Figure 2

The Full Picture: How Much Work Is New Work?

Share of the U.S. labor force employed in occupations that didn't exist in earlier eras — the same measure used in the agriculture chart

Eight fields we can trace (Figure 5)
All "new work" occupations (Autor et al., MIT/QJE 2024)
Farming today (1.3%)
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 75% 1850 1900 1950 1980 2000 2025 Agriculture in 1800: 75% Farming today: 1.3% 60% of all U.S. workers hold jobs that didn't exist in 1940 Autor et al., QJE 2024 7.1% in just the 8 fields we can trace The gap Hundreds of other "new work" occupations we can't trace to 1850 Same measure as the agriculture chart: share of the U.S. labor force. Farming fell from 75% to 1.3%. New occupations rose from 0% to 60%.

Read this chart against the agriculture chart. Farming fell from 75% of the labor force to 1.3%. Meanwhile, MIT economist David Autor and his colleagues documented that 60% of all American workers today hold jobs in occupations that didn't exist in 1940. Among professionals, it's 74%. In health services, 85%. The blue line at the bottom shows the eight specific fields we can trace all the way back to 1850: nurses, engineers, software developers, accountants, cybersecurity, app developers, solar, and data scientists. But those eight fields are just the visible fraction. The purple line shows the full picture measured by Autor's research. The economy didn't just replace the jobs that farming lost. It created an entirely new world of work that no one standing in a field in 1850 could have imagined.

Sources: Blue line — combined employment in 8 fields from Figure 5, divided by U.S. labor force (BLS CPS; Lebergott NBER estimates pre-1950; Wyatt & Hecker, BLS Monthly Labor Review, March 2006). Purple line — Autor, Chin, Salomons & Seegmiller, "New Frontiers: The Origins and Content of New Work, 1940-2018," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 139, Issue 3, August 2024. Decade-by-decade estimates interpolated from paper's methodology tracking new Census occupational titles. The 60% figure represents employment in job titles added to the Census Bureau's occupational index after 1940. Agriculture reference: USDA/BLS (Figure 1). Farming reference line at 1.3% from BLS 2024.