This isn’t a very festive post, being the holiday season and all. But being the holiday season, I actually have a few minutes to write it. The topic has been on my mind a lot lately.

Yesterday, I reviewed a number of the year’s “best graphs,” published by The Atlantic. One of the most striking, further inciting this post, was a graph showing how US GDP has effectively recovered from the recession. Shocking, right? Because jobs haven’t. In fact, the US is pumping out a pre-recession GDP with 6.6 million fewer jobs.

That chart supports another that I reviewed recently in The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, showing how manufacturing output in the US actually hasn’t diminished the way some pundits claim. Nor have the jobs all been sent offshore. Rather, factories are outputting more product with fewer people thanks largely to productivity improvements and, critically, automation. In fact, I’ve read that Foxconn, maker or Apple products, plans to start further automating its factories, eliminating jobs from its massive workforce. Capital flows downhill, and eventually flows into computers and robots whose labor is effectively more profitable than even slave labor.

Economists would argue that’s okay, because you need people to make, service and program the computers and robots. But (a) it takes far fewer people to program an iPhone app than manufacture an iPhone and (b) those people need a higher level of education than someone working on a repetitive assembly-line task.

Just compare “new economy” companies like Apple and Google with “old economy” companies like Ford and GM. The former make up to 10 times the profit per employee of the latter, despite having high-priced engineers on their payroll. Put another way, it takes these companies up to 10 times fewer people to produce every dollar of profit. Looking at those numbers, it’s no surprise you have a pre-recession GDP with 6.6 million fewer jobs.

Old economy versus new: "New economy" companies like Apple and Google make up to 10 times more profit per employee than "old economy" companies like GM and Ford (all data from Wolfram|Alpha)

And that trend will only continue. As Marc Andreessen has pointed out, an increasing amount of stuff is becoming software. Everyone from dedicated hardware manufacturers to toy companies are seeing the trend, with do-it-all gadgets like the iPad eating into their physical product business. When 3D printing goes mainstream (I guesstimate around 2013), that trend will only hasten the decline of traditional manufacturing. Combine that with the trend of collaborative consumption, with services like Zip car and AutoShare, and the number of factories and manufacturing jobs will only plummet further.

I’m not sure what this means for the economy and employment, but I’m pretty sure that business-as-usual and government-as-usual is not the answer. The fruits of productivity gains need to be shared more broadly, and more people engaged in the new economy in some capacity, or things like Occupy Wall Street will seem quaint and cute in comparison to the more violent protests of hungry, bored young people (particularly unemployed young men) who have nothing to lose.

Fundamentally, this isn’t your grandparents’ recession. There is a structural change going on here, and 1920s solutions won’t cut it. The cloud of political rhetoric around tax breaks and spending cuts is mostly a distraction. The economy is shifting beneath our feet. The signs are there for anyone to see if they’d simply look.