Dechurching

Daniel K. Williams at The Atlantic:

The reasons people who identify as Christian and hold Christian beliefs choose not to attend church vary. For some, dissatisfaction with their church options and the behavior of church members is a key factor in their decision to leave church, but for a sizable number of others, there is no single catalyst; they simply fall out of the habit of going, according to Davis and Graham’s research. The hectic pace of contemporary life, complete with Sunday work schedules, makes it difficult for some people to attend church if they want to keep their jobs.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, on an average weekend day, 29 percent of the workforce is at work. Restaurants, supermarkets, convenience stores, and retail outlets are staffed each Sunday morning by a lot of people who might identify as Christian but who definitely won’t be at church that day.

The result is that a lot of people who still identify as Christian no longer go to church. Even as early as 2014, the Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study found that 30 percent of self-identified Southern Baptists “seldom” or “never” attended church—and that was before the “great dechurching” accelerated after the disruptions of the coronavirus pandemic. The exodus of millions of Americans from churches will have a profound influence on the nation’s politics, and not in the way that many advocates of secularism might expect. Rather than ending the culture wars, the battle between a rural Christian nationalism without denominational moorings and a northern urban Social Gospel without an explicitly Christian framework will become more intense.

Military Recruitment

 Ben Kesling at WSJ:

The children of military families make up the majority of new recruits in the U.S. military. That pipeline is now under threat, which is bad news for the Pentagon’s already acute recruitment problems, as well as America’s military readiness.

“Influencers are not telling them to go into the military,” said Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in an interview. “Moms and dads, uncles, coaches and pastors don’t see it as a good choice.”

After the patriotic boost to recruiting that followed 9/11, the U.S. military has endured 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan with no decisive victories, scandals over shoddy military housing and healthcare, poor pay for lower ranks that forces many military families to turn to food stamps, and rising rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide.
...

Only 9% of young people ages 16-21 said last year they would consider military service, down from 13% before the pandemic, according to Pentagon data.

...

The lowest-ranking troops make less than $2,000 a month, although pay is bolstered by benefits including healthcare, food and housing, leaving them few out-of-pocket expenses.

Families or those who live off base can find expenses outstrip income. More than 20,000 active-duty troops are on SNAP benefits, otherwise known as food stamps, according to federal data.

Unions, Policy Advocacy, and Public Relations

IZA Institute of Labor Economics DP No. 16014: 

Does Policy Advocacy Generate Good PR? Evidence from Labor Unions and Minimum Wages

Jeffrey Clemens, Michael R. Strain 

Abstract:

We develop new facts relating news coverage, interest groups, and events in the legislative histories of minimum wage increases. First, we create and validate a database of news articles that includes coverage of minimum wages and organized labor. Second, we show that policy changes predict increases in news coverage that connects organized labor and minimum wages, in particular when those articles reference high-profile interest groups and research output. Third, these policy events lead coverage of organized labor to shift towards articles about minimum wages. We observe that the minimum wage’s popularity with the public makes this shift qualify as “good PR,” an assessment that is supported by sentiment analysis of articles about organized labor. This public relations channel can thus help rationalize why interest groups engage in policy advocacy.

Few Young Adults Aspire to Careers in Public Service

Many posts have discussed public administration and public service.

On January 11-18, 2023, Generation Lab and Axios surveyed 824  young people, 18-29 years old, about career aspirations and priorities. 

• Small, medium, and large businesses were roughly equally desired places to work (28%, 27%, and 31% respectively)
• Nearly half of youth prioritize personal fulfillment and happiness, while only 8% prioritize societal impact
• Just 14% of young people want to spend most of their career in government and non-profit sector.

Work and Social Capital

Brent Orrell, Daniel A. Cox, Jessie Wall at the Survey Center on American Life:

To understand better the social nature of the American workplace, we surveyed 5,037 American adults in June 2022. We asked them about workplace friendships, relationships with supervisors, workplace social capital investments, and feelings of satisfaction, appreciation, and loneliness. The answers to these questions help highlight and clarify work as a social environment and activity and what that environment and activity mean for workers, employers, and managers.

Our data suggest the workplace is an important generator of social capital, with spillover effects for personal, family, and community life. More than half of Americans have met a close friend through their work or a spouse’s work, and those who have strong relationships at work tend to have strong social connections with their family and people in their community. However, not everyone contributes to or benefits from workplace social capital equally, with disparities arising along gender and educational lines. College-educated women and men with no college education represent the positive and negative poles of workplace social capital.

