Just because some long dead English guy named Economics the Dismal Science doesn’t mean this post has to be dismal. Perhaps it isn’t economics itself that is dismal, but the reporting of it which I find to be uniformly dismal. I’m 41 years old, which doesn’t mean I’m any smarter than the young whippersnappers who write most of the blogs out there, but it does mean that I have heard economics reporting over several business cycles over the years, and the script never varies. Right now we are in the “jobless recovery” scene. The media notes at the beginning of every recovery that this, unlike all the other recoveries, is a jobless one. They seem to forget that every other one at this stage was being reported as jobless. And of course that means that manufacturing jobs are disappearing, having been exported overseas, with dire consequences – as in these jobs have been lost “forever”. They’re never coming back. Japan, the Asian Tigers, and now third world countries are going to put us out of work, and all that will be left is burger flipping. Maybe this time it will be true. But I’ll tell you this – only a few short years ago the job market was so tight that you couldn’t get decent service in a McDonalds (don’t even mention Hardees – they always have lousy service).
While in the past, the stock market has been a leading indicator and employment has been a lagging indicator doesn’t mean anything; nope, this time, it’ll be different!
The culprit is productivity. We don’t want any more of that! You see, productivity growth means that we need fewer workers to produce the same amount of goods. So while I suppose I should be happy that we had enough farm productivity growth over the last several hundred years that I’m not stuck slopping the pigs and tilling the soil in order to survive, along with 99 percent of my fellow humanity, but work in a nice airconditioned office ruining my eyes with a computer terminal, if we get any more, we won’t have jobs for everybody.
Or we could look at it that with greater productivity we have more goods, more leisure time, and earlier retirements for the same number of people. I’m sure that just because that’s what it’s always meant in the past won’t mean that it will continue in the future – past performance is no indicator of future performance, you know.
