Already this year we’ve had remarkably headline-grabbing
commentary on the direction of not only American jobs, but the country in
general. What have people been saying
and how much value does it have?
On January 11th, Salon shouted out “Sorry, Trump voters: Those factory jobs aren’t coming back –
because they don’t exist anymore.”
Author Conor Lynch made good points toward his correct thesis about those
nostalgia-inducing positions, that since the Great Recession year of 2009
manufacturing output has increased 20% while employment is only up 5%, with
“automation technologies, not foreign workers” the culprit in 80% of those lost
opportunities. That is the problem we
face, and is another reason why efforts to vilify immigrants are inappropriate.
Noteworthy observations punctuated “Lifelong learning,”
published January 14th in The
Economist. The column started with a
shaky assumption, that “education fails to keep pace with technology,” and
described “working lives” as “lengthy,” which they would be if people got what
they wanted, but then laid down a law that workers “must” add new skills with
time. The unbilled author proposed an
offset to the trend toward narrow college majors and courses of study, that
“those with specialised training tend to withdraw from the labour force earlier
than those with general education – perhaps because they are less adaptable.” That, at least generally true, would make as
good a subject for a book as for an article.
The same is true for a piece in the February 6th New York Times, in which Patricia Cohen
discussed something I have mentioned in the past but have seldom seen
elsewhere. “The Economic Growth That Experts
Can’t Count” said that, although American gross domestic product is growing
more slowly, to it “a delectable $20 meal that would wow Julia Child is equal
to a rubbery, tasteless one that costs the same amount,” and that “digital dark
matter” such as Wikipedia which demonstrably increases productivity is likewise
not included. Indeed, ordinary Americans
have advantages even the most affluent did not have only ten years ago, some of
which Cohen documented. They are not
creating jobs as they once did, and Wikipedia employs far fewer people than
would a Library of Congress-sized institute in each city, but they are real.
Is less than 17 years enough time to say that “This Century
Is Broken”? David Brooks posed that
question in the February 21st New
York Times. He said that from 1951
to 2000 there were “no world wars, no Great Depressions, fewer civil wars,
fewer plagues,” and asserted that slow economic growth was the core problem of
the years since then. Brooks cited
increased numbers of men aged 25 to 55 out of the labor force, a group with 57%
getting government disability, and “about half” taking pain medication daily,
those two depressing statistics related, one way or another, to the work
shortage. It is too early to say
anything comprehensive about 2001 through 2100, but in some ways we clearly are,
indeed, off to a bad start.
Along with Brooks, Robert J. Samuelson (“Have Americans gone
complacent?,” February 28, The Washington
Post) reacted last month to a new Tyler Cowen book, The Complacent Class. In it,
Cowen argued that our country is, as Brooks put it, “decelerating, detaching,
losing hope, getting sadder.” As
symptoms, Cowen named lower entrepreneurism rates and less tendency to move for
jobs; the last is easily explained by work
opportunities being increasingly temporary, but the first, especially Brooks’s
interpretation that “millennials may be the least entrepreneurial generation in
American history,” fueled both by Cowen’s telling us that the percentage of
those under 30 owning businesses is down 65% in about 30 years and that
generation having a sky-high underemployment rate, is worthy of concern. Samuelson’s observation that we “increasingly
cluster with people ‘like us’” is nothing new, and neither is his thought that what
Cowen called “complacency” was really “entitlement” (I would call it “justified
fear”). However, Brooks’s question,
“where is the social movement that is thinking about the fundamentals of this
century’s bad start and envisions an alternate path?” is a good one. I project that such a crusade will take shape
within a few years.
Another good one, “The Big Question for the U.S.
Economy: How Much Room Is There to
Grow?” was posed by Neil Irwin in the February 24th New York Times. There is still plenty of “economic slack,” in
the forms of underused factories (the rate much the same as it was five years
ago), unoccupied business property (down only from 17.6% to 15.8% since 2011),
and of course potential employees who aren’t working (see the latest AJSN at http://worksnewage.blogspot.com/2017/03/february-almost-every-jobs-number.html). Because of this extra capacity, Irwin called
for fewer interest rate increases, to “create a virtuous cycle” by attempting
“to run the economy a little hot.” That
is the strategy with the most merit, and would get more of our 17.9 million
surplus workers into jobs. That, not
fine-tuning, is what we need now as ever.