Learned

At the top of the list for highest projected total change in employment between last year and 2033 is "home health and personal care aide." According to the data compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 800,000 new home health and personal care aide jobs will be created in that timeframe. In 2023, the median salary was just over $33,500 annually. Or just under $16 an hour. I suspect that it would be more here, since it takes more than $16 an hour to get people to work in McDonald's or a local grocery store. Home health and personal care aide is near the bottom of the salary table, but it isn't alone. Of the 20 listed roles, 11 of them pay less than the current median wage in the United States.

Preventing economic inequality from growing wider is not going to be a matter of having home health and personal care aides or fast food and counter workers making substantially more money. Mainly because that's unlikely to happen. While one can always point the finger at "corporate greed" or "billionaires" (and I'm sure that people will), the fact of the matter is that the people who employ those roles, families, nursing homes, franchise owners et cetera, aren't likely to have the income of the wealth themselves to pay significantly higher salaries.

So what will need to happen is that the jobs that need to grow the fastest need to be the ones that provide greater value more broadly.

Complaining about the cost of health care has become a form of virtue signalling in the modern United States. But maybe what really needs to shift is the public discourse around education. The highest paying jobs in the United States, generally speaking, have high educational barriers to entry. If it takes a Master's degree to become a computer and information systems manager, then the overall number of them is going to be limited.

The cliché is that "education is wasted on the young." But maybe the problem that needs to be tackled now is that 12+ years of schooling is wasted on most retail jobs. Surely, with that long a period of mandatory education, it's possible to give people the skills to do more than barely get by in modern technological economy.