Spectator alum Phil Klein
has joined the many conservatives bashing President Obama for
attributing the ongoing unemployment crisis to technologies
like the ATM replacing jobs like bank tellers:
But the even more obvious problem with Obama’s statement is that
it isn’t even factually correct to say that ATM machines displaced
bank tellers. The number of ATMs more than doubled between 1998 and
2008, from 187,000 to 401,500, according to the American Bankers
Association. Yet data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that
during the same period, the number of bank tellers rose from
560,000 to 600,500. BLS expects “favorable” job prospects for bank
tellers over the next decade.
…There are also tremendous economic benefits to ATMs.
For example, Americans don’t have to wait on long lines during
business hours to access their money, which makes them far more
productive.
This happens but rarely: I’m going to disagree with
Phil. Obama’s statement, in context,
represented an improvement in his rhetoric on (if not his
actual understanding of) job creation since the days of the
stimulus.
Gone, apparently, are the days when Obama, Biden, and co. will
argue that the economy is simply a machine that needs to be
kickstarted or a pump that needs to be primed in order to start
hiring back up. Based on what he said, public spending can no
longer simply fill in for the dropoff in private spending when the
economy slows down.
Here’s what Obama said immediately following the ATMs quip
[emphasis added]:
So all these things have [created] changes in the economy and
this [council] is identifying where the jobs of the future
are going to be, how do we make sure there’s a match
between what people are getting trained for and the jobs that
exist, how do we make sure that capital is flowing into those
places with the greatest opportunity.
Compare that to the free-market economist and blogger Arnold
Kling’s succinct
description of the cause of joblessness in this recession
[emphasis added]:
…suppose that I had to start with a blank sheet of paper and
describe the state of the economy. I would say that the balance
between workers exiting declining firms/industries and entering
expanding firms/industries has disappeared. Instead, we have had
over a year in which exit took place at a faster rate than
entry.
Another way to put this is that the economy is only
gradually learning where the expanding firms and sectors will
be. As it learns more, employment growth will resume.
In the first two decades after the second World War, the
recovery from a recession required little or no learning about
where expansion was needed. A recession consisted of unemployment
among construction workers and factory workers. Once the excess
inventory of housing units and/or consumer durable goods was
eliminated, jobs in these sectors would come back.
These were recessions in which we knew where the employment
gains would take place. The current recession is one in which we do
not know this.
In other words, Obama is, at least in his messaging, coming
closer to a more sophisticated view of the economy than the one
that led him to sign off on the stimulus and other wasteful
spending projects.
