"Interesting -- but not very useful.
To see where our employment meltdown is taking us, you need to look at trends in labor participation rates, by increasing education and by increasing age. I did, and both are falling.
In other words, the percent of people with little or no education who have jobs is increasing -- while the percent of highly educated, employed with high paying jobs, is decreasing. The same applies to seniors and their cohorts. Both trends have been in place for a while – and are increasing.
It's what you'd expected for an economy that better rewards the relatively unproductive labors of financing, educating, litigating, and nursing than of actually DOING the productive, high value-added labor needed to generate at least as much, or more, economic wealth than we consume as a nation.
There’s no way to recover that high value added labor – sufficient to our nation’s consumption – without corresponding changes to the roles, goals and rewards our economy offers. As long as capital accumulation, control and intermediation is better rewarded than its productive investment and use – we’ll continue to see less of the latter and more of the former – until our National saving go too far negative to continue their descent. "
An aging population demands caregivers - a low skill job. Even at the lowest point of the recession, the nursing homes and retirement communities I see needed nursing assistants, caregivers and housekeeping staff. Except the CNA, all low skill.