For my thesis linking technological change to occupational change, one
concern is the unexplained deceleration of employment growth in abstract
task-intensive occupations after 2000 (Beaudry, Green, and Sand 2014, forthcoming;
Mishel, Shierholz, and Schmitt 2013). Figure 5 follows the format of
Figure 4 but instead of showing (approximate) percentage changes in wages on
the vertical axis, it shows percentage changes in the employment share of the jobs
ranked by their skill level in 1979. Since the sum of shares must equal one at any
time period, the changes in these shares across the decades must total zero, and
thus, the height at each skill percentile measures the growth in each occupation’s
employment relative to the whole.