Did we create a half million or 7.7 million jobs last quarter?
The undisputed gem of the United States Department of Labor is the Bureau of Labor Statistics. You can debate whether the rest of the place accomplishes much, but the BLS is pure gold — home to some of America’s smartest and most important data gatherers, knowledge makers, and statisticians.
They work about a block from the Capitol, but they might as well live on Mars. Economic facts, it turns out, rarely play a central role in political decision making; Fear and Greed have a lot more clout.
The debate about the flight of American jobs overseas is a staple of Democratic stump speeches, which routinely raise fear and money on visions of greedy corporate bastards sending our good jobs to them scary Chinese. In fact, greedy corporate bastards do send our good jobs to them scary Chinese (that, roughly, is what makes some of us corporate bastards, greedy and otherwise).
But we also take jobs away from them evil Chinese and bring them here. We are not being kind, we are just being greedy corporate bastards.
In search of a buck, we destroy a lot of jobs and we create a lot of
jobs. Turns out that we create a lot more jobs than we destroy — but I have no doubt we would behave this way even if we didn’t. It’s just business — it’s not personal.
Unless of course, your job disappears, at which point it all becomes very personal. Politicians, who work for Fear and Greed, rally the citizenry accordingly.
Presidents, as a direct result, love to talk about how many jobs
they have created. A decade or so ago, the President asked me to
assemble the data on "how many jobs my administration has created". I
was the new guy and I must have looked like I had time on my hands. My
answer (delivered in a memo to the Secretary of Labor) was roughly
"Mr. President, you have actually created very few jobs
(although you created mine, which I appreciate). Your budget policies
however, are reassuring the capital markets at the moment, especially
the debt markets. You are letting smart people immigrate here from
overseas. Your tax policies suck less than businesspeople thought they
would. We are not at war. This internet thing might be important.Smart
people plus access to capital plus tax policies that don’t suck plus
technical innovation promotes company creation, which promotes job
creation. Your Labor Department wants to train people for
better jobs, which might help a little. But these are all indirect
effects. Regardless of your campaign speeches, you don’t create many jobs directly. Your policies enable other people to create jobs.But hey, take credit. You’re the President."
Needless to say, the next time Mr. Clinton needed facts, he asked someone else (although by his second term, he was actually giving some version of this speech thanks mainly to the efforts of Bob Rubin and Gene Sperling).
A politician who turned to the BLS for facts this week would have learned that more high end jobs are washing up on our shores than are washing off. Notes Barons
According to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics (BLS), in fourth-quarter 2006 alone, 7.7 million jobs were
created while 7.2 million disappeared…
Even if we believe the widely cited projections of
consultants Forrester Research that 3.4 million service jobs will have
moved offshore between 2000 and 2015, that’s only a little more than
half the jobs created and lost in a single quarter. And even if we
believe Forrester’s estimate that approximately 800,000 service jobs
moved offshore between 2002 and 2006, that’s only a little over the 10%
of the jobs created and lost in a single quarter.
But
you are unlikely to hear this on the campaign trail. Successful
candidates bash Wal-Mart and play to the fears of people who forget
that we are living, right now, in one of the best economies in American
history. Next time you see a corporate bastard, give ‘em a hug.
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