Every utterance from the Administration concerning the economy contains a reference to jobs. What is a job? Is a part-time job a job? Is a temporary job a job? If so, then any mention of job numbers must be taken with a large pinch of salt. One full-time job lasting a year is clearly worth half a dozen or more part-time temporary jobs. Does one job paying $15 an hour equal two jobs paying $7.50 an hour? Job is obviously a wiggly unit, one that "means what I want it to when I say it", said the King.
Think of the job market as a jar of coins - everything from pennies to half dollars. We never know exactly what the mix is, but government economists are content simply to count the number of coins and to announce that number as a meaningful statistic. Whew!!!
If the Adminstration is to add meaning to its economic statistics, the term job must either be clearly defined on the package, or it must be qualified by the use of terms such as job-weeks, or job-months, and certainly monetary value. The wonderful thing about using wiggly units is that every statement you make can be made to seem true. You simply define your terms to make it so.
In its use of wiggly units, economics can never hope to improve on soothsaying, never hope to call itself science, and frankly, never make much sense.
Alan Greenspan, during his tenure at the Federal Reserve, to the very best of my knowledge (not that I hung onto his every word, mind you) at no time mentioned units of any kind in his Delphic pronouncements. Clever, Eh! It is one of the wonders of this country that it is left to the press to decide what public officials really meant by what they said!
We should be able to expect better of our Government.
Speaking of our government...
