They Used to Be Ahead in the American Economy. Now They’ve Fallen Behind.

To many Americans, whether you are prospering or not is often measured by whether you have a job and how much it pays. But there’s something harder to quantify that’s missing from that picture.

What this captures is a sense of relative standing — not just how well you do on your own terms, but how you fare compared with everyone else. In short, a sense of status.

As the American economy has shifted over the past 40 years away from manufacturing and toward services and “knowledge” work, this less visible hierarchy within the economy has shifted, too. Jobs that helped build the nation, like the machinists and metalworkers who were mostly white men without college degrees, today make a shrinking share of what the average American worker does. Newer kinds of work, like financial analysis and software development, have come to pay much more.

The economy has effectively devalued the work and skills of some Americans, while delivering mounting rewards to others — reordering the status of workers along lines that increasingly shape the country’s politics too.

This Upshot analysis of four decades of census income data provides a window into these changes, by education and gender, but also by geography and across hundreds of occupations. It seeks to size up the economy as many voters do: by whether they — and people like them — are falling behind or pulling ahead as the economy changes around them.

“In this country, we convey value through money,” said Kathy Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin. If your income is declining in relative terms, so is your sense of worth. “People don’t have these trends in front of them. But they feel them.”

Americans frustrated by the economy are responding not simply to lost jobs or rising prices, sociologists and political scientists say, but also to a sense of declining status in a world that now lifts up other kinds of people instead.

In the data, men working without a college degree of every racial group have fallen well below the average full-time worker (women without a degree have long been at the bottom in income, and college-educated men have consistently been at the top). Workers in coastal states have seen the highest growth, while steep declines have been concentrated in parts of the Midwest that are also likely to decide the election this November.

In the data, medical occupations like physician assistants, pharmacists and physical therapists have moved up. Meanwhile, a broad expansion of service-sector jobs — bartenders, servers, cooks, maids — now offers a lower foothold in the economy for workers without a college degree who 40 years ago might have found decent work in factories or clerical roles.

To take just one example of a disorienting decline: Factory foreman was a great American job in 1980, overseeing assembly lines and shop floors in the late days of U.S. manufacturing might. In supervisor roles that seldom required a college degree, they made more than the average worker four decades ago — more in fact than computer programmers at the time.

Today those computer programmers make much more (while doing more complex tasks than before). Also higher in the economic pecking order than factory supervisors today: registered nurses and dental hygienists.

A home and a boat

In 1980, those good factory foreman jobs were among the most common categories of occupations in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Many of the roles they supervised were relatively higher paying then, too: machinists, welders, metal fabricators and tool and die makers.

The forces that battered those jobs began to accelerate around that time.

“Things change very fast at that point,” said David Autor, an M.I.T. economist. A spike in interest rates in the early 1980s wiped out a lot of heavy manufacturing. Labor unions lost power. Automation replaced jobs. Then globalization, embraced by both political parties, sent work overseas.

“There was a clear division between winners and losers in the economy, and the losers were blue-collar white men largely,” said Tom Kochan, who has studied union work at M.I.T. He grew up in Manitowoc County, Wis., in the 1960s, when workers there made appliances, cranes and aluminum products. Most of that work has disappeared, and the manufacturing jobs that remain in Wisconsin are today less likely to be unionized and more likely to be contract work — lesser versions of the same occupations.

Because unionization rates were highest historically in the Midwest — with union workers earning a pay premium — manufacturing occupations have fallen the farthest there in relative incomes, especially compared with Southeastern states with right-to-work laws.

These declining lines, however, don’t capture the many workers who became unemployed or left the labor market by the end of this period.

Two generations ago, unionized factory work offered training, benefits and decent pay to many men right out of high school.

“Those people could buy a home, buy a boat,” said Susan Houseman, a senior economist at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Michigan. She pointed to inland lakes in the state dotted with vacation cottages once built for blue-collar workers.

“That’s what’s under attack,” she said — not just the jobs themselves, but the quality of life they created.

“The whole thing was: Own a house, feed the family, own a car — and then get your kids to college,” said Lisa Boscola, a Democratic state senator in Pennsylvania, who grew up a steelworker’s daughter. Her father’s job at Bethlehem Steel moved the family out of a cramped house where three children shared a bedroom. His job enabled her mother to go to community college, then sent her to college, too.

