James Manyika

But I'm just going to focus on one, which is job growth.

So when we looked at job growth across those counties,

While at the national level, we're all celebrating the job growth that had happened coming out of the 2008 recession and over the last, you know, between 2008 and 2018 was the data set we looked at.

First of all, it was at the national level, it was great.

But when you looked at it at the county level, what you suddenly found is that a lot of that job growth was concentrated in places where roughly a third of the nation's workers live.

The other two thirds of the places where people live either saw flat or no job growth or even continued job decline.

So all of that is to say, you know, we also have to solve this question of how do we get more even job growth and wage growth across the country in the United States?

We've also done similar work.

We've looked at these micro regions in Europe

And you see similar patterns, although maybe not quite as extreme as the US, but you see similar patterns where some places get a lot of the job and wage growth and some places get less of it.

It's just a function of the structure of our economy.

So we'd have to solve that too.

And then the other thing we need to solve is the classic case of the hollowing out of the middle class.

Because if you look at the pattern of, mostly driven by technology to some extent, the

A lot of the job declines or the jobs lost as a result of technology have primarily been in the middle wage, middle class jobs.

And a lot of the job growth has been in the low wage jobs.

So this question of the hollowing out of the middle class is actually a really particular problem, which has all kinds of

sociopolitical implications, by the way.

But that's the other thing to figure out.

So let me stop there.