Thursday, January 03, 2013

Creating Jobs

Creating jobs is easy.  All you have to do is look for the synonyms of both words in the phrase.  Make. Work.  (Macht.  Arbeiten.) Happens all the time. Is that what politicians are promising?  Could be.  We could have energy farms where citizens could go and get paid $10/hour to ride stationary bicycles to generate power, but what with the set-up and the safety features, it would cost more than the energy is is worth.  Even at $1/hour it’s a money loser. Plus, folks would be pretty insulted if that was the job the government got for them.

(Actually, that’s not a good example.  For a few hours a week people might be happy to get paid even a pittance for their exercise instead of paying for Planet Fitness, and it wouldn’t lose money at anywhere near the rate that other government jobs programs would. Maybe such work farms, oh wait, we’ll have to name it something better…Can I get back to you on this?)

Oh, you mean creating jobs that are self-sustaining and worth something, that someone is willing to pay people to do…that’s quite different.  Creating a job is actually an expense, not a benefit, when one is totting up the balance sheet.  Politicians seem to have that backward in their rhetoric.  Creating a job means creating an expense for someone, somewhere.  Everyone knows this when they stop to think about it for even a minute or two, but the electorate seems to forget this as the unemployment rate rises – particularly if you are one of the ones out of a job or vulnerable.

There’s a certain sleight-of-hand here, where the intervention of government dollars is supposed to spur, or stir, or stimulate something somewhere to encourage an industry.  I expect that it does.  With all the money we’re spending, we’d damn well better be getting some job for someone.  But how much is this costing per job created?  Whenever we see numbers on that it’s depressing, because we realise that we could have just sent $100,000 dollars to some random unemployed people and done much better. Or we find that the job created was at some other level of government.  The feds got the town addicted to a few more policemen. 

More jobs is generally an inefficiency.  People trying to save money find ways to make fewer jobs, not more.  I suspect he fear is that the jobs are going away forever, so we have to all find a seat before the music stops.  But remember that when you read about creating jobs, especially green jobs.  The most job creation isn’t likely the most efficient course.


Texan99 said...

My husband reminds me of a story, possibly about Milton Friedman, visiting a Chinese worksite where men toiled with shovels. He asked why they didn't use power equipment and was told that would eliminate much-needed jobs for the shovelers. He thought a moment, then asked, "Why not take away their shovels and issue them spoons?"

Sam L. said...

My mellow is severely harshed.

I expect even more severe harshing for the next 4 years.