Jobless growth?

I had blogged earlier about Michael Mandel's claim that the innovation driven growth of the last three decades has been accompanied by weak job growth. Now Mandel has three graphs that captures the shockingly anemic job growth in the private sector and appears to clearly indicate that "without a decade of growing government support from rising health and education spending and soaring budget deficits, the labor market would have been flat on its back". In the May 1999 to May 2009 period, employment in the private sector sector only rose by 1.1%, by far the lowest 10-year increase in the post-depression period.



Over the same period, the dominant private sector has generated a total of roughly 1.1 million additional jobs, whereas the public sector created about 2.4 million jobs.



Most of the industries which had positive job growth over the past ten years were in the government health and education (HealthEdGov) sectors. In fact, financial job growth was nearly nonexistent once we take out the health insurers.