Using data from the Census Bureau, NPR made a map of the most common job in each state.1 The award for top job goes, overwhelmingly, to truck drivers… who knew? Truck driver was the most common job in 29 out of 50 states.

Part of the commonality has to do with the way the jobs are categorized by the government. The truck driver category includes all delivery people, which is an understandably large category.

Still, truck driving is resistant to both globalization and automation, which has protected it from much of the declines seen in other industries. As NPR pointed out, “A worker in China can't drive a truck in Ohio, and machines can't drive cars (yet).”2

It is beyond clear that technology will radically change this in the future, as self-driving cars and trucks will start to appear in the next five years, and in ten years most of these truck-driving jobs will no longer exist.

Other industries have not been so fortunate, like farming. In 1978, farmers (owners and tenants) and farm workers were the most common job in eight states. In 2014, that had dropped to two states… but the term “farmer” is no longer used… now we have “farm managers,” which reflects the growing trend of “farms” turning into corporations.

Farmers, Once the Most Popular ‘Job’ in America, Now Make Up Less Than 1 Percent of the Population

The number of farmers in the US has been on the decline for a century. NPR explained this by saying that farming technology “keeps getting better, which means fewer and fewer people can grow more and more food.” As the Worldwatch Institute put it:a

“For most of the past two centuries, the shift toward fewer farmers has generally been assumed to be a kind of progress. The substitution of high-powered diesel tractors for slow-moving women and men with hoes, or of large mechanized industrial farms for clusters of small ‘old fashioned’ farms, is typically seen as the way to a more abundant and affordable food supply.

Our urban-centered society has even come to view rural life, especially in the form of small family-owned businesses, as backwards or boring, fit only for people who wear overalls and go to bed early-far from the sophistication and dynamism of the city.”

But is this really a form of progress? As the number of farmers is dwindling, demands for food have only increased – demands that are being met by the proliferation of industrial concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and, ostensibly, genetically modified (GM) foods. This isn’t a problem unique to the US, either.