On September 6, 2013, Neil Irwin writes on Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog in The Washington Post:
If you only looked at the headlines on Friday’s August jobs numbers, you’d think “Not bad!”
You would also be completely wrong.
Yes, the unemployment rate fell a notch to 7.3 percent, from 7.4 percent in July. Yes, the nation added 169,000 jobs, broadly consistent with the pattern of recent months.
But in almost all the particulars, you can find signs that this job market is weaker than it appeared just a few months ago, and maybe getting worse. The drop in the unemployment rate was caused by 312,000 people dropping out of the labor force. The number of people actually reporting having a job actually fell by 115,000 in the survey on which the unemployment rate is based.
And while the overall August jobs number was okay, the Labor Department revised down its estimates of June and July job creation by a combined 74,000 positions. In other words, through the summer, hiring has been quite a bit shakier than it had appeared.
Jobs numbers ebb and jobs numbers flow, and as always, it would be unwise to make too much of one report. But this one has enough signs of weakness embedded in enough places that it has to make economy-watchers — including those at the Federal Reserve who meet in less than two weeks — reassess their confidence that a solid, steady jobs recovery is underway.
Consider this: The nation has averaged 148,000 new jobs a month for the last three months. The number was 160,000 for the last six months, and 184,000 a month over the last year. That looks to me like a downward trend, no two ways about it. It’s certainly not the gradual acceleration that most mainstream economists have forecast as 2013 advances and the impact of tighter fiscal policy fades.
Want another sign? The proportion of the U.S. population that had a job in August was 58.6 percent. Six months earlier, the number was a whopping — wait for it — 58.6 percent. The year is nearly three-quarters over, and the economy isn’t growing fast enough to put a higher proportion of its citizens back to work.
You don’t have to squint hard to see evidence that the “nice, steady improvement” theme that has been the conventional wisdom is missing part of the story.
That is particularly relevant for Chairman Ben Bernanke and his colleagues at the Fed. The central bank has been expected to start pulling back on the pace of its $85 billion-a-month in bond purchases at its meeting Sept. 17-18. The Fed’s entire plan for winding down its “QE” policies, which it planned to conclude in the middle of next year, has been dependent on steady improvement in the jobs market.
That such a jobs recovery may not materialize has to make them at least think twice, maybe three times, about pulling the trigger on the so-called taper at this policy committee meeting. Adding to the case for waiting is a looming fiscal standoff and rising oil prices set off by the conflict in Syria, which is heightening geopolitical worries.
This report may not be definitive, but it’s enough to spur a reassessment of how robust this recovery is, and how much confidence any of us have in that view.
If you only looked at the headlines on Friday’s August jobs numbers, you’d think “Not bad!” You would also be completely wrong.
What never gets addressed in articles about the jobs crisis in America is the reality that jobs are being destroyed and the worth of labor is being devalued due to tectonic shifts in the technologies of production resulting in less opportunity for good-paying jobs growth.
The reality is that human productivity has not advanced, but that the productiveness of the non-human factor of production––productive capital––is the reason that private sector corporations, majority owned by the “1 percent,” are utilizing the non-human factor of production increasingly to create efficiencies and save labor costs. It is the function of technology to save labor from toil and to enable us to do things that otherwise is humanly impossible without non-human input. While the greatest impact of technological revolution has occurred in the manufacturing private sector, the other sectors, now functioning with low-paid human workers, will experience the job destruction and further wage degradation as companies never cease to produce products and services at less cost––and saving labor costs is ALWAYS part of that prescription.
The critical question becomes who should own productive capital? The issue of OWNERSHIP is unbelievably overlooked by those in academia and politics, as well as authors such as Neil Irwin and Ezra Klein. Yet we live in country founded upon private property rights.
Today, large streams of data, coupled with statistical analysis and sophisticated algorithms, are rapidly gaining importance in almost every field of science, politics, journalism, and much more. What does this mean for the future of work?
With increasing punditry, scholars and others are writing about the impact of the Second Industrial Revolution where tectonic shifts in the technologies of production are destroying and degrading jobs due to the shift from labor worker input to the non-human factor––human-intelligent machines, super-automation, robotics, digital computer operations, etc.
The question that requires an answer is now timely before us. It was first posed by binary economist Louis Kelso in the 1950s but has never been thoroughly discussed on the national stage. Nor has there been the proper education of our citizenry that addresses what economic justice is and what ownership is. Therefore, by ignoring such issues of economic justice and ownership, our leaders are ignoring the concentration of power through ownership of productive capital, with the result of denying the 99 percenters equal opportunity to become capital owners. The question, as posed by Kelso is: “how are all individuals to be adequately productive when a tiny minority (capital workers) produce a major share and the vast majority (labor workers), a minor share of total goods and service,” and thus, “how do we get from a world in which the most productive factor—physical capital—is owned by a handful of people, to a world where the same factor is owned by a majority—and ultimately 100 percent—of the consumers, while respecting all the constitutional rights of present capital owners?”
Solutions are to be found in the platform of the Capital Homestead Act. Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
See “Financing Economic Growth With ‘FUTURE SAVINGS’: Solutions To Protect America From Economic Decline” at NationOfChange.org http://www.nationofchange.org/financing-future-economic-growth-future-savings-solutions-protect-america-economic-decline-137450624
