If you dip into the vast ocean of Mr. Krugman's writing, your ladle will doubtless contain (simply through statistical probability) the words and phrases: liquidity trap; zero lower bound; austerity; stimulus; Keynesian multiplier; and, occurring more often than all other phrases, I'm right. Also, "as a percentage of GDP;" I'm convinced Mr. Krugman has a Casio watch with an algorithm built into it so that he can instaneously calculate anything, his lunch tab, for example, as a percentage of GDP.
As Mr. Krugman is wont to tell you (as he's desperate to tell you), he has been right that the Fed's money-printing has not ignited runaway inflation, nor has it caused the yields on Treasury bonds to spike higher. After four years of money-printing, the excess reserve accounts of the Primary Dealers (the favored members of the Fed's banker cartel) have been engorged. That's been the main effect. The big Wall Street stock indexes, allowing for inflation, have recovered to about the level of late summer, 2007; through complicated financial channels, this rise is an artifact of the Fed's legerdemain and is unrelated to the moribund state of the general economy.
Mr. Krugman's tendency to be right on a narrow range of predictions makes him my favorite Bar Bet Economist. Will the next woman walking through the door be blonde or brunette? On that order of significance. His predictions don't really mean anything, they don't diagnose the problem, but his focus on this narrow spectrum means that he can write the phrases listed above (dipped from the Krugman Ocean) on refrigerator magnets, push them around on the door of his Sub-Zero, and produce another deathless column/blog/paean to his infallibility.
Yet sometimes I wonder what's going on in America, and there I find Mr. Krugman's writing somewhat useless. Distractingly pointless, in fact. Which is why my attention was drawn to the "breadwinner jobs" analysis in David Stockman's 700 page magnum opus, The Great Deformation.
The "breadwinner job" was a hallmark of the Greatest Generation. My father had a breadwinner job. A lot of American males did in that era between 1900 and about 1970. I was alive for part of that, and many of my attitudes about life in America were formed then. My "parallax of nostalgia" (to quote myself, and N.B. to Krugman: don't steal that without attribution the way you did "Very Serious Person" from Glenn Greenwald) encourages me to think life here in America should always be that way, even though it so obviously isn't anymore.
A Breadwinner Job is a job that can support a family. A man or a woman can hold such a job. In most parts of the country, it takes about $50,000 per year to accomplish the task. Let's imagine it's 1965, adjust for inflation, and think about what such a job might have been. A man could work in Detroit, in an auto plant assembling cars, and work 40 hours a week for 40 years. At the equivalent in today's dollars of $25/hour, he could earn about $52,000 per year. He would also receive full medical insurance for his family with no deductible, a union pension plan, and Social Security on his retirement, along with Medicare. His kids could attend free public schools of excellent quality, then outdo the Old Man (to his satisfaction) by attending Michigan State or the University of Michigan virtually for free. I'm not saying that I would want that life, but America made such an existence possible back then. A man could live with dignity, raise a family, follow the Lions on Sunday TV, play poker and go bowling, and die a reasonably happy man. In a lot of ways, as Jack Nicholson told us, that's As Good As It Gets.
Increasingly, that's all gone. This is what Stockman is writing about. Of the 133 million jobs in America, how many are now Breadwinner Jobs? About 66 million. How many Breadwinner Jobs existed in America in 2000? About 72 million. The jobs being added during this "Recovery" are all part-time or lower-paying jobs (McJobs of the barista, restaurant, bartending, Walmart Greeter variety) or those of the "HES Complex," referring to health care (nursing home workers, home health care) education (diploma mills siphoning off money from the Student Loan Bubble), or social services. The HES jobs are derivative of government spending, one way or another, and are an artifact of our preferred approach to our declining fortunes, the borrowing or outright hallucination of money.
