New jobs--should McJobs count full?

Great Debates
1

So, the allegation is that umpty-whatsis “new jobs” have been added to the US economy. What is the nature of those “jobs”. Is a McJob 100% totally and utterly fundamentally identical in its ability to support a patriotic red-blooded American family as would be something that pays more, has good health benefits, paid vacation, etc.?

Are the people who are claiming that McJobs should count identically to real jobs willing to sacrifice their real jobs forever, for the rest of their lives, only to work at a McJob–after all, if they all count the same, then they’re functionally equivalent, right?
Here’s my solution to the problem:

Pick a year. Take the median US income for that year. A job that paid annually, in that year, the median income for that year is officially “one job”. Okay, so now adjust current annual pay rates for inflation back to that year and do a little math. A job that would pay twice “one job” in inflation-adjusted dollars would count as “two jobs”. A job that would pay half “one job” in inflation-adjusted dollars would count as “half a job”. No diddling is permitted. If the job is 10 hours a week for forty weeks a year, and paid hourly, then the gubmint is only permitted to permit the income that would be earned on those 400 hours. Any gubmint official who tries to report it as what the job would have paid were it 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, would be executed by braising in phlegm or something else suitably disgusting and amusing. Likewise diddling with the baseline year is forbidden.

Thus, if 10000 crapass jobs are added to the economy, an income-based comparison would let us know that they are only worth 2000 real jobs.

2

I agree, it would be a much more accurately assement of the health of the jobs facet of the economy. However, to be fair, if a new job paid twice the median income, would it count as two jobs?

3

Only if it was supporting two people.

And while I agree completely with the OP, how are you going to do this? Pass a law against politicians putting their own particular spin on the facts?

While I think this is a peachy idea, I’m not at all sure how it would be implemented…

4

This does not take into account, though, cost of living differences across the United States, and whether the job in question will be used as that of the primary breadwinner or as supplementary income.

We already have metrics to show income in American households, so this would be superfluous.

Let’s just let job growth or loss speak for itself. It gives us important numbers all by its lonesome.

5

This would be a great idea if the gov’t was forbiden by law to publish more than 1 labor statistic: total # of jobs. But since it isn’t, this is a terrible idea.

Why cram two statistics into one? We already can look at number of jobs and average hourly wage. Plus a whole slew of other statistics. When you jumble them together, you lose information.

6

Mr. M: Let’s just let job growth or loss speak for itself. It gives us important numbers all by its lonesome.

I agree. I think the OP is quite right that we need to know more about the jobs situation than just “we created x jobs” or “we lost y jobs”, but that’s why we have statistics on median wage levels, income trends, growth or shrinkage of specific economic sectors, etc. etc. etc.

To understand the jobs situation properly, what we need is additional data, not just a new way of processing a single datum.

7

Well I agree with the OP’s intent that more focus should be given to the quality of employment in job stats. To some degree it is brought up, though usually tangentially. When they talk of lagging jobs in the manufacturing sector(the traditional area for higher wages) but increases in the service sector – this is often indication of a McJob shift. I would be happier if we had better ways of keeping track of dead-end jobs in all sectors.

With current trends it’s whistling in the wind to expect the gov’t to highlight the situation. It should be an important labour-lobby talking point, IMHO. They need a snappy way to illustrate the changes in the north american job market.

8

I think trying to break it down by fractions of an average job would just confuse the issue. Average wage in addition to the number of jobs should provide adequate reference data, IMO.

BTW, hope this isn’t too much of a hijack, but yesterday Jim Hightower’s daily anti-Bush radio screed included the information that the White House is attempting to reclassify fast-food jobs from “service” to “manufacturing”, ostensibly to make the job-creation numbers look better. The justification, apparently, is that since making a burger involves material alteration of the product (turning ground beef into a burger, though cooking) and an assembly process (bun, lettuce, special sauce, etc.), it’s manufacturing. It’s all a bit reminiscent of the Reagan admin’s efforts to have ketchup reclassified as a vegetable for school lunch purposes. The question is, is Hightower’s claim correct?

