Speaker 1: Let's say I'm squeamish. I don't like to see blood.
Speaker 1: I get a bit uneasy around sick people makes me sad.
Speaker 1: So what else could I do when I get old?
Speaker 1: This episode is brought to you by nat X, the
Speaker 1: Binary Options Exchange. Binary options let you limit your risk
Speaker 1: and trade stock in dissees, commodities for x and more
Speaker 1: from a single account. Nat X is a CFTC regulated
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Speaker 1: future of trading is here now at n A d
Speaker 1: e X, dot com, futures, options and spots. Trading involves
Speaker 1: risk and may not be appropriate for all investors. Hi,
Speaker 1: and welcome back to Bloomberg Benchmark, a podcast about the
Speaker 1: global economy. It is Wednesday, December. I'm Tori Stiwell and
Speaker 1: economics reporter with Bloomberg News, and I am in New
Speaker 1: York work today with Dan Moss. And we're also joined
Speaker 1: by Aki Edo, our editor for Benchmark in San Francisco. Guys, Hiaki,
Speaker 1: are you feeling all lonesome out there? I am, I am,
Speaker 1: I wish. Yeah. We're having a big party here in
Speaker 1: New York with the producers Crazy. Today we're going to
Speaker 1: be looking forward, not just next year, but to the
Speaker 1: coming decade. We're going to offer everyone a sneak preview
Speaker 1: far out into the future. What does the American labor
Speaker 1: market look like a decade from now? And we have
Speaker 1: a great guide with us, which is this giant set
Speaker 1: of projections that the US Labor Department published this month.
Speaker 1: It's got info on the fate of hundreds of different
Speaker 1: kinds of jobs by the year, and it's a pretty
Speaker 1: fascinating look into the future. Gosh, I just love this report.
Speaker 1: I've used it for my own reporting, and I like
Speaker 1: it for myself to you know, thinking about where I
Speaker 1: want my own career to go. Uh Tori, what will
Speaker 1: your life look like? And ideally I will be on
Speaker 1: a farm making homemade cheese. And that's the dream just
Speaker 1: in overalls, Yeah, retirement at age six. Now I'm going
Speaker 1: to be a farmer. I'm gonnas how farmers are going
Speaker 1: to do real quick? Farmers are going to lose jobs. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're moving away from an agricultural economy. You'll be one
Speaker 1: of the very few. You'll be really special, excellent, It'll
Speaker 1: be like an artisanal farm. To help us make sense
Speaker 1: of this brave new world, and we have Heidi Sherholtz
Speaker 1: on the line. She is the chief economist at the
Speaker 1: Labor Department. Hello Heidi, Hi, thank you for having me. Heidi.
Speaker 1: This is a huge report that you guys have put out.
Speaker 1: So let's start with very broad, five thousand foot view
Speaker 1: of the labor market. What are the main changes that
Speaker 1: we are going to see in the demographic makeup of
Speaker 1: our workforce over the next nine tennis years. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: this is the report that the Bureau of Labor Statistics
Speaker 1: puts out every two years where they do these massive
Speaker 1: projections of what employment will be like for the next
Speaker 1: ten years. They look at not just occupations and industries
Speaker 1: that will be growing, but also demographic changes. And one
Speaker 1: of the sort of the theme we see from these
Speaker 1: numbers is not a surprise. The labor force is going
Speaker 1: to continue to get older. We're seeing more of the
Speaker 1: just broad aging of the population that will sort of
Speaker 1: start tapering off at the end of this window, at
Speaker 1: the end of this tenure window they're looking at, but
Speaker 1: we are seeing the labor force continuing to get older.
Speaker 1: And then the other thing that we're seeing is increasing
Speaker 1: diversity of the labor force. We see bigger share of
Speaker 1: the labor force are racial un ethnic minorities, and so
Speaker 1: those two key things are sort of important dynamics going forward.