These findings mirror recent research that has identified a growing social disparity in the lives of Americans with and without a college degree. On nearly every metric, the college-educated are reporting more sustained engagement across a wide variety of social outlets. As a previous AEI report said, “College graduates live increasingly different lives than those without a college degree. They are more socially connected, civically engaged, and active in their communities than those without a degree.”[13] It seems this disparity exists on the job as well.

Educational disparities are also associated with different outcomes in social capital development between workers and supervisors. College-educated workers are most able to take advantage of rich networks of relationships to access opportunities on the job, from mentoring to skill building to personal support.

Americans with close workplace friends are generally more satisfied with their job, more often feel engaged and excited about their work, and are less likely to be looking for new career opportunities. They are also more invested in and satisfied with their community outside of work. Where social capital at work is missing, which is the case especially for noncollege-educated men, loneliness and dissatisfaction prevail.

However, increasing investments at work also appear to be associated with a preoccupation with work that can become “workism.” The college-educated population, and women in particular, reap benefits from being the social capital catalysts, but they also report increased anxiety, stress, and dependence on work for personal identity. The close of this report discusses barriers to social capital development in the workplace, including imposter syndrome, crude or insensitive humor, code-switching, workplace tenure, and remote work.

Support for Unions

 Jake Rosenfeld at WP:

Gallup polls have been surveying Americans’ attitudes toward labor unions for nearly 90 years. Last week, the most recent Gallup survey found that union support was higher than it has been since the mid-1960s. Nearly three-quarters (71 percent) of respondents said they approved of labor unions.

Why?

Nearly three decades ago, a pair of researchers used statistical techniques to analyze decades of union approval polling. They wanted to find out why union support changed over time. Like previous research, they discovered that the state of the economy mattered. Specifically, Americans soured on unions when there was high unemployment — and were more supportive of unions when labor markets were tight.

The survey evidence suggests that this may still be true. Gallup surveys show a dramatic dip in union support between 2009 and 2012 — the last sustained period of high unemployment in the United States. Indeed, in 2009 support for organized labor fell below 50 percent for the first and only time in the Gallup series.

...

People are more likely to think unions are valuable when inequality seems high. Even in 2012, when overall support for organized labor was much lower than today, a strong majority agreed that “labor unions are necessary to protect the working person,” according to a Pew poll. People see unions as a counterweight to corporate power, fighting on behalf of average workers. Recent scholarship suggests local context matters: Rising economic inequality in one’s Zip code corresponds with greater support for labor unions. As the percentage of wealthy residents in one neighborhood climbs, so too does support for strengthening union

So why have unions gotten so much weaker?

Research points to the interrelated forces of automation, offshoring, and employer and political opposition as the key reasons the labor movement is weaker than it has been for a century. These underlying factors suggest rising popularity alone will not transform the fortunes of organized labor.

Fathers

At AEI, W. Bradford Wilcox and colleagues write:

The decline of marriage and the rise of fatherlessness in America remain at the center of some of the biggest problems facing the nation: crime and violence, school failure, deaths of despair, and children in poverty.

The predicament of the American male is of particular importance here. The percentage of boys living apart from their biological father has almost doubled since 1960—from about 17% to 32% today; now, an estimated 12 million boys are growing up in families without their biological father.1 Specifically, approximately 62.5% of boys under 18 are living in an intact-biological family, 1.7% are living in a step-family with their biological father and step- or adoptive mother, 4.2% are living with their single, biological father, and 31.5% are living in a home without their biological father.2

Lacking the day-to-day involvement, guidance, and positive example of their father in the home, and the financial advantages associated with having him in the household, these boys are more likely to act up, lash out, flounder in school, and fail at work as they move into adolescence and adulthood. Even though not all fathers play a positive role in their children’s lives, on average, boys benefit from having a present and involved father.

 1. Numbers are calculated based on the 2019 American Community Survey, and Lydia R. Anderson, Paul F. Hemez, and Rose M. Kreider, “Living Arrangements of Children: 2019,” Current Population Reports, P70-174, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, DC, 2021.

