Laura D’Andrea Tyson is a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and served as chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton.
Like many economists, I believe that the immediate crisis facing the United States economy is the jobs deficit, not the budget deficit. The magnitude of the jobs crisis is clearly illustrated by the jobs gap – currently around 12.3 million jobs.
Perspectives from expert contributors.
Perspectives from expert contributors.
History suggests that recovery from a debt-fueled asset bubble and ensuing balance-sheet recession is long and painful, with significantly slower growth in gross domestic product and significantly higher unemployment for a least a decade. Right now it looks as though the United States is following this pattern.
The jobs gap is primarily the result of the dramatic collapse in aggregate demand that began with the financial crisis of 2008. Even with unprecedented amounts of monetary and fiscal stimulus, the recovery that began in June 2009 has remained anemic, because consumers, the major driver of private demand, have curbed their spending, increased their saving and started to deleverage and reduce their debt — and they still have a long way to go.
As I asserted in my last post (and many other economists, including Lawrence Summers, Alan Blinder, Christina Romer, Peter Orzsag and Robert Shiller, have made this point, too), the jobs gap warrants additional fiscal measures to increase private-sector demand and promote job creation.
Sadly, current signals from Washington indicate that such measures will not be taken.
Instead, the risk grows that large, premature cuts in government spending will reduce aggregate demand, will tip the economy back into recession and drive the unemployment rate back into double digits.
Even if no budget deal is reached and no major spending cuts are made in the near future, there is now a serious risk that the rating agencies will downgrade government debt because of the political stalemate over a long-run deficit reduction plan. That would almost surely produce higher interest rates that could sink the economy into recession again.
Although the jobs gap and the high unemployment rate are the immediate problems in the American labor market, they are not the only ones. And there is no sign that the budget negotiations in Washington are going to address these other problems, either.
Even before the onslaught of the Great Recession, the labor market was in serious trouble. Job growth between 2000 and 2007 was only half what it had been in the preceding three decades.
Productivity growth was strong, but far outpaced compensation growth. Between 2002 and 2007, productivity grew by 11 percent, but the hourly compensation of both the median high-school-educated worker and the median college-educated worker fell.
During the same period, the real median income for working-age households declined by more than $2,000. The 2002-7 recovery was the only American recovery on record during which the income of the typical working family dropped.
And despite the recovery, job opportunities continued to polarize. Employment grew in high-education, high-wage professional technical and managerial occupations and in low-education, low-wage food-service, personal-care and protective-service occupations; employment fell in middle-skill, white-collar and blue-collar occupations. The drop in middle-income manufacturing jobs was especially precipitous.
To fashion the appropriate policy responses to these long-term structural problems in the labor market, it is first necessary to understand their causes. The key contributors are three:
1. Skill-biased technological change that has automated routine work while increasing the demand for highly educated workers with at least a college education, preferably in science, engineering or math.
2. Globalization or the integration of labor markets through trade and more recently through outsourcing.
3. The declining competitiveness of the United States as a place to do business.
Recent studies by Michael Spence and Sandile Hlatschwayo (discussed last week in Economix by Uwe Reinhardt) and by David Autor describe how technological change and globalization are hollowing out job opportunities and depressing wage growth in the middle of the skill and occupational distributions.
A widely cited commentary by Andrew Grove, former chief executive of Intel, and a prize-winning article by Gary Pisano and Willy Shih make similar arguments.
Many of the workers and jobs adversely affected by technological change and globalization are in the tradable goods sector, primarily in manufacturing. Nor is the United States labor market the only one to be affected by these forces: the polarization of employment opportunities is also occurring in the other advanced industrial countries.
Many of them, like Germany, are doing something about it. The United States is not. According to a recent McKinsey study, the United States is becoming a less attractive place to locate production and employment compared with many other countries.
A newly published study by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation reaches a similar conclusion. The United States is underinvesting in three major areas that help a country create and retain high-wage jobs: skills and training of the work force, infrastructure, and research and development.
Spending in these areas currently accounts for less than 10 percent of all federal government spending, and this share has been declining over time. And that’s despite the fact that the borrowing costs of the federal government have been near historic lows and much lower than the returns on economically justifiable investments in these areas.
Such investments fall into the “non-security discretionary spending” category of the federal budget, the category in line to be cut to historic lows to reduce the government deficit over the next decade.
In my previous Economix post, I said a budget deal should pair fiscal measures aimed at job creation now with a credible plan to reduce the deficit gradually and that both should be passed at once as a package. I also urged that the plan include an unemployment rate target that would postpone serious deficit-reduction measures until the target had been achieved.
I also think the plan should include a separate capital budget that distinguishes government spending on education, infrastructure and research as investments with committed revenues over several years. A capital budget would close the investment deficit in those areas that strengthen American competitiveness and promote high-wage job creation. None of the budget plans currently under debate include a separate capital budget.
The labor market is suffering from two problems: an immediate jobs gap, primarily the result of inadequate demand, and a long-term shortfall in rewarding employment opportunities for American workers, primarily the result of structural forces.
As a result of these forces, even when demand has recovered, many of the good jobs lost during the last decade will not be replaced by new good jobs without significant public investments to strengthen the attractiveness of the United States as a production location.
So far, the deficit-reduction proposals attracting attention do not address the labor market’s dual problems and leave many American workers and their families to face another lost decade.
