Deming was also able to assess demand shifts for what he calls the “social skills” of coordination, negotiation, persuasion, and social perceptiveness. He found that “social skill task inputs”—in other words, the overall use of these tasks—increased 24% between 1980 and 2012, while the use of “non routine and analytical skills” grew only 11%. What’s more, jobs that required high social skills increased as a share of total employment during this period, whether or not those jobs also required high math skills. Not all of these jobs are managerial, but it’s clear that the economy as a whole has,
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