Speaker 1: And one one thing I should say though, is none
Speaker 1: of that is changing incredibly rapidly. Deetographic trends tend to
Speaker 1: move pretty slowly, but that's the direction they're going in
Speaker 1: right now. I want to I want to zoom in
Speaker 1: on the on the kind of aging piece of this
Speaker 1: because I thought it was really interesting in the report,
Speaker 1: you guys say that the labor force participation rate, which
Speaker 1: is the share of the working age population that is
Speaker 1: either employed or at least looking for a job, that
Speaker 1: rate for the sixty five years old and older age
Speaker 1: group is going to rise to one point seven percent
Speaker 1: from eighteen point six percent. And I think that's just
Speaker 1: it's astounding. It's a it's a really big increase in
Speaker 1: I think really illustrates what you just said very well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a fascinating dynamic. So we see workers workers who
Speaker 1: are older or people who are older are more likely
Speaker 1: to be in the labor force than they used to be,
Speaker 1: and that trend is continuing. So some of that so
Speaker 1: we're never going to retire at all. I do I
Speaker 1: do plan on retiring myself, and I believe you all
Speaker 1: will also be able to have a period of retirement.
Speaker 1: But people are um starting to delay that more than
Speaker 1: they used to. So we're starting to see workers over
Speaker 1: age sixty five and larger numbers continue being in the
Speaker 1: labor force. But you will note those numbers you cited
Speaker 1: are still quite low. It's not like they're compared to
Speaker 1: younger workers. Yes, and one of the dynamics we're seeing
Speaker 1: is the um the overall labor force participation rate is
Speaker 1: actually dropping. Interestingly enough, because when you even though you
Speaker 1: have this increase in labor force participation of older workers,
Speaker 1: their overall numbers are lower. It's growing, but from sort
Speaker 1: of a very low base. And so as we have
Speaker 1: the aging of the workforce, you're aging people into this
Speaker 1: category that has a lower labor force participation rate. Let's
Speaker 1: talk about this older population, and you know, as our
Speaker 1: population ages, that really means that some jobs are going
Speaker 1: to be in huge amen and other jobs aren't going
Speaker 1: to be in demand at all. So, Dan, do you
Speaker 1: want to walk us through some of those numbers. We'll
Speaker 1: be seeing big increases in healthcare across the board. Someone
Speaker 1: has to take care of this aging population. The job
Speaker 1: that's going to see the most growth over the next
Speaker 1: decade is a thing called personal care aids. These are
Speaker 1: people who take care of everyday stuff when you can't
Speaker 1: do it yourself. This job is going to employ almost
Speaker 1: half a million more people in compared with last year.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of people. And there are tons of
Speaker 1: other jobs in healthcare that are also going to win
Speaker 1: pretty big registered nurses, home health aids, nursing assistance, medical assistance.
Speaker 1: So let's say I'm squeamish. I don't like to see blood.
Speaker 1: I get a bit uneasy around sick people. Makes me sad.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm not a huge guy in terms of
Speaker 1: guzzling medicine or administering medicine. So what else could I
Speaker 1: do when I get old? We've got other jobs for you,
Speaker 1: I promise, Thank god there are You were really emphatic there.
