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What the article overlooks and seems to smuggle in is the idea that we don't have any problems to solve that actually require jobs of the non-IT sort. Look around and see crumbling infrastructure everywhere. We need bridges replaced, highways mended, etc, etc. That represents millions of physically-intensive jobs.

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Look around and see crumbling infrastructure everywhere.

This is a common meme, but I just don't see it. Where is our crumbling infrastructure? At least in my area, the infrastructure works fantastically.

We had one bridge collapse due to a design flaw, which was so surprising that it became national news. Now we need to replace every bridge, potentially introducing new design flaws in the process? Seems like a massive overreaction to me, probably on the same scale as our overreaction to 9/11.

We shouldn't wait until after a piece of infrastructure collapses to fix the cracks in the foundation. The public capital stock has been allowed to age much more than the residential and private stock:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2010/12/age_americas...

Measuring age is not necessarily relevant - if a bridge has a lifetime of 50 years, but the average age is 23 years (up from 16), we have a long way to go before it becomes a problem. Your chart is interesting, but hardly conclusive.

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