The New Division of Labor--How to Prepare for America's Changing Job Market

HGSE Thompson Professor Richard Murnane and MIT Economics Professor Frank Levy Explore Education's Role in Creating New Jobs

With time, today's economic recovery will return the economy to full employment. But what kind of jobs will we have? In The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market (Princeton University Press and Russell Sage Foundation, June 2004), Thompson Professor Richard Murnane and MIT economist Frank Levy, examine how computers are reshaping the job market and the human skills rewarded in the marketplace. Combining numerous workplace examples and 30 years of economic trends, the authors illustrate how computers create and enhance jobs, even as they eliminate some jobs and move other jobs overseas. The result is a hollowing-out of the U.S. occupational structure with most job growth in higher-end, high-skilled occupations.

The nation's challenge is to recognize this division and to prepare the population for the high-wage/high-skilled jobs that are rapidly growing in number--jobs involving extensive problem solving and interpersonal communication. Using detailed examples--a second grade classroom, an IBM managerial training program, Cisco Networking Academies--the authors describe how these skills can be taught and how our adjustment to the computerized workplace can begin in earnest.

Core to the argument of their research, Levy and Murnane contend that the jobs growing in numbers share two general skills that computers cannot replicate: expert thinking and complex communication. The first skill, expert thinking, addresses the ability to solve new problems that cannot be solved by rules. (For example, if the problem could be solved by rules, a computer could complete the task.) New problems range from conducting research to fixing a new problem in a car (not covered in the manual), to creating a new dish in a restaurant.

The second general skill, complex communication, addresses the ability not only to transmit information, but to convey a particular interpretation of information to others in jobs like teaching, selling, and negotiation. If a student gets a calculus lesson from the web, the student will literally have the information. But there is no guarantee that the student will understand the information she is receiving. It takes a good teacher to present the information in a way that allows the student to translate the information into knowledge she can apply.

Praise for The New Division of Labor:

"Levy and Murnane go beyond conventional accounts of the effect of automation on the workforce to take a comprehensive and thoughtful look at how increased use of technology is affecting the occupational distribution in the U.S., and precisely what skills are likely to be valued in tomorrow's labor markets. This should be read by all who care about the future of work in America."

-Lawrence H. Summers, President, Harvard University

"This fine book was written by well-trained economists and reasonable, reflective people. The first characteristic could perhaps have been imitated by a computer, but not the second. And that is the authors' basic message. Levy and Murnane show how computers have changed the relation of man and machine, but not the amount of work that can profitably be done. The real task is to educate a labor force that can turn this change to human advantage. An excellent first step is to read this book, reasonably and reflectively."

-Robert M. Solow, Institute Professor Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences

About the Authors

Richard Murnane and Frank Levy coauthored the bestselling Teaching the New Basic Skills (Free Press). Murnane, an economist, is Juliana W. and William Foss Thompson Professor of Education and Society at Harvard University. His books include Who Will Teach? Policies that Matter. Levy is the Daniel Rose Professor of Urban Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His books include The New Dollars and Dreams: American Incomes and Economic Change.

For More Information

Contact Greer Bautz at 617-496-1884 or greer_bautz@gse.harvard.edu.