Our Era of Chronic Inflation and Ongoing Job Deterioration

Inflation is “a gradual loss of purchasing power that is reflected in a broad rise in prices for goods and services over time.”[1] It is a market economy phenomenon that arises when demand for goods and services exceeds the supply of those goods and services. Rising incomes can offset some or all of the purchasing power loss, but not everyone in a population will get sufficient income growth to do so. Political tensions inevitably grow as inflation persists and more people lose purchasing power.

In the long history of the capitalist modern world-economy, periods of inflation have been generated by supply chain disruptions that cause the expansion of production to fall behind the expansion of demand — disruptions usually caused by economic and shooting wars, by production encounters with food production or mineral extraction barriers (e.g., exhaustion of crop lands, depletion of deposits of coal, oil, or other critical resources), and occasionally by a pandemic or labor shortage. However, in time wars and pandemics end and technological breakthroughs and mineral deposit discoveries restore the growth of resource inputs into production. Supply side growth catches up with demand side growth.

In the past, restoring the balance between supply and demand worked because the carrying capacity of the earth-system could handle intensified extraction of minerals, intensified harvesting of plants and animals, and intensified dumping of pollutants into the air and water without generating destructive phenomena that most humans could not escape. As populations grew and more powerful technologies were developed and implemented and mass marketing transformed more and more of the world’s people into consumers with unlimited appetites for everything modern, the expansion of production capacity could generally keep pace with or catch up with and sometimes outpace the growth of demand. The relationship between supply and demand cycled through periods of imbalance and balance.

That capacity in the capitalist modern world-economy for governments and capitalists to restore balance following a period of imbalance came to an end in the late 20^th century. Human activities finally pushed the the earth-system beyond its carrying capacity limits.

Chronic Inflation

The capitalist modern world-economy has entered into a unique era of processes and trends that interact to form two conjunctural forces that make inflation chronic. The key processes and trends in this conjuncture are continuing world population growth, expected to reach 10.3 billion in the 2080s,[2] continuing consumer and business demand growth as all of the world’s people continue to aspire to western middle class lifestyles, the intensifying development of mineral extraction and food and shelter production technologies as producers race to keep up with growing demand, and the accelerating impingement of the earth-system’s carrying capacity limits on production expansion. One conjunctural force is the combination of population growth with consumption aspirations built into middle class cultures and constantly reinforced by global marketing campaigns. The other conjunctural force is the accelerating rise in living costs generated by the mutually reinforcing interactions between the world’s production activities and the carrying capacity limits of the earth-system. Every increase in production brings with it an intensification of costly repercussions from the earth-system[3] and further stimulation of unrelenting demand growth. In the other direction, the growing number and intensity of costly repercussions from the earth-system create political pressures to accelerate the development and implementation of technologies intended to reduce costs and ameliorate damages, while still satisfying popular expectations for lifestyle improvements. This is a vicious cycle of systemic destructiveness that is now driving inflation and will not relent for decades.

More and More Bad Jobs

In this era of chronic inflation, the only way to rebalance supply and demand is to bring down demand so that the production of goods and services does not have to continue to expand and consequently intensify the costly repercussions from the overtaxed earth-system. In theory, this could be done equitably. However, the capitalist modern world-economy is a strongly top-down social-system; inequalities of wealth and power are enormous and growing. The wages and working conditions of working people and the economic protections for the poor are already being diminished by public and private institutions and will continue to be. Moreover, and more ominously for the fate of representative democracy, the wages and working conditions of many currently middle class workers will almost certainly come under increasing attack, as the rich and their well-heeled hirelings (managers, lawyers, and politicians) take actions to protect their wealth and purchasing power from the ravages of chronic inflation.

Of course, as inflation and adverse policies cut away at the world’s middle classes, resistance movements will grow and make stronger and stronger demands for more political accountability, limits on profits, and higher taxes on the wealthy. Those efforts, which are piecemeal now, are being met with brutal suppression and if history is a guide, will continue to be for the foreseeable future. The niceties of democracy will not be allowed to get in the way of the interests of the rich and their economic and political friends. History also tells us that at some point suppression fails. As participation in resistance movements grows and global coordination among resistance movements increases, the moment of suppression failure will arrive. For now, the global forces of suppression are powerful and growing, so that global moment of defeat for the forces of suppression is almost certainly decades away.

[1] Jason Fernando, “What is Inflation,” Investopedia, Updated September 27, 2024. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/inflation.asp.

