The History of Jobs In America

Paul Kedrosky points to this very cool tool for visualizing the jobs people have done between 1850 and 2000; you click on any one or write it in the window and see how they have changed. Kedrosky writes "Too bad it ends at 2000, thus taking away the fun of watching the profusion of real estate agents and mortgage brokers." But what about "green jobs"? Can one get a sense of what people are doing, and what the trends are?

There appear to be a lot fewer carpenters than there used to be, although again by ending in 2000 this is missing the housing boom of earlier this decade.

But if there were fewer people building houses, there were a lot more selling them. It is also interesting that there is nothing under "computer" or "electronics"- I would have thought that they would have started appearing in the sixties. I wonder how this will look after the next census.

Big timewaster at Flare Data Visualization