Job Creation Blues
Leave it to the market used to be the cry. Economists never tired of singing the praises of our capitalist system for its flexibility and job creating magic. So, let take a look at the job creation magic–and here we ignore other relevant considerations like pay, insecurity, working conditions, and even the value of what is being produced.
As the chart below (taken from Michael Mandel’s blog) shows, private sector job creation pretty much slowed to a crawl over the last decade–and that was before the crisis. Mandel comments as follows:
Between May 1999 and May 2009, employment in the private sector sector only rose by 1.1%, by far the lowest 10-year increase in the post-depression period. It’s impossible to overstate how bad this is. Basically speaking, the private sector job machine has almost completely stalled over the past ten years.
This is another good indication that our economy is in desperate need of real structural transformation.