[2] “Growing or shrinking? What the latest trends tell us about the world’s population”, United Nations July 11, 2024. https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/07/1151971.

[3] Such as higher costs for extracting minerals, higher costs for replacing property destroyed by extreme weather events, higher costs for maintaining the fertility of croplands, higher costs for adapting lifestyles and production activities to rapidly changing environmental and geopolitical conditions.

The Future of Work for Most of Us is Survival Work

In our memories of recent jolts to daily life, the 9/11 attacks, the 2008 financial meltdown, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the 2004 tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people across 14 countries, the destruction of life and property by hurricane Katrina along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, and many others, stand out. COVID19 stands out differently. All the others were massive jolts to particular people in particular places. COVID19 is one of a growing wave of destructive events that will sweep over large parts of the world’s population, and sometimes everyone. We are in the early stages of a massive wave of destructive events that will in one to two generations alter the entirety of our modern way of life.

We are used to thinking in terms of us and them, us and the weather, us and the oceans, us and other living things, yet our lives are connected to everything, literally everything, that makes up this globalized and overworked planet. Perhaps waves of extreme climate events, pandemics, and species die-offs are not the only waves of devastating events that climate change is visiting upon all living things on this planet. Perhaps even the seemingly solid earth itself is not untouchable by climate change.

A British scientist argues that global warming could lead to a future of more intense volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. And while some dismiss his views as preposterous, he points to a body of recent research that shows a troubling link between climate change and the Earth’s most destructive geological events.

…

The most solid evidence for climatic influence on geology comes from the end of the last ice age, around 12,000 years ago, says McGuire, who is a volcanologist and professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. Analysis of volcanic deposits, published in the past decade by several authors, has found that this period of rapid climate change, when ice sheets retreated from much of the planet, coincided with a sudden outburst of geological activity. The incidence of volcanic eruptions in Iceland increased around 50-fold for about 1,500 years, before settling back to previous levels.

Fred Pearce, Could a Changing Climate Set Off Volcanoes and Quakes? Yale Environment 360, May 7, 2012.

The earthquakes in Turkey and Syria are another stark indicator of the future of work in 21^st century. News reports say more than 45 countries have offered to help Turkey and Syria with rescue efforts, thousands of rescue workers are on the scene, more than 21,000 have been killed and tens of thousands are homeless. The number of people who are now unavailable to do the usual work of everyday life is small for a planetary human population of 8 billion people, but they have to be added to all the other workers being shifted out of lines of work that contribute to expanding affluence and the growth of a global middle class. More and more workers are being drawn away to do the work of preventing, preparing for, and recovering from wars, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, mass shootings, and other disasters.

This shift is cutting deeply into the flows of human, animal, and machine energy that are available for all the things we want. Climate change and the impacts of a too large and still growing human population on the earth’s many ecosystems and even its geology are forging a world of work that is not the work we really want to be doing. No end to this ongoing shift in the tasks of work is in sight.

Lesson from COVID19: the Work of Today and Tomorrow is Constructing a Way of Life for a New and Different Historical Era

In our memories of recent jolts to daily life, the 9/11 attacks, the 2008 financial meltdown, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the 2004 tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people across 14 countries, the destruction of life and property by hurricane Katrina along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, and many others, stand out. COVID19 stands out differently. All the others were massive jolts to particular people in particular places. COVID19 is the only one that has swept up everyone on the planet. It is the only one that seems to be a massive jolt to the entirety of our modern way of life.

Some observers are calling COVID19 a black swan event, meaning that it is very rare, and try to reassure us that things will eventually go back to normal. In its particulars, COVID19 is a rare event, but it is best to see it as only the biggest so far in an accelerating wave of devastating events that is sweeping across the modern world. Each disaster in its particulars is a rare event, but they happen within and are shaped by the conditions of our modern way of life, conditions that have never existed on this planet before. The real black swan rarity is an earth that is dominated by a species (humans) with such enormous appetites for energy and materials and space, and with such enormous powers to feed those appetites that this species is undermining the biological and social infrastructures of its own existence. The wave of disasters that is breaking upon us is very much a part of this unprecedented black swan rarity.

COVID19 is revealing with great clarity that our capitalist world of work is all wrong for this unfolding era in human history. Over the last several centuries the modern world of work was created to serve two interlocked priorities: maximizing the comfort and convenience of an expanding middle class and maximizing the hoarding of wealth and power by the modern version of royal families. The global conditions in which those priorities were tenable are now gone. On a fully populated planet bound together by transportation and communication technologies into a single societal entity where a disaster for one people becomes a disaster for all peoples and with the juggernaut of climate change growing bigger and more menacing with every month, those work priorities are no longer tenable. It is no longer tenable to sacrifice the natural and human made infrastructures of existence in one part of the world, to subsidize the royal families and their middle class enablers in other parts of the world. It is no longer possible for the affluent and rich of the world to escape the consequences of the conditions that the feeding of their appetites creates.

