Economic Growth vs. Jobs

Sometimes, well, actually, many times, those without any economic background or education run at the mouth about related topics, getting relationships all wrong.

Such was the case earlier this morning, when I heard the first few minutes of the president's remarks about from where new jobs would come.

So often, we hear people with no economics training whatsoever harp on job growth, as if they can magically wave a wand or fund a program, and paying jobs will appear.

That's just not true. In fact, the whole point of a market economy is for government to enact stable, lasting policies which promote business and capital formation, which leads to economic growth, which then creates jobs.

A related common complaint by some pundits is the oft-proclaimed death of US manufacturing.

In a well-written editorial entitled The Truth About U.S. Manufacturing, in last Friday's Wall Street Journal, economics professor Mark Perry (University of Michigan at Flint) debunks that complaint.

Perry observes,

"In every year since 2004, manufacturing output has exceeded $2 trillion (in constant 2005 dollars), twice the output produced in America's factories in the early 1970s. Taken on its own, U.S. manufacturing would rank today as the sixth largest economy in the world, just behind France and head of the United Kingdom, Italy and Brazil. Despite recent gains in China and elsewhere, the U.S. still produced more than 20% of global manufacturing output in 2009.

The truth is that America still makes a lot of stuff, and we're making more of it than ever before. We're merely able to do it with a fraction of the workers needed in the past.

The average U.S. factory worker is responsible today for more than $180,000 of annual manufacturing output, triple the $60,000 in 1972.

These increases are a direct result of capital investments in productivity-enhancing technology, which last year helped boost output to record levels in industries like computers and semiconductors, medical equipment and supplies, pharmaceuticals and medicine, and oil and natural-gas equipment."

It's the productivity and volume of economic activity that drive further growth. And productivity is enhanced when more capital is provided. Sure, there are eventually diminishing returns. But it's simply wrong to try to force-feed an economy the jobs government thinks ought to exist.

Haven't we learned from Russia's failed 50+ year experiment with a centrally-planned economy that such efforts are pointless?

With capital availability, mobil labor resources and high productivity, and low barriers to new businesses and innovation, an economy is poised to grow, thus leading to new jobs as a consequence.

Jobs aren't the ultimate objective of economic policy, per se. They are important, but follow economic activity. Not vice versa.