Both Dean Baker and Josh Bivens weigh in Robert Samuelson’s outburst at the New York Times for saying that the government can too create jobs. (He went so far as to call it “flat-earth” thinking). Sadly, Samuelson’s attitude is widely shared — even, at least rhetorically, by Barack Obama.
So let me not focus on Samuelson’s piece so much as on the general proposition. What can it possibly mean to say that only the private sector can create jobs?
It could mean that government jobs aren’t “real” jobs — presumably that they don’t supply something of value to society. Samuelson disavows that position, I think — and rightly so. After all, the bulk of government workers are in education, protective services, and health. Do you really want to say that schoolteachers, firefighters, and nurses provide nothing of value?
What then? Well, Samuelson argues that when the government adds jobs, these come at the expense of jobs elsewhere. This is manifestly not true when the economy is depressed; all the evidence on big multipliers amounts to saying that under current conditions government jobs create additional jobs in the private sector, rather than crowding them out.
Under near-full-employment conditions, however, it’s true that expanding government employment displaces other employment. But this is equally true of any expansion in private employment! Suppose a successful business expands, and adds worjers. How does it do that? By attracting customers away from rivals, or from other kinds of products; by attracting capital; by bidding away workers who might have found employment somewhere else…
Choosen excerpts by JMM from
via The New Physiocrats – NYTimes.com.
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