2. Ibid.

State and Local Government Employment

From the Census:

 Education, hospitals, and police protection constitute the largest functional categories of state and local governments. In March 2021, 12.6 million people were employed on a full- or part-time basis in a capacity related to these functions. The remaining 6.2 million employees worked in other functional categories. Education, the single largest functional category for state and local government (which includes elementary and secondary, higher, and other education), employed 10.5 million people. Among those public education employees, 7.8 million worked at the local government level, primarily in elementary and secondary education. State governments employed another 2.7 million education employees, mostly in higher education. The next largest functional category, hospitals, employed 1.1 million state and local government employees. Of those employees, 0.7 million worked at the local government level, and 0.5 million worked at the state government level. Police protection, which includes people with power of arrest as well as other police support staff, accounted for 1.0 million workers for state and local governments. Local level governments employed 0.9 million of all police protection workers, and 0.1 million worked at the state government level. 

 

COVID and Deaths of Despair

At STAT, David Introcaso writes of deaths of despair:

The term deaths of despair comes from Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who set out to understand what accounted for falling U.S. life expectancies. They learned that the fastest rising death rates among Americans were from drug overdoses, suicide, and alcoholic liver disease. Deaths from these causes have increased between 56% and 387%, depending on the age cohort, over the past two decades, averaging 70,000 per year.

...

This psychological state is largely the result of economic hardship or the loss of work or wages, something that today is disproportionately experienced by approximately 66 million white workers without college degrees between the ages of 25 and 64 years, or 38% of working-age people. As Case and Deaton showed, this population has seen the purchasing power of their wages decline by 13% since 1979 while per capita income increased 85% over the same period.

The resulting health effects are altogether predictable. Insecurity, deprivation, the loss of possibilities, the lack of belonging, hopelessness, and social maladjustment lead to negative emotions including loneliness, unhappiness, worry, and stress that in turn lead individuals to, in part, experience more pain and pain sensitivity both physical and psychological. Over approximately the past three decades, survey data show that Americans, particularly middle-aged white people, report more pain than respondents in 30 other wealthy countries. Pain, especially chronic pain, can become a gateway to opioid use and addiction.

Factor in the Covid-19 pandemic, and it’s no wonder that 911 calls for opioid-related use increased 250% between 2019 and early 2020.

Echoing Durkheim, Case and Deaton concluded, “Jobs are not just the source of money; they are the basis for the rituals, customs, and routines of working-class life. Destroy work and, in the end, working-class life cannot survive. It is the loss of meaning, of dignity, of price, and of self-respect that comes with the loss of marriage and of community that brings on despair.”

Misleading Graphs on Labor Force Participation

Philip Bump at WP:

Earlier this month, [Tucker] Carlson ran a segment focused on the decline of men in the workforce. To bolster his point, part of his broader effort to cast American men as endlessly embattled — “The thing about men is they kind of need to work,” he said in the segment — he showed graphs of the labor force participation rate by gender. (That’s the percentage of working-age Americans who are working or looking for work.)

Here, as reported by the Daily Beast, is what Carlson showed.

Man line go down; woman line go up. Done and done. Cable news success.

Yet there are two big problems here. The more immediate is that the vertical axis on the female participation rate graph is mislabeled. It doesn’t range from 65 to 90 since the labor force participation rate for women has never been higher than 60.3 percent. It’s not really clear what happened here. Notice that the grid lines don’t actually line up with the axis labels anyway. It’s just a mess.

But that leads to the bigger problem. The labor force participation rate for men has always been higher than that of women. Here are the same data, with two changes: a vertical axis that runs from 0 to 100 and both measures shown at once. There is still a long-term decline in the participation rate for men — but also for women over the past decade or so.

Christmas in World War II

A fact sheet from the National World War II Museum reminds us that shortages of supplies and workers are nothing new.

 During World War II Christmas trees were in short supply because of a lack of manpower to cut the trees down and a shortage of railroad space to ship the trees to market. Americans rushed to buy American-made Visca artificial trees.

... 

The shortage of materials—like aluminum and tin—used to produce ornaments led many people to make their own ornaments at home. Magazines contained patterns for ornaments made out of non-priority war materials, like paper, string, and natural objects, such as pinecones or nuts

...

Fewer men at home resulted in fewer men available to dress up and play Santa Claus. Women served as substitute Santas at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York City and at other department stores throughout the United States.

...

Travel during the holidays was limited for most families due to the rationing of tires and gasoline. Americans saved up their food ration stamps to provide extra food for a fine holiday meal.

Boomers Exit the Workforce

Erica Pandey at Axios:

The pandemic pushed more than 3 million baby boomers into premature retirement, according to a new analysis from Miguel Faria e Castro, a senior economist at the St. Louis Fed.

Why it matters: The wave of early retirements is contributing to the labor shortage that's roiling the U.S. economy.

What's happening: Many older workers faced layoffs, and others left the workforce to protect themselves from the risk of infection.

