Traditional labor market data isn’t keeping up with jobs in the ‘frontier economy’

September 10, 2026, Opinion: "Current debates about AI and the labor market overwhelmingly focus on job losses. If you’re a student of history, this might seem counterintuitive: You’ve likely heard the argument that new technologies historically create more new jobs on net than they destroy. One reason why today’s discourse revolves around job displacement rather than creation is that we have far less clarity about what those “new jobs” are going to be. Over the past year, as part of my upcoming book, "The new American Frontier: Job Training for the Next Technological Age." I have been researching the jobs being created in what I call “frontier regions”—places that have been early to develop and deploy critical and emerging technologies. In doing this work, I came to appreciate more fully that the traditional labor market data sources many policymakers rely on were not really designed to shed light on this question, especially not in real time."