THIS is inspired by the recent non pipeline. As my sources are Mass Media, the reports may be quite wrong. Fortunately my analysis is immune from such defects. Some company wanted to build a pipeline that would transport oil from Canada to the Southern states, where refineries are located. The pipeline would be cheaper and quicker than using big oil tankers. And pipelines do not run into shores, open up, and coat pelicans with crude oil. The current administration declined to rule on permission to build it. Some political experts feel that the pipeline is inevitable. The administration is simply delaying permission until after the election. This is because the eco-idiots oppose it and threatened the president with non-support.
All of the above was background. The pipeline itself is not of direct interest to me. One related story was that a pipeline person overestimated the number of jobs that it would yield. It seems that he counted twice, by considering one job that is spread over two years to be two jobs. So this got me considering the following question. What is a job?
As many experts argue that the current national economic crisis is based upon a shortage of jobs, we should all know what a job is, right? And we all do, right? I do not. I do not think that anyone else does either. And this makes the attempt to reduce economic realities to mathematical formulas and simple numbers simply invalid.
Let me be micro about this. Suppose, as often happened on shows like “Father Knows Best,” a son got a job as a paper delivery boy. For those of you who did not study social history this meant that he delivered the paper bags that were used to transport lunches to school. And he got sick. So he did not his job. So his father did it for him. Did this create another job, or did the father have two jobs?
When does a job begin? If a guy only sits around and daydreams about what he could do to make money then he is jobless. If he borrows money from a bank to begin a business, and rents an office, and then does the same thing, is he then employed? What if his company is making money from a previous idea of his, and he is drawing a salary, and does the same? Are these second and third real jobs? How about if a family all works in a family business? Do the children have jobs, or are the simply helping?
And if I hire a local kid to cut my grass in the summer, is this a job? Probably. However, is he actually “employed” in the time while the grass is too short to cut? If I hire him to shovel the snow and it does not snow, is he still employed? Or, if he were employed only when it snows, is he employed anew, with a new job, each time it snows? If I then decide to shovel my own snow have I eliminated a job, or several jobs?
I admit that most of the time most of us would readily agree on what is a job and who has it. However, once we introduce related real world elements the issue can get confused. Building the pipeline certainly would produce jobs. But how many? Do we multiply the workers by years? Did we count as one job a task that lasts for 50 years and is filled by 12 different workers? As I pronounced above we do not know. And artificial definitions will not reflect reality. And without reflecting reality economic policy and data is defective. Bu then so is America in general.
Books by the author are available on Amazon.
Comments