It's So Much Fun to Be Contrarian, But....

In the New York Times, Steven Landsburg takes on Romney and McCain for offering retraining for displaced workers:

All economists know that when American jobs are outsourced, Americans as a group are net winners. What we lose through lower wages is more than offset by what we gain through lower prices. In other words, the winners can more than afford to compensate the losers. Does that mean they ought to? Does it create a moral mandate for the taxpayer-subsidized retraining programs proposed by Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney?

Um, no. Even if you’ve just lost your job, there’s something fundamentally churlish about blaming the very phenomenon that’s elevated you above the subsistence level since the day you were born. If the world owes you compensation for enduring the downside of trade, what do you owe the world for enjoying the upside?

Isn't there more to this than "morality"? Is it economically sensible for the nation to let workers free fall from their middle class jobs, because they lack sufficient skills to get jobs at comparable wages? Do we as a society benefit when a factory worker ends up in a service industry job at a fraction of his former salary, in foreclosure, in bankruptcy, or on public assistance?

This is not to overlook the costs of retraining programs, the difficulties of retraining career factory workers for well-paying jobs, or the difficulty of identifying a future job market that will need their (new) skills. Even with retraining many will never achieve the same salaries they previously enjoyed. But the costs of successful retraining (with a reasonably designed program) should be less than the cost of losing a worker's productivity, financial fallout from their job loss, and possible cost of public assistance. Also, as compared to job skills training directed at nonproductive segments of our society, it seems to me that there is likely to be a greater return on the investment if you retrain somebody who wants to work. Thus, to me, it makes economic sense to help displaced workers find jobs within their skill set, and failing that to help them update or upgrade their skills such that they can qualify for available jobs.

As for what you "owe the world" for enjoying the upside of trade? It's not so much what you owe the world, but what you owe the government. Taxes. Landsburg may perceive the provision of "taxpayer-subsidized retraining programs" as purely a moral question, and may see a worker's demand for some return on decades of tax payments as being selfish, but can he truly see no economic benefit to the state in getting a formerly productive citizen back into a decent job?

Bush's Job Creation Record

Steve Benin notes that although G.W. Bush's actual job creation record is 72,000 per month,,

Bush's monthly average, using the cherry-picked timeline, still trails Clinton, 172,000 per month to 237,000 per month.

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I'd only add that U.S. News recently asked Rudy Giuliani about this in an interview about economic policy. The magazine said, "The Democrats are going to say, 'We raised taxes in the '90s, cut the deficit, and the economy boomed.' Why not try and rerun the '90s instead of cutting taxes?"

Giuliani responded, "Because we have actually done more job creation by lowering taxes than by raising taxes."

Laughable. But also missing something I suspect is crucial - has anybody explored what percentage of the job creation on G.W.'s watch is directly driven by the Iraq war? If you were to reduce his job creation figures by the Iraq numbers, thus creating a "peacetime jobs" figure - jobs which will continue to exist after the war ends - is that not a better figure for comparison to Clinton's record? (And how good would Bush's "peacetime jobs" performance be?)

A war job "boom" paid for by government contracts and deficit spending - the Republican reality, perhaps, but not the image they try to sell to the public.

When Everybody Wants To Work For You....

There's no way to sort out the applications without being arbitrary.

TalkLeft observes that Google is (as usual) hiring, but sets very high standards for applicants.

Memo to Google: Think outside the box. Rather than look for people who can sell your product, look for people who can enhance your product.

What you need are people who can separate the wheat from the chaff and find the best, not the most, of the web. Don't ask people to apply for specific jobs. Just let them take the test and then devise an algorithm to decide which job they're most suited for. The results would probably astound you.

Do people still "think outside the box"? (It was at least six years ago that I heard somebody quip that anybody who describes themselves as 'thinking outside the box' is certain to be stuck way inside the box.) But enough about boxes... she has a point. But it probably doesn't matter.

Google seems to pride itself on its highly degreed workforce, and that's not likely to change. Holding an advanced degree is not incompatible with being creative, and to the extent that Google values creativity it should be able to find many creative individuals within its applicant pool despite requiring advanced degrees and experience.

But there is still something to be said for recognizing that there are other valuable aspects to job applicants, beyond their academic credentials, and that sometimes those other factors should take a more prominent role in the hiring process. That's not just true for Google, but for pretty much any employer. Often the academic credential is used as an artificial means of narrowing a candidate pool, simply because there would otherwise be too many job applications to reasonably process. But it seems rare for companies to question if those academic qualifications are truly the best measure of qualification for the job.