Marketplace - These jobs may be hot in the next 10 years … or not

Episode Date: December 19, 2024

Nurses, software developers and restaurant cooks are among the jobs predicted to grow the most in the next decade, according the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But some experts warn that predictions can be “spectacularly wrong.” Plus, homeowners cling to low mortgage rates, “exurbs” dominate this year’s most popular housing markets, and we hear from business owners who may struggle if President-elect Donald Trump’s policies push inflation back up.

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Lest you think that running this economy is easy. It's not unlike driving on a foggy night or walking into a dark room full of furniture. Happy Fed Day everybody. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdall. It is Wednesday today, the 18th of December. Good as always to have you along everybody. What is the first thing you think of when you hear the guy most responsible for running the American economy say this?

Let me start by saying that we think the economy is in a really good place and we think policy is in a really good place. If you're a regular consumer of economic news, you might think, yeah, the economy is OK. Inflation is still a tad hot and prices are higher, but generally, you know, good. If you are a Wall Street consumer of economic news, though, clearly this is the end of the world, because Powell also said this. Two cuts next year compared to four in September. That is, back in September, with inflation a tad less sticky than it is now,

guesses among the members of the Federal Reserve was that they would cut interest rates four times next year. Now, with the aforementioned stickiness holding inflation higher than the Fed and the rest of us want it to be, the central bank is banking on just two cuts next year. I think that the slower pace of cuts for next year really reflects both the higher inflation readings we've had this year and the expectation that inflation will be higher. Two and a half percent is where the Fed thinks inflation is going to be come the end of next year. Cue the market sell-off.

It is almost a footnote to point out, I guess, that they did cut interest rates today. Another quarter percentage point, the third cut this year. And two things specifically to mention here. Number one, look at the labor market. It's cooler by so many measures now, modestly cooler than it was in two thousand nineteen a year when inflation was well under two percent so it's not the source of inflationary pressures

not to say there are regional and particular professions were labor is tight but overall you're not getting inflationary impulses of any significance from the labor market. And number two and related. The story is still just we're unwinding from these large shocks that the economy got in 2021 and 22. Which is kind of amazing because it's been like three years, you know, Wall Street on

this Fed Day. Everything was fine until Jay Powell started talking. We'll have the details when we do the numbers. The federal funds rate, which is the rate the Federal Reserve controls, is a powerful, if blunt, economic tool, but it is by no means all-powerful. Exhibit A? The American housing market. Last week, the average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage was about 6.6%, which is higher than when the Fed started

its rate-cutting cycle back in September. So that's not great for the housing market. But the bigger problem is that according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency, something like 60% of people who are paying on mortgages right now have rates below 4%. That gets us something called the lock-in effect. Homeowners who don't want to give up those cheap rates, which means they don't want

to sell, which means housing inventory stays low and housing prices stay high. Marketplace's Matt Levin has more now on the housing market's new normal. HOFFMAN Hopefully there will be more than enough eggnog at today's holiday office party for the Northwest Illinois Alliance of Realtors. Because there definitely aren't enough houses to go around. CLEMENT We currently have over 900 realtors in our board of realtors. And with our inventory right around 346 houses and condos available, that makes the competition pretty stiff.

HOFFMAN J. JURICK, JR. Jane Urick has been a real estate agent in the Rockford, Illinois area for 38 years. It's about 90 miles northwest of Chicago. Homes are priced attractively in the low to mid-200s. The problem is finding interested sellers. JANE URICK, JR. There are people that look at that 3% interest rate and aren't giving it up. the low to mid-200s, the problem is finding interested sellers. There are people that look at that 3% interest rate and aren't giving it up. Less life issues come up.

Estate sales, divorces, job relocations. According to research from the Federal Housing Finance Administration, the lock-in effect resulted in 1.7 million fewer home sales nationally between 2022 and 2024. Jonah Cost is an economist with FHFA. This reduction in supply increased prices by 7%. That's part of the reason when the Fed was raising rates to fight inflation, housing prices stayed high. Unless rates somehow drop dramatically, which feels unlikely, Cost doesn't see the lock-in

effect dissipating. We don't find any evidence that simply time is going to do much to alleviate this. This new normal, so many homeowners with dramatically cheaper mortgages compared to market rates, is basically unprecedented, says economist Darrell Fairweather at Redfin. And that's widening the gap between the have-nots and have-homes. Well, there's definitely this unfortunate inequality between people who had a home or bought a home

during the pandemic and people who weren't ready to buy a home quite yet. Sure, location matters a lot with real estate, but so does timing. I'm Matt Levin for Marketplace. If because of timing in your life you miss us on the actual air, we've got a podcast, you know, just in case. You can find it at marketplace.org or just follow us on the platform of your choice. The jobs report that we get the first Friday of every month, the Employment Situation Summary

it's called, that's the official name, it tells us where the labor market in this country was the month prior. Less remarked upon is another data set the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts out. It's called the Occupational Employment Projections and it's done annually with a window 10 years into the future. In its most recent edition out this past summer, the Department of Labor says the top growing occupations, that is those with the most new jobs being created, include home health aid, software developer, cook, and registered nurse. The fastest growing occupations, that's by percent increase in jobs, include solar and wind turbine technicians, nurse practitioner, and data scientist. Marketplace's

