Even as western economies globalise, it can be a shock to discover how little resemblance the working world bears to the folkloric economy of children’s books and politicians’ rhetoric. These are not economies of butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers. The US has more graphic designers (191,000) than bakers (157,000), according to data released this week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I was taken aback to discover, during the 2008 presidential campaign, that the country also has more choreographers than metal casters. National politicians, though, almost always campaign as if “the economy” is something found only in factories and on farms. A president with a real interest in the economy would also visit some of the nation’s 202,000 sports coaches or its 80,000 substance-abuse counsellors.

The centre of the US economy has moved from shop floor to shopfront, then to shopping online. Many endeavours considered “employment” in the past couple of centuries have proved vulnerable to automation and computerisation. This year’s BLS data show that, since 2007, the US has gained 387,000 managerial positions and lost about 2m clerical ones. Perhaps the occupants of the former were consulted on how to fire the latter. It was once assumed that the skills-biased technological change that decimated factory work would never threaten jobs that required a human touch. How wrong that was. Automatic teller machines replaced bank staff years back.

Less than a year ago, too, scholars of higher education were marvelling at how rapidly online university courses had advanced. They seemed to work particularly well when students could be assured their professors would actually have time to mark them. Now EdX, the online learning company that draws on Harvard and other universities, has reportedly found a reliable way to grade written work by computer. Summly, the app teenager Nick D’Aloisio has just sold to Yahoo, shortens articles to Twitter length. It sounds suspiciously like something that might eventually replace an editor.