I don’t think many people grasp just how much job creation we need to climb out of the hole we’re in. You can’t just look at the eight million jobs that America has lost since the recession began, because the nation needs to keep adding jobs — more than 100,000 a month — to keep up with a growing population. And that means that we need really big job gains, month after month, if we want to see America return to anything that feels like full employment.
How big? My back of the envelope calculation says that we need to add around 18 million jobs over the next five years, or 300,000 jobs a month. This puts last week’s employment report, which showed job losses of “only” 11,000 in November, in perspective. It was basically a terrible report, which was reported as good news only because we’ve been down so long that it looks like up to the financial press.
So if we’re going to have any real good news, someone has to take responsibility for creating a lot of additional jobs.
Paul Krugman puts the important job numbers on the table and then says that the Fed has to make this a priority. I agree but I think that the nature of "jobs" needs a revisit as well. If we don't understand "job" we may not get what we need.
Between 1941, America' entry into WWII, and about 1980 it was well paying manufacturing jobs that built the American economy. But since the mid 1980's these jobs have gone. To China or replaced by machines. They have been replaced by minimum wage service jobs if at all. Today the number of manufacturing jobs is the same as in 1942!
While this has gone on White collar jobs are also disappearing - this is driven by the web revolution. Journalists are the most obvious but this trend is thinning out many very well paying jobs and entire industries of blue collar jobs - the paper industry, printing etc.
This is not your usual recession. It is a work revolution. It is like the industrial revolution itself. What happened then was "Enclosure". All the work attached to the land and the rural communities was destroyed by the revolution in agriculture where machines and new practices did away with a system that depended on lots of people. Where did they go? In England 3 million went to London by 1860. Millions went to Manchester etc and formed the basis of the Industrial revolution.
There are NO JOBS TO GO BACK TO. Just as there was no village and rural work in 1840.
We have to re-invent our economy just as the Victorians re-invented theirs.
A start will be local food, local energy and web infrastructure.
Simply throwing money at "Jobs" will be to waste it and millions of lives.