Mitchell Harman explains what's driving job growth and loss and, not to be forgotten, how much trust we really ought to put in labor market predictions a whole decade out. The folks at Portland State University's Career Center really want to know what the BLS's hot jobs of the future are. I am Giovanna DeFalco, employer relations manager. Marissa Miller, I'm the internship coordinator. Their students' career ideas range from clearly defined to impressionistic at best, says Miller. For some people it is a job title, for some people it is, well this is a thing that I learned in class this week that I didn't Defalco, Student, Defalco says to point students down plausible career paths, demographics are one structural factor shaping future labor market demand.

Michael Wolf is in charge of employment projections at BLS. He says health care is a key factor in the future of the job market. Defalco says that the job market is a key factor in the future of the job market. Demographics are one structural factor shaping future labor market demand. Michael Wolf is in charge of employment projections at BLS. He says healthcare will be the fastest growing occupational sector driven by the needs of aging baby boomers. Meanwhile, the older generation of carpenters, welders, machinists and the like are aging out of manufacturing and construction. Those skilled trades, they may not be growing rapidly, but if a lot of the workers are retiring, it can still be creating a whole lot of opportunities for new workers.

There's less opportunity in K-12 education as the birth rate and school-age population fall. Wolf says the other big driver of job change is new technology, renewable energy and EVs, robots and artificial intelligence, causing job loss and growth. Computer and mathematical are the second fastest growing occupational group. A lot of that is being driven by big data. And the flip side? The fastest declines, office and administrative clerical type workers primarily being impacted by automation.

There's already evidence of technological unemployment as AI is rolled out in marketing and back office operations, says economist Joe Brusuella, said consulting firm RSM. You can see in places like finance, sophisticated technologies being deployed, causing very talented, very expensive white-collar workers to have problems finding employment. Meanwhile, he says lower-skilled office workers are looking more and more like the telephone operators of a past generation. I think the population most at risk are women 25 to 54 with less than two years of education. Those jobs are just going to be automated out of existence.

I will rant for just a minute here. Peter Capelli directs the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School. These forecasts on technology have been spectacularly wrong. Remember driverless cars? By 2019, the prediction was that truck drivers would be obsolete.

BLS now predicts there'll be 200,000 more of them by 2033. The reason that they're always spectacularly wrong is that they're driven by people who are building the technology telling you what is possible. They're not telling you what is practical. Capelli isn't a big fan of making job projections for a decade in the future, either. Forecasts stopped working out very well about 50 years ago, and we really, really want to have them. It's hard to get people to accept the fact that maybe you've got to just deal with a

lot of uncertainty. At Portland State's Career Center, the BLS's long-term job predictions are treated like general directions on a map, says director Greg Flores. He offers an example. Ten years ago, BLS listed Cartographer among the fastest growing occupations. Flores hasn't sent a lot of students down that specific career path, but… The skill behind that, cartography, is a program called ArcGIS.

And there are lots of jobs that use it, but the job title isn't what the projection said it was going to be. Flores says it's most important to focus on skills and interests that will help a student develop in their career ten years down the road. I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace. You sit down, you write what the business problem is is and everyone has to read it before now That is a productive use of company time first though. Let's do the numbers Yeah, the wah-wah feels like it's been a while the Dow industrials tumbled 1,000

123 points today 2.6 percent 42,000-326 the Nasdaq sank 716 points that is 3.6% 19,392. S&P 500 off 178 points about 3% 58.72 there. Matt Levin was talking about mortgage rates so let's look at some lenders. Rocket Company subtracted 4.5%. Loan Depot slid 7.5%. Gild Holdings Company off 1.4% today. General Mills down 3.1%. That's after the snack and cereal company adjusted down its 20-25 profit outlook in its most recent earnings report. Birkenstock reported strong profits.

Year over year, the Sandal Company saw a 21% jump in revenue shares, walked, nay they ran. Hard as that may be to do in Birkenstocks, up 2% today. Bonds, just cause. Prices down, yield on the 10-year T-note, up 4.52%. Thank you, Jay Powell. You're listening to Marketplace.

