The Net

U.S. employment is up 2.5% since ChatGPT launched. Computer systems design is down 5%. Wages rose 7.5% nationally and 16.7% in tech. Young workers' job-finding rates dropped 14%. Every number is accurate. None of them describe the same economy. The Dallas Federal Reserve published a labor market study in February 2026 that contains two findings which cannot both be reassuring. First: overall U.S. employment has grown approximately 2.5 percent since ChatGPT launched in late 2022. Second: employment in the top ten percent of AI-exposed sectors has declined one percent over the same period, with computer systems design — the industry building the technology — down five percent. The aggregate is fine. The composition is not. The Compression Artifact Net employment figures are compression artifacts. They take two populations experiencing opposite realities and average them into a single number that describes neither. The 2.5 percent growth includes healthcare hiring, construction, and servi