AI Summary
5 min readFor nearly 80 years, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been publishing something called the Occupational Outlook Handbook—a government report that tries to predict which jobs will grow and which will shrink. A listener named Asa Matsumoto, an application security engineer who also teaches at Georgia Tech, wanted to know: how does the BLS make these projections, and how accurate have they actually been? The answer, it turns out, is surprisingly good—but the method is less about crystal balls and more about watching how slowly the world changes.
How the BLS makes its predictions
The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not employ psychics. As economist Sarah Mattson put it, "If I can make every exact prediction in a crystal ball, I would not be working here. I would have won the lottery by now." Instead, the process starts with broad structural trends: the aging of the population, overall population change, and historical employment patterns within different industries. For example, home health and personal care aides have been growing faster than physicians and surgeons, so the BLS extends those trends forward.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:05) **Episode Introduction & The Core Question** - Whelan introduces the episode's focus on future-proof jobs amid AI and tariff uncertainty, and teases a look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics' "crystal ball."
- 2 (01:56) **Listener Asa's Real-World Dilemma** - A listener named Asa, an application security engineer and teaching assistant, describes the pressure to give empirically-backed career advice to students in an AI-driven world.
- 3 (03:16) **The BLS's Top & Bottom Job Lists** - The hosts reveal the BLS's fastest-growing jobs (Nurse Practitioner, solar installer, wind tech) and declining jobs (telemarketer, desktop publisher).
- 4 (03:46) **The Economist Behind the Curtain** - Sarah Mattson, a BLS economist, explains her role is not psychic but involves analyzing labor market trends.
- 5 (04:30) **How the BLS Handles New Trends** - Sarah's team applies qualitative research to adjust initial statistical estimates for emerging trends.
- 6 (05:03) **The Accuracy Question: A Researcher's Study** - The episode shifts to economist Maxim Masenkov, who wrote a paper on the reliability of BLS projections, motivated by AI's impact on job forecasts.
- 7 (06:10) **Historical Predictions: Hits and Misses** - The hosts recount classic BLS predictions: more vets for suburban pet owners, fewer barbers due to long hair in the 70s, and a famously wrong benign outlook for telegraph operators in the 1940s.
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Show Notes
Today on the show, we flip through the Occupational Outlook Handbook and answer your questions about the future of work.
This episode originally aired on May 8th, 2026
Fact checking by Sierra Juarez.
Your Next Listen
— How AI is shrinking the job market for teens
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