• It's much harder for workers in their 50s and 60s — or older — to re-enter the workforce after a period of unemployment, due to persistent ageism in corporate America.
• So it's likely that many of those who left jobs got discouraged and chose to retire instead.

Amara Omeokwe at WSJ:

Siavash Radpour, associate research director at the Retirement Equity Lab at The New School, a private university in New York, said some older workers face discrimination in hiring. They may be passed over even in industries with plenty of openings, such as food services, because employers consider the jobs physically demanding, he said. That means some older workers “don’t really have the option to come back to the labor force,” he said.

Research suggests that some early exits from the workforce in the pandemic were more pronounced among seniors with less education and lower incomes.

A higher share of workers without a college degree retired before the traditional retirement age of 65 compared with those who had a college education, according to the Retirement Equity Lab. The lab’s analysis of census data found that retirement rates for those ages 55 to 64 without a college degree rose by 0.8 percentage point from 2019 to 2021, compared with a decline of 0.6 percentage point for similarly aged workers with a degree.

Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research used census data to determine that job losses earlier in the pandemic were steeper among lower-income older workers compared with higher-earning ones.

About 38% of workers aged 62 and older and in the lowest third of weekly earnings no longer held jobs in the fourth quarter of 2020, up from 28% in the second quarter of 2019, according to the analysis from Geoffrey Sanzenbacher, a research fellow at the center.

Among similarly aged workers in the highest third of weekly earnings, 22% weren’t working during the fourth quarter of 2020 compared with 18% in the second quarter of 2019.

COVID and Caregiving

Tina Reed at Axios Vitals:

American families shouldered an enormous burden caring for family members even before the pandemic, and a shortage of professional caregivers now is only likely to make that burden heavier.

The big picture: Nursing homes and other long-term care settings have seen a staff exodus both during and after the pandemic, especially when they've imposed vaccine mandates — poking new holes in a system that was already full of them.

"We have this terrible tradeoff right in a lot of parts of the country where we can either have staff working who aren't vaccinated and put our older adults at risk, or we can be short-staffed and that also puts older adults at risk," David Grabowski, a health policy professor at Harvard, told Axios.

By the numbers: Health care employment is down by 524,000 jobs since February 2020. Nursing and residential care facilities account for about 80% of the losses. Last week's jobs report showed another 38,000-job decline in nursing and residential care.

• "We are losing more people than we can recruit," Gayle Kvenvold, CEO of industry trade group LeadingAge Minnesota told the Minneapolis Star Tribune about concerns in her state. Seven in 10 nursing homes and 29% of assisted-living facilities have limited new admissions as a result.

Between the lines: The kind of care delivered in nursing homes and assisted-living facilities has long been a patchwork in the U.S.

• It's expensive, it's hard for all but the poorest patients to get insurance coverage for it, and facilities offer widely differing levels of care. It's mostly been family members that have filled in the gaps.
• Unpaid caregiving is a burden that has traditionally fallen disproportionately on women — as has child care, which is facing its own pandemic crunch.

Automation and Inequality

 Daron Acemoglu & Pascual Restrepo have an NBER paper titled "Tasks, Automation, and the Rise in US Wage Inequality." The abstract:

We document that between 50% and 70% of changes in the US wage structure over the last four decades are accounted for by the relative wage declines of worker groups specialized in routine tasks in industries experiencing rapid automation. We develop a conceptual framework where tasks across a number of industries are allocated to different types of labor and capital. Automation technologies expand the set of tasks performed by capital, displacing certain worker groups from employment opportunities for which they have comparative advantage. This framework yields a simple equation linking wage changes of a demographic group to the task displacement it experiences. We report robust evidence in favor of this relationship and show that regression models incorporating task displacement explain much of the changes in education differentials between 1980 and 2016. Our task displacement variable captures the effects of automation technologies (and to a lesser degree offshoring) rather than those of rising market power, markups or deunionization, which themselves do not appear to play a major role in US wage inequality. We also propose a methodology for evaluating the full general equilibrium effects of task displacement (which include induced changes in industry composition and ripple effects as tasks are reallocated across different groups). Our quantitative evaluation based on this methodology explains how major changes in wage inequality can go hand-in-hand with modest productivity gains.

Federalism and Minimum Wages

 Drew DeSilver at Pew:

Prospects for raising the federal minimum wage, which has stood at $7.25 an hour since 2009, appear to have stalled out yet again, despite broad public support for the idea. In truth, though, for the past several years most of the real action on minimum wages has been in states, counties and cities, not on Capitol Hill. Just this past November, for example, Florida voters approved Amendment 2, which will gradually raise the state’s minimum until it reaches $15 in 2026.

