Artificial intelligence
(AI), productivity, globalization, and the demise of baby boomers are among
trends that cause all sorts of consternation if not hyperventilation. I won’t
argue that these trends won't disturb our happy society. I won’t even argue
that they are not already affecting many people in many places.
Concern for
these and other issues is legitimate. What I am saying today is that, while
there is much truth to the fact that we have considerable challenges ahead, the end of the world is nowhere in sight. Our biggest challenge is to decide as
a nation what we can do so that jobs continue to exist and people are paid
enough to keep the economy growing. This is our biggest challenge because it
will take thoughtful policy in a very complicated US and global economy. There
will always be more than one way to resolve these issues. In a world where politicians
would rather spit that compromise, it is hard to see how they can be trusted to
do the right thing. Whatever they could do won’t be perfect but sadly it is not
clear that they are capable of anything besides giving hateful interviews to greedy media organizations.
But we do
have time and it is possible that sanity might return to the political arena.
Maybe it will take a severe recession or a flood of Biblical proportions, but
there is at least some hope. In the meantime, I suggest we look at some data to
reassure ourselves that the end of the world has not already come.
On the first
line of the table below are numbers for the productivity of the private non-farm business sector. These are index
numbers representing productivity in 2006 and 2018, and then the percentage change
in the index over those 13 years. Notice that productivity in the business sector
rose by around 15%.
The second line
has comparable numbers for employment.
The employment numbers are for all employees of non-farm businesses. They are
in millions. In 2006, we had 137 million employees in the US. That number took a big dip
in the recession down to 130 million in 2010 but then reached 148 million in
early 2018. That amounted to an 8.5% increase.
The final row is the employment cost index. This index measures changes in wages and
benefits of private industry workers. Starting at an index value of 102.1 in
2006, wages and benefits rose to almost 133 by 2018. That’s an increase of 30
percent.
The upshot
of this little table is that we are nowhere near falling off the earth. While
these numbers were clearly affected in a negative way by a very scary recession,
they show that productivity grew, employment grew, and the wages and benefits
of workers increased even faster.
I purposely
leave you with this impression of growth. I could have compared this time to
previous ones. I could have compared the wages and benefits change to inflation.
I could have dissected the employment numbers by manufacturing versus services.
There is a lot more I could have done to put changes from 2006 to 2018 in a more
complete perspective. But I save that for other posts and other purposes.
I
am not trying to say that this is the rosiest of times. I am not trying to
say that we don’t need to get to work on solutions. But what I have tried to do
with this little table is to suggest that we stop panicking. This is not the worst of all possible worlds.
I am no Pangloss but then, again I am no Martin either (characters in Voltaire’s
Candide). Pessimism might be
warranted by some things we see today – but pessimism surely will not provide
the answers. This glass is definitely half-full. How can we get policymakers to work together for us -- to make the glass even more half-full?
2006 2018 %Change
Productivity 94.4 108.2 14.6
Employment 136.5 148.1 8.5
Wages &
Benefits 102.1 132.5 29.8
Note: The
values are for the first quarters of these years.