Speaker 1: That was great. Over the next ten years, it's expected
Speaker 1: that will add almost ten million jobs. Around a quarter
Speaker 1: of those jobs are indeed expected to be in healthcare,
Speaker 1: so that's a huge share, but it's still only a
Speaker 1: quarter of those jobs. So even though it's a fast
Speaker 1: growing industry, there's going to be a lot of other
Speaker 1: jobs growing. So there's a lot of other jobs. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of other high paying jobs that are going
Speaker 1: to be added. Outside of the health care industry. You
Speaker 1: see a lot of growth and business and financial operations,
Speaker 1: computer and mathematics occupations, management occupations. One of the category
Speaker 1: that's growing strongly that is a good paying job that
Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily require a college degree are installation, maintenance and
Speaker 1: repair occupations. And that's one of the categories where the
Speaker 1: aging of the workforce factors in. Is that like the
Speaker 1: guy who comes in and puts in your cable box
Speaker 1: at his or the plumber who comes in and compares
Speaker 1: that that when you sort of think of installation and repair,
Speaker 1: that that's a catch all for all of those skilled,
Speaker 1: in many cases very skilled trades. And we're seeing many
Speaker 1: of the workers in those jobs are getting older and
Speaker 1: so as you see retirements happening, it's going to open
Speaker 1: up a lot of jobs. And I just have to
Speaker 1: mention this category because it's jumping out of me. You've
Speaker 1: listed as an industry offices of dentists and they're supposed
Speaker 1: to do really well. Yeah, I don't have anything specific
Speaker 1: to say about the offices of that dis although one
Speaker 1: thing I can say is that now that I've become
Speaker 1: chief Economists at the Department of Labor, the job involves
Speaker 1: such stress that I now grind my teeth at night.
Speaker 1: Did you get a nightguard? I have a nightguard. Now
Speaker 1: help health employ more than this, But I, UM, I
Speaker 1: do think it's part of the broader We're going to
Speaker 1: need more people in healthcare. I like. I also like
Speaker 1: the occupation you guys have here. It's the fastest growing occupation,
Speaker 1: even though it employees a relatively small number of people,
Speaker 1: wind turbine service technicians. That makes me so the story
Speaker 1: behind that. You're right, it's small, but it sticks out
Speaker 1: as the fastest. Yeah, it is because it's been around
Speaker 1: ten or so years when we started, since we started
Speaker 1: to see a big investment in wind turbine and now
Speaker 1: they're coming due for repair, and so we're we are
Speaker 1: now seeing we're going to continue to see the need
Speaker 1: for more of those of repair technicians. That's interesting because
Speaker 1: I still think of them as being a failing new phenomenon.
Speaker 1: But you're signing the replacement cycles already here. Yeah, we've
Speaker 1: really we started to see, um that investment pick up
Speaker 1: five ten years ago. So over the next ten years
Speaker 1: they're gonna start to need to be fixed. Let's let's
Speaker 1: bum everyone out for one second. Which jobs are disappearing
Speaker 1: a CD of those numbers for us? Yeah, so the
Speaker 1: postal service as an industry is going to lose a
Speaker 1: whole lot a hundred and sixty five thousand jobs. Uh,
Speaker 1: and we're probably going to see really big losses in
Speaker 1: the number of federal government jobs. To other than that,
Speaker 1: our economy is going to continue to make more progress
Speaker 1: into becoming a service oriented economy. So we're gonna lose
Speaker 1: a lot of manufacturing jobs. Um, these jobs are going
Speaker 1: to move to countries with cheaper labor, or they're going
Speaker 1: to be replaced by robots altogether, HAIDI. I worry that
Speaker 1: we may already know the answer to this, but we've
Speaker 1: got to ask anyway, what do our prospects as journalists
Speaker 1: look like? So one of the journalists, it's tricky. It
Speaker 1: is one of those industries where it's evolving so quickly
Speaker 1: that one way people consume news to day may not
Speaker 1: be the way they consume news the next day. But
Speaker 1: I think the key thing is they're still consuming news
Speaker 1: like you know, people are always going to be hungry
Speaker 1: for the information, and so you guys are doing the
Speaker 1: right thing by being creative about different ways to try
Speaker 1: to get the news to people. Are not like regular
Speaker 1: journalists were cool journals you are. I think she's saying
Speaker 1: we're lucky we were exactly. Well that's a ringing endorsement