You turn to Marketplace for up-to-the-minute news, for stories that show you the connections between global events and your personal economy. And you're not alone. Marketplace is the most widely consumed business and economic news program in the country. We're proud to make fact-based journalism freely accessible. And Marketplace investors make it all possible. Your year-end donation today will make a real difference in our nonprofit newsroom and in the lives of millions of Marketplace listeners every single day. So please contribute what you can today at marketplace.org.

This is Marketplace. I'm Kyle Rizdal. We've been talking a whole lot about the bond market on the program this week, which is mostly a way to talk about interest rates, the cost of borrowing money. The Federal Reserve, as we set up at the top of the program, just cut that cost by a quarter of a percentage point, but it has become clear since Election Day mostly that rates might not fall much farther given the possibility of new tariffs, more tax cuts, mass deportations, and the higher inflation those policies are likely to trigger. And if interest rates don't fall or if they go up, businesses are going to have to figure

out how to deal with higher for longer interest rates. So Marketplace's Justin Ho called a couple of those businesses to see how they're getting ready. One sector that's really sensitive to interest rates is construction. John Kirk, the founder of the Light Path Company, an apartment construction firm in New Braunfels, Texas, says even though rates have started to come down, they're still too high for a lot of construction projects to make economic sense. So that's why you're not going to see a huge, robust pipeline of supply hitting the market

again. Kirk says he and other developers still have to make money. But if rates stay elevated throughout the next 12 months, he says they are going to be pretty choosy. When it comes to site selection and what deals do they believe in and how do you raise capital and really get it across the finish line to start construction. Even though interest rates have been slowly coming down, there are plenty of commercial borrowers that are about to get hit with much higher rates.

Dominic Myarten, CEO of American Pride Bank in Macon, Georgia, says that's because they're sitting on loans they took out a few years ago, back when rates were really low. And if those loans were originated with three to five year terms, then those loans are maturing right about now. Myarten says that means those borrowers are likely going to scale back their plans, maybe cancel a new project or new hiring. So there's a chilling effect. Even though the rates have come down recently, they're still much higher than they were three or four or five years ago. High rates also have an indirect impact on industries that rely on consumer spending. Spiro Papadopoulos, CEO of Schlau Restaurant Group, says when car loans and credit cards

and mortgages are expensive. It affects the restaurant business earlier than it would something that is less able to be cut out. Like for instance, gas or groceries. Papadopoulos says he made plenty of changes to his restaurants while interest rates and inflation were even higher. He modified his menus to keep quality high,

but prices reasonable. Think chicken instead of veal, or featuring family style meals instead of individual entrees. Really just trying to offer more value during that period of time and amping up the experience and the hospitality. Papadopoulos says even if interest rates fall more slowly next year,

his restaurants are still in a position to give consumers what they want. I'm Justin Ho from No matter how much mortgages might be costing, when people got a move, they got a move. And according to new data from Zillow, the most popular housing markets of the year were exurbs and small cities, mostly in the Northeast and Midwest. We're talking places with lower housing prices than the nearby big cities that are within long but still reasonable commuting distances. Marketplace of Samantha Fields has that one. What does it mean for a city to be popular? In this case, Skylar Olson, chief economist at Zillow, says it means places where home prices have appreciated significantly. And where do we see the most attention and traffic on Zillow.com?

This year, Manchester, New Hampshire tops the list. Four cities in Connecticut also made it, as did Allentown, Pennsylvania and Columbia, Maryland. Really the exurban cities, right? So think of these as ones within 90 miles from, you know, that major city core. This tracks with general trends we've been seeing for the last few years. People moving away from big metro areas and towards smaller and medium-sized cities and rural areas.

Rudin Frost at the Joint Center for Housing Studies says the biggest factor for most people is cost. Affordability in general has become a nationwide issue. And so I could really see that driving people to move out, especially if they're trying to purchase a home. And the rise of remote work has made more people feel like they can move further out, says Richard Green at the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate.

Work from home has changed where people want to live. like they can move further out, says Richard Green at the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate. Work from home has changed where people want to live. And if you don't have to go into work, you can live wherever you like. But he says the ability to work from home is key if you are moving for affordability. If you don't work from home, I don't think the excerpts are particularly affordable because the cost of commuting is expensive. Especially if you have to drive a long distance. And a lot of companies are calling people back to the office, whether a few days a week

or full time. And that's going to make closer in locations more popular. Lisa Sturtevant, chief economist at Bright MLS, says she's already seeing that in mid-Atlantic markets. Recently, it has been the first ring suburbs of DC and of Philadelphia, where home buyers have been most active, which suggests to me that people are looking to be a little bit closer to the office, a little bit closer to transportation. Even if it's a little bit or a lot less affordable.

