Lookin’ for Jobs In All the Wrong Places

September 17, 2009

Victimized by the recession and looking to start over in a new field? Some advice: Don’t trust the corporacrats.

Proponents of government-managed “economic development” believe that by using subsidies and tax breaks, they can nurture “emerging industries.” In addition, their programs and bureaucracies, we are told, help secondary schools, colleges, universities, and job-training nonprofits provide a steady supply of workers for the enterprises that are certain to dominate the economy of the future.

A decade ago, the Internet’s flowering into a powerful tool for commerce sent the economic-development community into paroxysms of planning. Talking about employment opportunities in e-shopping, broadband networks, tech support, database management, and webmastering was sexy. It sure beat finding better ways to assist machine shops and insurance companies.

As Virginia Postrel noted in 2000, corporacrats’ prevailing attitude was simple: “We know the one best future, and it is ‘high-tech.’” So “listening sessions” were held, “roadmaps” crafted, and “action plans” implemented. Taxpayer-financed goodies flowed to IT firms, as did “investments” in educational efforts designed to provide the human resources needed by the “knowledge economy.”

But the road to silicon nirvana got bumpy, fast. The dot-com bubble burst, taking a barrelful of tax revenue with it, and in the words BusinessWeek economist Michael Mandel, “information technology, the great electronic promise of the 1990s … turned into one of the biggest job-growth disappointments of all time.”

Since its peak at the dawn of the 21st century, employment in the nation’s “information” sector, as defined by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, has declined by over 20 percent. In Connecticut, the loss has been bigger.

Information is an awfully broad category, so some disaggregation is helpful. According to state labor bureaucrats, between 2000 and 2008, employment in “ISPs, search portals, and data processing” in the Hartford Labor Market Area (LMA) fell from 2,031 to 1,513 -- a loss of 26 percent. The figure was far worse for the Bridgeport-Stamford LMA, where jobs in the subsector vanished by a stunning 81 percent. Telecommunications is another underperformer. In the New Haven LMA, employment dropped by 20 percent during the eight-year period, and Hartford’s LMA saw a decline of 31 percent.

These statistics should serve as a cautionary tale for anyone looking to the government for career advice. But undaunted by the IT debacle and its countless other failures, the corporatist cabal carries on.

Clear-headed observers see solar panels, wind turbines, and hydrogen-powered fuel cells as bottomless pits for far too many tax dollars. Others see “green jobs.” Left-wing environmentalists and the alternative-energy industry have found a powerful ally in the economic-planning lobby, and Barack Obama, Jodi Rell, and (in all likelihood) your municipality’s chief executive have climbed aboard the ethanol-powered bandwagon.

Few saw the IT implosion coming. Fortunately, there’s ample evidence that the latest “jobs of the future” might not be very plentiful. In March, a study by King Juan Carlos University found that Spain should rethink its massive “support to the construction and production of electricity through renewable sources.” Among other disturbing conclusions, the analysis discovered:

* the number of jobs created by Spain’s subsidies to “green power” was “surprisingly low,” and “just one out of ten” involved “actual operation and maintenance of the renewable sources of electricity”

* “the high cost of electricity due to the green job policy tends to drive the relatively most electricity-intensive companies and industries away, seeking areas where costs are lower”

* guaranteed prices “for renewable-generated electricity, far above market prices, wasted a vast amount of capital that could have been otherwise economically allocated in other sectors”

* if the U.S. follows Spain’s approach, for every “green” position it creates, it “should expect a loss of at least 2.2 jobs on average”

Here in America, analysts with the Institute for Energy Research, University of Illinois College of Law, and the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Green Jobs and the New Economy have also contributed to the debunking of an imminent revolution in alternative-energy employment.

It’s likely that green-jobs advocacy will one day be forced to accept economic realities. Then it’s on to something else. Corporacrats are as prone to fads as teenage girls. IT gave way to biotech/stem cells, which got pushed aside for moviemaking. There’s always another “must-have” -- nanotechnology is a safe bet for the next craze.

Meanwhile, the workers who lay tile, analyze stocks, cut hair, pour cement, draw blueprints, empty bedpans, serve coffee, groom pets, operate lathes, fill cavities, and drive tractors will continue to pay the bills for an economic-development bureaucracy that generates very little economic development.

D. Dowd Muska is a writer, commentator and lecturer. His website is www.dowdmuska.com.

# # # # #