The U.S. economy has been so outstanding at creating jobs over the past ten years that now is a good time to stand back and assess where, among industries, the pickup has been most remarkable and whether there are currently signs of general easing.

The top half of Graph 1 sets out the level of U.S. total employment from January 2000 to the present. The rectangles of gray shading highlight the last two slowdowns – i.e., the dot-com setback in Q2 and Q3 of 2001 and the Great Recession running from Q1 2008 through Q2 2009. The downturns in employment during those time frames is quite evident in both the upper and lower portions of the chart.

What’s also readily apparent, however, is how the past-20-years period, from a number-of-jobs point of view, has split into distinct decades. Total employment at the end of 2009 was slightly less than it was in January 2000. By way of contrast, from January 2010 on, the jobs count has done nothing but ascend.

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