Speaker 1: from the US government itself. Yeah, well, we've gone through
Speaker 1: lots of winners and losers. Let's jump into a broader
Speaker 1: discussion about the future of the job market and what
Speaker 1: we can do to be ready for that future. After
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Speaker 1: and swaps. Trading involves risk and may not be appropriate
Speaker 1: for all investors. So in a previous episode, we talked
Speaker 1: about how advances and artificial intelligence are allowing engineers to
Speaker 1: make software do all these things that only humans could
Speaker 1: do before. And one of my pet favorites has been
Speaker 1: driverless cars because I don't really like driving and this
Speaker 1: would presumably displace human taxi drivers. So Heidi, you know,
Speaker 1: what are your thoughts on the technological progress that we've
Speaker 1: seen so far are and it's impact on the job
Speaker 1: market and where do you think that's going. So while
Speaker 1: I remain extremely excited about the prospect of driverless cars,
Speaker 1: I do think that there's an important context for thinking
Speaker 1: about how fast things are changing right now. There's a
Speaker 1: sort of breathless conversation out there about this pace of change,
Speaker 1: But there's actually a way we can look at, like
Speaker 1: like sort of measure how fast things are changing, and
Speaker 1: it's productivity growth. So if robots really were stealing all
Speaker 1: our jobs, that means that before something that took you know,
Speaker 1: ten people to do, now it takes one person to
Speaker 1: sort of supervise for lack of a better word, ten
Speaker 1: robots and so that one human hour of work they
Speaker 1: get the same amount done, where before it took ten
Speaker 1: human hours to do the work. So that kind of
Speaker 1: scenario describes a big acceleration of productivity growth. But if
Speaker 1: you look historically, productivity has typically grown around two percent
Speaker 1: per year. It's sometimes faster, sometimes slower, but that's sort
Speaker 1: of been its long run growth rate. It is, if anything,
Speaker 1: a little slower than that over the last ten years
Speaker 1: than it was before. So we are not seeing a
Speaker 1: massive acceleration and productivity growth that would signal that robots
Speaker 1: were stealing all of our jobs. And our listeners will
Speaker 1: know from our very first episode it is the US
Speaker 1: economies silent menace. Yeah, I I. One of the things
Speaker 1: about that long run productivity growth is that that's happened
Speaker 1: in times of prosperity and times of recessions, but that
Speaker 1: but mostly it's happened in times of prosperity. In times
Speaker 1: of prosperity is when there's a lot of innovation going on,
Speaker 1: and productivity tends to accelerate because there's sort of a
Speaker 1: lot of action out there and investments and innovation and
Speaker 1: people people having the opportunity to try new things that
Speaker 1: can lead to productivity growth um that goes hand in
Speaker 1: hand with a lot of job growth, a lot of
Speaker 1: good things happening, So it doesn't necessarily spell it doesn't
Speaker 1: in my view, productivity growth doesn't spell menace. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: robots will steal some jobs, but the people who then
Speaker 1: benefit from that productivity growth have more income. They buy
Speaker 1: nude things that generates demand for other things that people
Speaker 1: get employed in other places. So there's there's sort of
Speaker 1: there could be adjustment pain as there's one occupation or
Speaker 1: industry that gets subsumed by robots, but it, you know,
Speaker 1: it sort of balloons out elsewhere and there's something else
Speaker 1: at growth. One thing I thought was really interesting in
Speaker 1: projections is participation by youth in the labor force. So
Speaker 1: people ages sixteen to twenty four, and right now they
Speaker 1: make up about almost four of the labor force, but
Speaker 1: that's projected to decrease. So I think it's it's fascinating
Speaker 1: You've got this dynamic where the participation by older adults
Speaker 1: is increasing and the participation by the youngest adults is decreasing.
Speaker 1: What's going on there? Shouldn't the the young ones be
Speaker 1: the ones that are most highly engaged? Is it's solely
Speaker 1: because they're going to college. What what's what's thee you
Speaker 1: put your finger on it. So the UM the there's
Speaker 1: been a long term decline in labor force participation of
Speaker 1: younger people, workers under the age of people under the
Speaker 1: age of and that is a huge chunk of that
Speaker 1: is attributable to people staying in school longer. So it's people.
