol and Bowen pointed out that the same number of 
  musicians is needed to play a Beethoven string quartet today 
  as was needed in the 19th century; that is, the productivity 
  of classical music performance has not increased. On the 
  other hand, real wages of musicians (as well as in all other 
  professions) have increased greatly since the 19th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

Thank you. I'd run across that elsewhere and was wondering where the hell I'd just recently mentioned it....

The decline of the number of people employed in agriculture is certainly due to increases in productivity (small family farms giving way to industrial-scale farming). But much of the decline in the number of U.S. manufacturing jobs has occurred due to these jobs being moved outside the country, where labor is cheaper.

No. US manufacturing output is at an all-time high.[1] US manufacturing jobs peaked in the late 1970s.[2]

[1] https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/OUTMS [2] https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/MANEMP

Well stated.

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