As a practical matter, the $7.25 federal minimum wage is actually used in just 21 states, which collectively account for about 40% of all U.S. wage and salary workers – roughly 56.5 million people – according to our analysis of state minimum-wage laws and federal employment data. In the 29 other states and the District of Columbia, minimum wages are higher – ranging from $8.65 in Florida to $15 in D.C.

In eight of the states with higher-than-federal minimum wages, some cities and counties have adopted local ordinances that provide for even higher rates than their state’s minimum, accelerate schedules for future increases, or both. (None of the states where the $7.25 federal minimum prevails have higher local minimums.) Our research found at least 46 such cities and counties – most of them (36) in the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas of California. The highest local minimum wage in the country, $16.84, is in Emeryville, a suburb of San Francisco.

Post-Pandemic Jobs Bust

Erica Pandey at Axios:

By the numbers: The pandemic's disruption of work will push around 17 million U.S. workers to find new occupations by 2030, according to a recent McKinsey Global Institute report.

• "Even before the pandemic, 70% of employers reported having trouble filling roles because of a skills gap in the labor force, per Bloomberg.
• After the pandemic, high-skilled jobs, like web developers and epidemiologists, are expected to boom. And low-skilled ones, like restaurant hosts, bartenders and ticket agents are projected to bust.

"We knew artificial intelligence was going to devastate jobs, but, frankly, I thought that was five or seven years away," says Plinio Ayala, CEO of the job training company Per Scholas.

• "The pandemic accelerated that. The number of jobs that existed before the pandemic will not be the same number after, and most of those jobs were occupied by people of color and women."
• "I’m concerned about a real uneven recovery.

Raising the Minimum Wage

 From the Congressional Budget Office:

If enacted at the end of March 2021, the Raise the Wage Act of 2021 (S. 53, as introduced on January 26, 2021) would raise the federal minimum wage, in annual increments, to $15 per hour by June 2025 and then adjust it to increase at the same rate as median hourly wages. In this report, the Congressional Budget Office estimates the bill’s effects on the federal budget. 

• The cumulative budget deficit over the 2021–2031 period would increase by $54 billion. Increases in annual deficits would be smaller before 2025, as the minimum-wage increases were being phased in, than in later years.

• Higher prices for goods and services—stemming from the higher wages of workers paid at or near the minimum wage, such as those providing long-term health care—would contribute to increases in federal spending.

• Changes in employment and in the distribution of income would increase spending for some programs (such as unemployment compensation), reduce spending for others (such as nutrition programs), and boost federal revenues (on net). 

...

Increasing the minimum wage would affect employment in several ways.

• Higher wages would increase the cost to employers of producing goods and services. Employers would pass some of those increased costs on to consumers in the form of higher prices, and those higher prices, in turn, would lead consumers to purchase fewer goods and services. Employers would consequently produce fewer goods and services, and as a result, they would tend to reduce their employment of workers at all wage levels. 

• When the cost of employing low-wage workers goes up, the relative cost of employing higher-wage workers or investing in machines and technology goes down. Some employers would therefore respond to a higher minimum wage by shifting toward those substitutes and reducing their employment of low-wage workers.

• In some limited circumstances, increasing the minimum wage could boost employment if employers had what is known as monopsony power—that is, bargaining power that allows them to set wages below the rates that would prevail in a more competitive market.

• Because increasing the minimum wage would shift income toward families with lower income, it would boost overall demand in the short term. Lower-income families spend a larger proportion of any additional income on goods and services than do families with higher income. That increased demand for goods and services would reduce the drop in employment for several years after the implementation of a higher minimum wage, CBO projects. 

Taking those factors into account, CBO projects that, on net, the Raise the Wage Act of 2021 would reduce employment by increasing amounts over the 2021–2025 period. In 2025, when the minimum wage reached $15 per hour, employment would be reduced by 1.4 million workers (or 0.9 percent), according to CBO’s average estimate. In 2021, most workers who would not have a job because of the higher minimum wage would still be looking for work and hence be categorized as unemployed; by 2025, however, half of the 1.4 million people who would be jobless because of the bill would have dropped out of the labor force, CBO estimates. Young, lesseducated people would account for a disproportionate share of those reductions in employment.