Speaker 1: You know, even high school graduation rates are going up,
Speaker 1: and then college graduation rates going up, people going and
Speaker 1: getting master's degrees and even higher levels of professional degrees.
Speaker 1: The incidents of that, the share of young workers that
Speaker 1: are continuing on in school is just going up. So
Speaker 1: that um, that piece of the clin mine in labor
Speaker 1: force participation among young people is actually really good news.
Speaker 1: It's people making investments that will set them up to
Speaker 1: get higher earnings going forward. And when you finished this
Speaker 1: report and you sat back and you went home at night,
Speaker 1: did anything keep you up anything? He'd really worry us,
Speaker 1: you know, none of what maybe not in the sense
Speaker 1: that it was what we see wasn't a surprise. The
Speaker 1: even though there's changes, all we were seeing sort of
Speaker 1: things like the fastest growing jobs are going to be
Speaker 1: in healthcare, that there are. The labor market is evolving
Speaker 1: all the time, but it tends to evolve pretty slowly.
Speaker 1: If you look out in the world and you see
Speaker 1: the jobs that people do, it's you know, it's this.
Speaker 1: It doesn't evolve all that fast. We still have unless
Speaker 1: there's a shock, right, unless we get another another accession,
Speaker 1: oh right right, that would be indeed a uh that
Speaker 1: that I do not want to have happened. And that's
Speaker 1: the stand of mixed in and for as long as
Speaker 1: is absolutely possible. Um. So the thing about these projections
Speaker 1: is that they don't factor that in. These projections come
Speaker 1: out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and we we
Speaker 1: certainly it is not their job to try to predict
Speaker 1: when the next recession will be. And so they just
Speaker 1: assume that things are going to be humming along at
Speaker 1: a at a sort of a happy place. And so
Speaker 1: I do get worried about the prospect of another recession,
Speaker 1: but that is not what these numbers are about it
Speaker 1: right right, um, you know, how do you Before a break,
Speaker 1: we talked about the not very encouraging future of print
Speaker 1: journalism at least um so a newspaper, the newspaper and
Speaker 1: periodicals industry is projected to lose more than one thousand
Speaker 1: jobs over the next decade UM. For for people like
Speaker 1: us who are in these potentially losing industries, UM, what
Speaker 1: do you think we should be thinking about it? It
Speaker 1: is tricky because you the well I keep saying things
Speaker 1: evolved slowly, but there's some occupations and industries where things
Speaker 1: are evolving quickly, and journalism in point of those. You
Speaker 1: just see this, it's sort of lightning pace of the
Speaker 1: way people absorb news just seems to be changing all
Speaker 1: the time, really rapidly. But I think you just can
Speaker 1: go back to we know they're still taking a news.
Speaker 1: People are still really hungry for this information, and so
Speaker 1: it will be out there. So the best advice is
Speaker 1: to do what you're doing, experiment, be flexible, be you know,
Speaker 1: sort of able to to um looking forward into how
Speaker 1: people are consuming it and trying to go in that direction. Wonderful. Well,
Speaker 1: thank you Heidi so much for joining us. It's been
Speaker 1: great getting all this wonderful insight from you. It's been
Speaker 1: my pleasure. Happy New Year, you guys, thanks again for
Speaker 1: listening to Bloomberg Benchmark. We will be back next year
Speaker 1: were and until then you can find us on the
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Terminal and Bloomberg dot Com, as well as on iTunes, pocketcast,
Speaker 1: stitch your Google Play, and while you're there, please take
Speaker 1: a minute to rate and review the show. Some more
Speaker 1: people can find us and let us know what you
Speaker 1: thought of the show. You can talk to us and
Speaker 1: follow us on Twitter at seven at Tori Stillwell and
Speaker 1: at Daniel Moss DC. Happy New Year, We'll see you in.
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