The "internals" of the job market are obscured by the relentless focus on "GDP" (a dumb beast of a statistic if there ever was one) and "growth." Mr. Krugman and his ilk talk about "jobs," but they do not get down to the granular detail that an angry renegade like David Stockman does (who is motivated to skewer everybody, of whatever political persuasion). This is what makes Stockman so valuable. In Krugman's case, his obfuscations are because he's in the tank for the Obama Administration and his buddies on the Federal Reserve Board. While Krugman makes no secret of his belief that Obama is doing everything wrong (Obama is not borrowing and spending enough), Mr. Krugman also wants you to believe (it helps if you can achieve a headstand with a full-length mirror for this one) that Obama is doing everything right, because of the recovery, which is so much better than anything Mitt Romney could have done.
The larger point being: it's better for The Powers That Be if you go along with the gag that we're getting somewhere, even if we aren't. Even if we're so obviously moving backwards. Thus, the emphasis on "GDP." In a society where wealth is so grossly unbalanced, so ruinously concentrated at the top, growth in GDP might simply mean that Jamie Dimon has added another 10,000 square foot guest house on his Hamptons estate. It's better if we say the unemployment rate is going down, without a lot of messy detail about what kinds of jobs are being "created" in the recovery, or how many people have simply given up looking for work and dropped out of the U3 denominator. Ben Bernanke likes to talk about the "wealth effect" of a soaring stock market engendered by money printing - a wealth effect for whom?
Even if you concede that the Breadwinner Jobs have been replaced by McCrap Jobs, you're not quite done yet. Because the total number of jobs, period, has not increased significantly over the last 12 years, certainly not with respect to the "job entrant" category of at least 125,000 per month (Stockman uses 150,000 per month, but I'm not quite the polemicist he is). Let us say that this latter number is about 1.5 million new workers per year, over and above deaths, retirement and other ways of escaping this lousy job market. Between 2000, when there were a total of 130.8 million "non-farm payroll jobs" (and it may be easier to keep 'em down on the farm, after they see these data), and late 2012, when there were 133.5 million NFP jobs, America added 2.7 million jobs, of whatever quality. This needs to be measured against about 18 million new job entrants.
Stockman calculates that we've added about 18,000 jobs per month over the last 12 years (his numbers cannot be derived from my calculations above because he uses slightly different assumptions, but there's no material difference). There has been no net gain of "Breadwinner Jobs" during this period - not a single job. We've lost 6 million of those. Yet of whatever quality the putative jobs may be, another question naturally arises: How can we have only 2.7 million jobs more now than in 2000 and yet only post 7.5% as the U-3 unemployment rate, when the job pool (the denominator) grew by 18 million? Where did all the people go?
I don't actually agree with David Stockman's emphasis on the Fed's "easy money" policies as the font from which all of America's economic travails flow. I am afraid it is much more serious and intractable a problem than that. In some ways he is like Krugman on that score, since Mr. Krugman is forever talking about stimulus spending until the American economy "gains traction" again. In essence, Mr. Krugman is making a fundamentally circular argument: he is arguing that the Bubble Years of 2000 to 2007, where Americans could spill an extra tril per year into the consumer economy, can be regained on a sustained basis, and that the aberrant trend line of this one-off event can become the permanent state of affairs. Yet even those Bubble Years did not produce Breadwinner Jobs, and without such employment, there is no foundation for sustaining such prosperity. Put another way, what is the evidence that more Keynesian stimulus of the economy, with its concomitant increase in the debt load and fiscal imbalance of the federal budget, will lead to the massive creation of Breadwinner Jobs necessary to handle such debt and sustain such a trajectory?
Stockman's approach is to establish the "sound dollar" such as existed under the former gold standard, and to limit government spending to that which we're willing to pay for with current taxes. To give up the money printing games, the Quantitative Easing, the American Snake Eating Its Own Tail, in other words. Given the demographics of current America, with its aging Baby Boom population (you rang?), the utter dependence of so many on present government largesse, the breakdown of the American economic contraption caused by globalization and high energy prices, Stockman is simply sketching out a different Road to Perdition. Both Mr. Krugman and Mr. Stockman are dabbling in fantasy, but they sell different kinds of books as a result of the choices they make.
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