(b) Constructed using data reported in the supplementary tables to Piketty & Zucman (2014). (c) These data are consistent with the ONS Quarterly National Accounts Q2 2015 release. Selfemployed labour income is imputed differently than series (b) due to data availability. BIS central bankers’ speeches  25%  Top 10% income share in the UK  40 1900  1950  20%  2000  Source: Piketty (2014)  21  0  Chart 17: Share of employment by sector, since 1688  Primary  Secondary  Percentages of workforce 90  Tertiary  80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 1688  1718  1748  1778  1808  1838  1868  1898  1928  1958  1988  0  Source: Shaw-Taylor and Wrigley (2013); ONS; Bank calculations.
As Mark Twain almost said, labour market history, if not repeating itself, has certainly rhymed. This should come as no surprise. As in the mid-19th century, this is a time of huge change in the jobs market. Rarely a day passes without concerns about job prospects in some of the UK’s most iconic industries, from steel to oil and gas to cars. And rarely a week passes without evidence of jobs and industries being fundamentally reshaped by globalisation and technology, be it the digital economy, the sharing economy or even the Second Machine Age. There is no shortage of explanations for these searing developments. They are part cyclical, as the global economy continues to recover from a financial crisis which is likely to be the most costly since the Great Depression. But these changes are also in part structural given tectonic shifts in demography, inequality and technology, to name but three. None of these challenges is of course entirely new either. My own interest in economics was spawned in the early 1980s by just such a challenge. At that time, more than 3 million people were unemployed in the UK, or almost 12% of the working population. In Yorkshire, where I grew up, the unemployment rate peaked at close to 13%, hit by a double whammy of deep recession and a contraction in steel, textiles and coal-mining. Unemployment at that stage was not for me a statistic. Nor was it the bloodless theorising I would go on to study at university.