What the history of (new) jobs can tell us about the impact of technological change on employment

There is currently widespread concern that rapid technological change will fundamentally change the nature of work. In this paper we show that, despite 140 years of technological change, more than 70 percent of employment today is located in occupations whose core economic functions already existed in the late nineteenth century. Full-count Swedish census and administrative data from 1880 to 2019, harmonized to five-digit HISCO, let us observe how many people work in each occupation. This yields far greater occupational persistence than when new work is inferred from the appearance of new job titles. To characterize the new work that does emerge, we distinguish Schumpeterian occupations, tied directly to new technology, from Smithian occupations, arising from a deeper division of labor. Most new work is Smithian. Schumpeterian occupations, on the other hand, remain small and unstable, with an increasingly older workforce, and it is specialization, not technology or newness, that commands the largest earnings premium. Technology sustains employment less by expanding technological occupations than by creating the scale on which specialization depends.