9

It is true in as far as it appears to be the reasoning of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors:

Remarks to the National Economists Club and Society of Government Economists on February 17 by Dr. N. Gregory Mankiw, Chairman Council of Economic Advisers

It is unclear if this is an actual recommendation, or merely a trial balloon. Mankiw is the same dolt who suggested that outsourcing American jobs was good for the economy.

10

Political dolt or economic dolt? If the latter, he has lots of company-- the vast majority of economists would agree with him.

11

I don’t doubt that you could find one or more economists that agree with Mankiw, but that does not translate in to the “vast majority”. If you have credible data supporting this, I’d like to see it.

The point is, too many White House economists equate what is good for stockholders must be good for the economy, when less than half of the households in the country own any stock at all, and derive their income the old fashioned way.

12

From the CBS News site on this very story (my bolding):

13

That is a very lame cite of one writer’s opinion, that comes nowhere near supporting your claim of “the vast majority”; and I think you knew that when you posted it.

However, in your own cite, I found this regarding Mankiw’s theories on job creation in general, which does nothing to support his credibility as an expert in economics:

14

Please prove that the law cannot be changed, under any circumstance, whatsoever.

15

Interesting, and somewhat related, is Tom Tomorrow’s commentary on Thomas Friedman’s recent column.

In brief, Friedman was examining the issue of the outsourcing of jobs to India when he saw a T-shirt that said, “My job went to India and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.” Friedman said that this is why we don’t have to worry about outsourced jobs–Americans will always have ingenuity, such as that shown by the people selling these T-shirts.

Tom Tomorrow tracked down the guy selling the shirts, who says that while he hasn’t actually lost his tech job yet (though he’s supposedly in line), he’s made about $10 so far selling the shirts. And this is supposed to be equivalent to a career with a good salary and benefits?

As for the OP, it would be a useful number, but that doesn’t mean the White House would use it. They’ll continue to use the numbers that make them look best, or the ones they can at least make sound good.

Dr. J

16

Actually, you initiated the claim “Mankiw is a dolt…” which needs to be supported. I offered evidence to the contrary. You need to provide some evidence to back up your claim.

His credibility as an economist is not the question here. The quote, in context, has absolutely nothing to do with outsourcing and whether or not that is good or bad for the economy:

17

The key point is that the people who are offering McJobs as real jobs are not the ones who are faced with the prospect of working in McJobs. They’re hoping the idjits will take up the cry and pronounce these McJobs the new wonder of America’s economy. Speaking of which … cue the Usual Idjits …

18

While I agree with Dogface’s general line of reasoning, I think the actual method of processing job data would be so cumbersome as to be useless. Suppose for example that a bunch of $25K/year jobs were replaced by $15K jobs. Would they then count as 3/5 of a job? What about a job that has no health insurance or other benefits? What fraction of a “real job” would that be? There is a continuum in the wage scale, a curve if you will. Granted at the lower end of the wage scale, the curve can look like an angle, but… The model presented in the OP is also flawed because a job that paid twice the median would count as two jobs, thus partially disgusing the shortfall of various parts of jobs.

Throw into the mix that many employers are now hiring people for 35 hours a week instead of the traditional forty so the new employees can be classified as part time and thus not eligible for insurance benefits. My mom had fits when she was looking for a “part time” job, and in interviews found that the jobs she was applying for were seven hours, five days a week… in other words, full time jobs that had a few hours trimmed for the above stated reason. I haven’t seen this practice figured into any research or gummint statistics yet, but it is becoming increasingly common.