Wealth Inequality

Briana Sullivan and Donald Hays at the US Census:

Wealth inequality between homeowners and renters continued to be remarkably pronounced in 2017: Homeowners’ median wealth was nearly 89 times larger than the median wealth of renters and not entirely because of home equity.

The 2017 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) data shows continued disparities in wealth – the value of assets owned minus the liabilities (debts) owed – revealed in last year’s report on household wealth in 2015.

Biggest contributors. Just two assets — home equity and retirement accounts — accounted for 61.7% of households’ wealth in 2017.

The median value of home owners’ wealth in their homes was $118,000, and the median household retirement account balance was $65,000.

While many households owned these assets, others did not: 38.2% of households did not own a home and 42.7% of households did not have a retirement account. This gap of ownership in two key assets contributes to wealth inequality.

• Bank accounts. Some commonly held assets made up a small portion of household wealth. In 2017, 93.7% of households had bank or credit union accounts. However, the accounts made up only 8.9% of total household wealth.
• Home Ownership. Home equity did not fully account for the difference in median wealth between homeowners and renters. Households that owned their home had a median wealth of $269,100, substantially more than that of those who rented their homes ($3,036).  Even when home equity was excluded from total wealth, the median wealth of homeowners was $109,000, a staggering 35.9 times more than the median wealth of renters.
• Health insurance. Households with people who did not have health insurance all or part of the year had dramatically lower median wealth ($18,750) than households in which all members had coverage for the full year ($140,500). Those without insurance also had 50% less in their checking accounts and 74% less in their retirement accounts.
• Marital status, age and gender. Unmarried female householders (those who own or rent the home) of any age had a median wealth of $28,290. That represented 75.9% of their unmarried male counterparts’ median wealth of $37,290 and only 12.1% of their married counterparts’ median wealth of $233,100.Such disparities between genders and marital status persisted over most age groups.
• Race and Hispanic origin. Relative to Black and Hispanic householders, non-Hispanic White and Asian householders had higher median household wealth.Non-Hispanic White householders had a median household wealth of $171,700, compared with $9,567 for Black householders and $25,000 for Hispanic householders. Asian householders had a median household wealth of $157,400, which was not statistically different from the estimate for non-Hispanic White householders.
• Education. Higher education was linked to higher median household wealth. Households in which the most educated member held a bachelor’s degree had a median wealth of $198,000, compared with $34,460 for households in which the most educated member only had a high school diploma. Those with graduate or professional degrees had just over twice the median wealth ($396,900) of bachelor degree holders.
• Employment. Households in which at least one member was unemployed or worked part-time during the year had less wealth. Households in which at least one person had a full-time job for the entire year had a median wealth of $114,200, compared with $81,150 for households in which one or more members had a part-time job during the year, and $19,490 for households in which one or more people were unemployed.

 

Largest US Employer

 From the Census:

Which industry had the highest employment and annual payroll in 2018?

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s County Business Patterns (CBP), the 907,426 businesses in the Health Care and Social Assistance sector topped all others with 20 million employees and over $1.0 trillion in annual payroll in 2018.

And the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects this sector will grow 14% from 2018 to 2028, due largely to an aging population with increased health care needs. 

COVID Inequality: the K-Shaped Recovery

Heather long at WP:

U.S. stocks are hovering near a record high, a stunning comeback since March that underscores the new phase the economy has entered: The wealthy have mostly recovered. The bottom half remain far from it.

This dichotomy is evident in many facets of the economy, especially in employment. Jobs are fully back for the highest wage earners, but fewer than half the jobs lost this spring have returned for those making less than $20 an hour, according to a new labor data analysis by John Friedman, an economics professor at Brown University and co-director of Opportunity Insights.

Though recessions almost always hit lower-wage workers the hardest, the pandemic is causing especially large gaps between rich and poor, and between White and minority households. It is also widening the gap between big and small businesses. Some of the largest companies, such as Nike and Best Buy, are enjoying their highest stock prices ever while many smaller businesses fight for survival.

Some economists have started to call this a “K-shaped” recovery because of the diverging prospects for the rich and poor, and they say policy failures in Washington are exacerbating the problems.

...
As much of the economy has moved to work-from-home mode, the shift has mainly benefited college-educated employees who do most of their work on computers. A Fed survey found that 63 percent of workers with college degrees could perform their jobs entirely from home, while only 20 percent of workers with high school diplomas or less could work from home.

Richer Americans also have seen their wealth recover — or even surge — as home values have jumped to their highest level ever (even in inflation-adjusted terms), according to the National Association of Realtors.