Has Russia Won The Future?

To inform some of the discussion from yesterday, here's a chart of labor force shares by sector in the world's 20 largest economies. This tripartite scheme is admittedly simplistic, but it's the only way to get internationally comparable data on labor force allocation:

Some observations to stir the pot. Service sector jobs outnumber industrial jobs in all 20 countries. Service sector jobs are a majority of employment except in poor (China, India, Indonesia, Turkey) countries with many farmers. The three countries with less industrial employment than the United States (Canada, UK, Netherlands) are all more egalitarian than the United States. Italy has a larger share of people working in industry than does Germany. Of major economies, the country with the largest share of people working in industry is Russia. America's agricultural sector employs freakishly few people, especially when you consider our low population density and I assume that different approaches to farm subsidies are the reason.

Nothing about this proves anything one way or another as regards specific policy questions, but the point is that industrial employment will occupy less than a third of the labor force.