The decline of jobs like that has brought all kinds of loss that are distinct from losing money, said Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist at Berkeley. ​​“What happens economically has such ramifications — there’s a whole other story,” she said. She describes in a new book how the shifting economy also undermined the pride of blue-collar men that they could be of use, to their families, their communities and the country.

Those blue-collar workers have also seen others pull ahead in jobs that were not even tracked in official statistics when Bethlehem Steel was in its heyday. The 1980 census didn’t include figures for “credit analysts,” “software developers,” “database administrators” or “appraisers and assessors of real estate.” (In our analysis, such jobs are collapsed into larger categories like “financial specialists” and “computer programmers.”)

“So much of the growth in the economy has been not just in the tech sector,” Professor Cramer said, “but in this whole way of creating wealth and earning money that’s just invisible and not available to people who were traditionally in the sector of the economy where you’re using your body, and you’re making things.”

In fact, workers in those new, growing industries have largely been insulated from the upheaval of the last 40 years that affected workers who make things.

“If you’re sitting in a suburb on one of the coasts, I’m not sure it hits you necessarily until the pandemic, and you couldn’t get stuff,” said Scott Paul, executive director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing. Suddenly, you needed something that was no longer made in America. Then the cost of everything rose.

“Folks that were sitting in an auto town in Michigan or a steel town in Pennsylvania had been feeling this in some way since the late ’70s, the ’80s,” he said. “This was a fact of life — that things were getting smaller and not bigger.”

Economic decline, electoral consequences

Americans who’ve lost the most amid these changes — materially, but in a sense of status as well — are not evenly distributed across the country.

“What matters for our political outcomes,” said Stephanie Ternullo, an assistant professor of government at Harvard, “is that those voters are in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.”

There, the Electoral College and the casualties of a shifting economy meet.

Democrats have lost ground with white voters particularly in the places most affected by job losses after NAFTA, a free trade deal, took effect in 1994. And in a broader educational realignment underway for decades, college-educated voters have increasingly moved toward the Democratic Party, as voters without a college degree have voted more Republican.

“We were the party of the middle class and working hard and unions,” said Ms. Boscola, the Pennsylvania state senator. “But something went wrong.” In her father’s Bethlehem, Pa., it would have been unthinkable for a union worker to vote Republican.

As Democrats increasingly become the party of college-educated workers, they’re also aligning with a different picture of what “work” looks like.

Observers largely misunderstood the role of the economy in Donald J. Trump’s rise, said Noam Gidron, a political scientist. Many voters who turned to Mr. Trump were middle income, not poor. But that doesn’t mean economic factors didn’t matter, he said. Rather, right-wing populism across Western democracies doesn’t necessarily appeal to those with the lowest incomes, but to those who are downwardly mobile.

The economy matters, he said, “exactly for these changes in the social hierarchy.” But that is also only part of the picture, as political scientists continue to debate how these economic changes can become intertwined with cultural and racial grievances.

Mr. Trump promised to restore the jobs working-class voters had lost. But he also spoke directly to that “whole other story” — and to the immigrants and elites he blamed for setting it in motion.

Since defeating Mr. Trump in 2020, President Biden has prominently stood beside unions and been more successful reviving American production. But he (and Kamala Harris in turn) has seldom talked in such raw terms about that downward mobility or offered such a tidy story to explain it.

“If you feel like you’re declining, you have this tendency to now start seeing the world in zero-sum terms,” said Stefanie Stantcheva, a political scientist at Harvard. You might agree that if immigrants do better economically, it must come at the expense of U.S. citizens, or that if some ethnic or racial groups or nations do better, others inevitably do worse — views Ms. Stantcheva and colleagues have tested in a large-scale survey.

Or you might believe that if women are doing better, it must come at the expense of men.

Zero-sum thinking exists on the left and right. But among Republicans, those who hold zero-sum beliefs were likelier to have voted for Mr. Trump in 2016, according to the survey. And many of the Democrats who voted for him, including previous Obama voters, shared this trait.

Economists and politicians often counter that it’s possible to have an economy where everyone rises together, where relative position matters less than everyone’s absolute growth. But that is not how many voters see it today.