The line chart displays how many individuals were employed (in millions) in each of the four economic sectors – manufacturing, retail, agriculture, and health care – in the US at twenty-year intervals from 1960 to 2020. Broadly speaking, two contrasting trends can be identified in the figures: those for the retail and health care sectors climbed consistently from one interval to the next, reaching similar peaks in the final year, whereas those for the remaining two ended the period below their initial levels, despite a temporary rise in manufacturing in 1980.
Specifically, while the health care sector originally registered the lowest number of workers, at around 2.5 million in 1960, its employment figure increased substantially over the following decades, making the sector one of the largest employers by 2020, with approximately 16 million workers. The employment trajectory in retail roughly mirrored that in health care, with the number of jobs rising steadily from a little over 5 million in 1960 until the two sectors nearly converged in 2020.
By contrast, even though the agricultural sector accounted for about the same number of workers as retail in 1960, its figure fell by almost half to around 3 million in 1980 and held virtually constant through 2000, before declining further to approximately 2 million in 2020. Manufacturing, however, followed a different pattern. Standing at 15 million workers in 1960 – the highest initial figure among the four – employment in this sector reached a temporary peak of around 20 million in 1980 before decreasing all the way to its lowest figure of approximately 13 million in 2020.