Where Have All the Jobs Gone?

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Table of Contents

Essays

New tires travel like so many hangman’s nooses past a bank of recently installed automated curing presses at a tire factory in 1960. (Charles Rotkin / Corbis)

The automation crisis of the 1960s created a surge of alarm over technology’s job-killing effects. There is a lot we can learn from it.

Daniel Akst
A seventh grader at Samuel J. Green Charter School in New Orleans looks on in class. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the city’s school system was drastically restructured, with a new emphasis on charter schools geared toward college preparation. (Lee Celano / Reuters / Corbis)

Millions of young people will never attend four-year colleges. America must do more to equip them to secure good jobs and live fulfilling lives.

Sarah Carr
A John Deere factory in Pune, India, is a visible sign of the offshoring of jobs. But many middle-paying U.S. jobs have been replaced by better-paid managerial, professional, and technical positions. (Scott Eells / Redux)

The great American job machine is sputtering, but it has not lost any of its underlying power.

Scott Winship
Mawwin hides in a home in Cairo after a 1999 factory accident.

Snatched from a marketplace in Sudan and sold into slavery at the age of six, William Mawwin became one of millions of people in the world enduring some form of involuntary servitude. This is his extraordinary story.

Melissa Pritchard
The main street in Rogun, a modest town that hopes to be home to the world’s tallest dam, a relatively narrow clay and stone “embankment” dam more than 1,000 feet high. (Joshua Kucera)

Poor, landlocked, and bedeviled by its neighbors, Tajikistan is staking its future on the one resource it has in abundance.

Joshua Kucera

In Essence

Foreign-policy elites really are smarter than the rest of us.

Come autocrats or invaders, the Russian capital endures.

Book Reviews

HOTHOUSE:
The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America’s Most Celebrated Publishing House, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
By Boris Kachka. Simon & Schuster. 448 pp. $28

WILD ONES
A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America.
By Jon Mooallem. Penguin Press. 339 pp. $27.95

THE END OF NIGHT:
Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light.
By Paul Bogard. Little, Brown. 325 pp. $27

A CALL TO ARMS:
Mobilizing America for World War II.
By Maury Klein. Bloomsbury Press. 897 pp. $40

BLESSED:
A History of the American Prosperity Gospel.
By Kate Bowler. Oxford Univ. Press. 337 pp. $34.95

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