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Jobless Rate Wrong
Posted by Kevin

As this article reminds us, there are people who want to work but are not being employed to their capacities. That is as damaging as unemployment, and yet we have no real way to measure it. The job picture is a lot worse than the official statistics make it seem, and since the official statistics don’t trumpeted the discouraged or underemployed, we have no easy way to bring the issue to the center of national debate.

What keeps being forgotten in the discussion of jobs is that the quality of the job is as important as the quantity. A nation in which the majority of its jobs are low wage, low benefit, dead end traps is not a healthy society. Its middle class will shrink and its economic prospects will dry up do to lack of consumption. The combination of white collar jobs disappearing overseas and the increase in underemployment very strongly suggests that the United States is becoming just such a nation.

December 29th, 2003 Economics | 2 comments

2 Comments

  1. SayUncle writes:

    Hell, we’re all underemployed.

    These stats also tend not to include the self employed.

    Comment 12/29/2003

  2. tgirsch writes:

    Still, Uncle, I fail to see how a factory closing down and being replaced with retail space is somehow “good” for the local economy, when you’re essentially replacing $20/hour full-time jobs with $8/hour part-time ones. And that’s the point.

    People like us are fortunate that at our level of education, the competition for our jobs isn’t all that great compared to high-school educated, unschooled laborers. As more and more people get college educations, the competition for the relatively few remaining good jobs will become greater and greater, and more people will be pushed into crap-paying retail/service jobs, or worse, unemployment.

    So the options, as I see them, are three:

    1. Revive the US manufacturing base, and rely less on foreign manufacturing (and the cheap labor that comes with it)
    2. Make retail and service jobs pay more
    3. Create large numbers of good paying jobs in some other sector besides service or manufacturing

    Unfortunately, without all kinds of “oppressive” (to Repubs and Libs anyway) regulation, protectionism, or other such government intervention, I don’t see how any of these three things will ever come to pass.

    What does it all mean? The middle class will continue to disappear, the gap between the haves and have-nots will widen, and it will have absolutely nothing to do with the have-nots being “lazy” or “uneducated.”

    Comment 12/29/2003

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