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| At the beginning of the 20th century, total employment in the United States was about 26 million. About 11 million of that total, or more than 40 percent, were agricultural jobs. Over the last 100 years, agricultural employment has shrunk to just over 3 million, or less than 3 percent of total employment. If you had told a farmer in 1900 that over the next 100 years employment in agriculture would go from more than 40 percent of economy-wide employment to less than 3 percent, he would have been horrified. What could possibly replace all of those jobs? Surely, there would be massive unemployment and famine. It turns out that his fear would have been misplaced. While farm jobs were getting scarce, we managed to create over 100 million new jobs in the past century. Those agricultural jobs were replaced with other kinds of jobs, jobs that people preferred over working in the fields at five in the morning and slopping the hogs. Talking to a farmer in 1900, we would have had no way of predicting what kind of jobs would be created to replace the agricultural jobs that would not have been created in the first place. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that millions of jobs were created as U.S. resources were devoted to activities other than farming. The farmer’s skepticism would have been misplaced. That error may provide comfort to today’s skeptic who is concerned about the same issue of future job growth. |
