Joe Gregorio
You might think that as the U.S. moves from an industrial and manufacturing based economy to a knowledge based economy that we surely have weathered similar tranistions. For example, as we moved from an agricultural economy to a manufacturing based one. While we did indeed weather the same changes, the vital difference is the timescale over which those changes took place.
As you can see from this data on agricultural employment, we did experience a loss of 6 million agricultural jobs over a 50 year period from 1910 to 1960. In contrast, from Voter anger explained—in one chart, you can see that the U.S. economy also lost 6 million manufacturing jobs, but this time in just 10 years, from 2000 to 2010.