I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace. I'm going to go not too terribly far out on a limb here and say that there is not a person among us who hasn't had to sit through a meeting that most certainly should have been an email, watching somebody read to you every word of their 25-page PowerPoint. And yet here we are. PowerPoint is somehow a staple of corporate culture. Matt Alston wrote about PowerPoint's hold on us in Business Insider.

Matt, thanks for coming on. How are you? I'm well, how, but I've been to too many PowerPoint presentations. How did it come to pass that we are now living in the tyranny of PowerPoint? It is a software that for I think almost 30 years has come with every personal home computer and every business computer.

It's become the standard mode of person-made presentation. Any single person has a software that makes it very easy for them to create a six, eight, or sometimes 40, 50 slide presentation. It was designed to get rid of presentation jitters and instead it's just sort of made bloated presenters of us all. Yeah, I get the jitters thing because it kind of does make sense. But look, one hates to give Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and bajillionaires too much credit for anything right now, but it does seem that they're onto something

in trying to get rid of PowerPoint as a kind of a crutch, right? They're not wrong. The difference between them and the rest of us is that when they get annoyed with something, they have more power to make it go away. You and I have both sat in those presentations and been like, I just wish my boss would say,

shouldn't this be an email or shouldn't this be something else? Well, in 2004, Jeff Bezos had that response and turned to people he worked with and said, is there some way to make this go away? And they said, yes, there is. I don't even know what to say. But here's the actual next question. So why, obviously, it's useful. I get that. But it has now been abused. Why do you suppose it is that we're all just still stuck? Is it just middle managers not having the courage to say cut it out, don't do that anymore? I think that because it's easy to use, and because it turns conversation

into presentation because it's low density, you don't have to put all of the information that you have. But people always do, Matt, you know that. Come on, man. Oh, yeah. You know, yeah, let me rephrase that. Well, I think that PowerPoints and presentation tools often appeal to two specific types of vices, either the very, very, very over-prepared or the badly under-prepared. But being in the room for either type of presentation stinks. If you're a bad presenter, it can help you. If you're a good presenter, it's not a crutch you need.

Right there is why we're having this conversation, right? And that's why we've all been in those PowerPoint presentations. I get that. Is there a substitute? I mean, PowerPoint's not going away anytime soon, I guess is the question, right? PowerPoint isn't going away.

There are Bezos at Amazon and many of his, you know, his sort of NFL coaching tree of VPs and now CEOs who've worked under him swear by the Amazon six pager. It's a memo and there's no specific format. You sit down, you write what the business problem is and everyone has to read it before. You know, some companies even have silent reading time at the beginning of meetings where you you digest Right you digest everything and then you address the question or the single order of business Lots of CEOs like that right where are you on the spectrum? Are you one of those users who kind of slaps a sentence on seven different things and wings it or do you over stuff? I?

like pictures I like the Ted and wings it or do you over stuff? I like pictures. I like the TED talk. A writer who likes pictures. Now, I like the TED talk. I like the, the right question to ask is not what is the correct PowerPoint use for this presentation but should PowerPoint be used at all? And if I'm being forced to use it, I'm going to embrace the low density quality.

You know, each slide can only contain one thing. Well, then it might contain a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip or just a one-liner or a quote because, like you said, when the person is reading what's on the page that you're looking at, you know you're headed for the edge of the waterfall. Anyway, Matt Alston at Business Insider writing about PowerPoint. Matt, thanks a bunch. Appreciate your time.

Yes, sir. This was a pleasure. This final note on the way out today, one last item from Chair Powell's press conference in which the lines are best read between. Neil Irwin from Axios asking the question. Do you see any value or benefits in the U.S. government building a reserve of Bitcoin? So you know, we're not allowed to own Bitcoin. The Federal Reserve Act says what we can own and we're not looking for a law change. That's the kind of thing for Congress to consider, but we are not looking for a law change at

the Fed. And there you have it. Our media production team includes Brian Allison, Jake Cherry, Jessen Duller, Drew Jostad, Gary O'Keefe, Charlton Thorpe, Juan Carlos Torrado, and Becca Weinman. Jeff Peters is the manager of media production, and I'm Kyle Rizdall. We will see you tomorrow, everybody. This is APM. You turn to Marketplace for up-to-the-minute news, for stories that show you the connections

between global events and your personal economy. And you're not alone. Marketplace is the most widely consumed business and economic news program in the country. We're proud to make fact-based journalism freely accessible. And Marketplace investors make it all possible. Your year-end donation today will make a real difference in our nonprofit newsroom and in the lives of millions of Marketplace listeners every single day. So please contribute what you can today at marketplace.org.