I think that underemployment should be a published and publicized statistic on its own. People who need full-time jobs in order to support themselves and their families, but can only find part time work, or people who are unable to find employment that pays a real, living wage because higher-paid jobs are no longer available should be figured into the publicized statistics. As it stands, part-time workers who need full-time work to survive are counted, but not figured into the official employment statistics. If we saw on the news just after the rosy “low unemployment” statistics (which underestimate the problem because “discouraged workers” who have given up looking for work are not counted as “unemployed”, even though they may still need and want work), the percentages of people who were forced by circumstances to take “partial jobs” it might create a different perception of the economy as far as job creation is concerned.

19

I’ve got no doubt that John Mace is right about whether most economists would support Mankiw’s assertion, even though I can’t produce polls of economists to back him up. I’ve been reading a lot of Brad DeLong’s blog lately, and DeLong is one very liberal guy, as well as being a respected economist. He backs Mankiw to the hilt on this one, and pretty much says that your choices are to agree, or to somehow turn two centuries of economic theory on its head.

And I’ve been reading a lot of Paul Krugman lately as well. While I don’t recall Krugman responding directly to Mankiw’s assertion, my reading of Krugman is that he’d agree with Mankiw too.

The real problem with Mankiw’s remarks is political. There is a difference, we all know, between how “the economy” does, and how you and I do. That gap didn’t used to be all that big; when the economy heated up, factories added workers, and when it cooled off, they laid workers off. The ‘jobless recovery’ of the early to mid 1990s greatly weakened that connection, and the current job-loss recovery has pretty much broken it: if the pie known as “the American economy” is growing, but the growing pie isn’t growing most slices, then why should most Americans care that trade of jobs as well as goods enriches “the economy” as a whole? If I can’t see my way to a better job, then what good does it do me when my job is traded to India?

From here, we could segue into a discussion about John Edwards’ “Two Americas”, but it’s late, I’m tired, and you probably get the idea. There’s winners, and there’s losers, and that’s your problem. If only a small group of winners benefits from free trade, then people are going to take offense at the notion that their job is just another commodity that can be shipped overseas at the drop of a hat.

20

Allow me to grossly oversimplify. America is loyal to capitalism, but capitalism is not loyal to America. It has no such capacity, of course, being an abstract economic system.

It has reached its zenith in the multi-national corporation, an entity like a biological organism, subject to all the tiresome laws of Darwinism. Its individual components may feel some passing sentiments, some vestigal sense of “belonging” to a nation, but this is of no consequence in the final analysis. If General Widgets can steal a march on Amalgamated Stuff by moving its home office offshore, its loyally Republican CEO might feel a passing twinge when he thinks about America’s soldiers having to do without GW’s tax revenues…but he’ll do it.

Because that is his first, and primary, loyalty. And, of course, the widows and orphans who’s life savings are invested in his stock. It is for them he shoulders the massive burdens of his office, and slogs his weary way to his mahogony office. For thier sakes, he sacrifices even his patriotism. Let us take a moment to weep for him. OK, that’s enough.

Jobs and labor is “outsourced” because it works. There isn’t the slightest chance of reversing this trend. In an oddly ironic way, Marx has been proven right: capitalism evolves. It has done so.

The first and most important casualty will be our beloved work ethic, for the simple reason that there is not enough work to go around, or, at least, not enough productive and useful work, certainly not enough white collar work. The computer spreadsheet has rendered thousands of Bartleby Scriveners redundant.

Remember how we used to marvel at our future, how much drudgery would be relieved by our machines? But we forgot that so many of our fellow humans make thier livings by drudgery. Are we now to scold them for thier laziness, how foolishly they neglected to obtain MBA’s? Or retrain all of our truck drivers to be computer programmers or Starbucks entreprenuers?

It won’t work. We won’t work. We will have to radically redefine economic justice and our “work ethic”. There is not enough drudgery to go around.

So what will you have? A much more simple America, with more limitations, less room for the driving ambitions of entreprenuers? Or an America of privileged apparatchiks in gated communities and listless lumpenproles eager for the opportunity to paw through thier garbage?