"I think all of us, of course, get caught up in the current period, and we think that change is going on now or perhaps (it's) the only time that changes have happened," says Dr. Walden, a North Carolina Cooperative Extension specialist. "But actually that's usually not true.

"And it's certainly not true in this case. If you look, for example, over the last 200 years we've had two big transformations in the job market," he adds. "Go back to 1800, 90 percent of workers worked on the farm. 90 percent! By 1900 that had fallen to 50 percent, and the other 50 percent was split equally between the manufacturing sector and the service sector.

"Now today what's happened is not only have we seen the number of people on the farm fall further, to about 3 percent, manufacturing is also down to about 20 percent and, of course, services makes up the bulk, at about 75 percent," he concludes. "The point is that this change has been going on for centuries, and it's a gradual change, certainly not all at once."