The world that capitalism made has been moving deeper and deeper into crisis for decades. Efforts by the world’s rich and the world’s affluent to hold out for a return to better times, especially by Americans, have piled up weapons systems, piled up mountains of public and private debt, and underfunded the maintenance of vital infrastructures. These efforts to save the conditions of historically extreme comfort, convenience, and elite wealth are futile. Human history shows us many examples of peoples who have tried to resist the multiplication of forces that make a particular way of life no longer possible. Those efforts always failed. In fact, those efforts made the inevitable deaths of those ways of life more destructive and devastating and the construction of a new way to live more difficult.

The American version of capitalism, which is practiced in many parts of the world, is no longer tenable. The priorities that now drive the world of work have to go. They will go. In one way or another, they will disappear. The best we can do is to not resist the inevitable death of much of modern life, but to accept that it is happening and has to happen. The best we can do is to thoughtfully manage the death of the American version of modern life and replace it with priorities and ways of life that reconstruct and sustain the infrastructures necessary to human existence. Sacrifices will be made; they are already being made. Our task is to manage the forms and distributions of those sacrifices. Failure to do so will not prevent sacrifice; it will only make it more likely that annihilating wars for survival among groups organized along the classic dividing lines of modern life will determine who sacrifices and what they sacrifice.

The Dictatorship of Climate Change: Creating Jobs for Now and the Future

SOURCE ITEMS

A dangerous, large-scale feedback loop that promotes wildfires has emerged. Forests, woodlands and grasslands hold much of Earth’s terrestrial carbon. When they burn, more carbon dioxide is released, increasing concentrations in the atmosphere and causing land and sea surface temperatures to rise. This warming increases the likelihood of even more widespread and intense fires and exacerbates the severe weather and sea level rise we are now beginning to experience.

Don J. Melnick, Mary C. Pearl and Mark A. Cochrane. The Earth Ablaze. New York Times. August 8, 2018.

—————

Changes in the greenhouse gas concentrations and other drivers alter the global climate and bring about myriad human health consequences. Environmental consequences of climate change, such as extreme heat waves, rising sea-levels, changes in precipitation resulting in flooding and droughts, intense hurricanes, and degraded air quality, affect directly and indirectly the physical, social, and psychological health of humans. For instance, changes in precipitation are creating changes in the availability and quantity of water, as well as resulting in extreme weather events such as intense hurricanes and flooding. Climate change can be a driver of disease migration, as well as exacerbate health effects resulting from the release of toxic air pollutants in vulnerable populations such as children, the elderly, and those with asthma or cardiovascular disease.

Climate and Human Health, Health Impacts webpage. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Accessed August 9, 2018.

—————

Humanity’s challenge then is to influence the dynamical properties of the Earth System in such a way that the emerging unstable conditions in the zone between the Holocene and a very hot state become a de facto stable intermediate state (Stabilized Earth) … This requires that humans take deliberate, integral, and adaptive steps to reduce dangerous impacts on the Earth System, effectively monitoring and changing behavior to form feedback loops that stabilize this intermediate state.

Will Steffen, Johan Rockström, et al. Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August 6, 2018.

COMMENTS

It is now well established that we are increasingly living under the steadily growing power of a climate change dictatorship that we brought into being. The chance to choose a future of greater freedom is gone. This global dictatorship will come to dominate our every waking hour and every aspect of our lives, including our work lives. Our jobs will increasingly be the jobs forced on us by this dictatorship as it works its will on this planet with no concern for any of us.

Note that the “intermediate state” referred to in the Trajectories article is not a restoration to the cooler earth of a century ago. It is a possible state of things that we must work hard to achieve, yet even if we bring this “intermediate state” into being, it will not be benign. It will still inflict much ruin on our lives; it will still force us to create massive numbers of survival jobs that do not create new wealth or enhance our lives. At best these jobs will sustain something close to the level of global human welfare we have now. More likely, given how unwilling humans are to make proactive changes that make life less convenient and comfortable, we will not create the necessary wealth saving jobs fast enough to prevent massive losses of existing wealth.

Across the world, we can expect to see massive shifts in our work lives as the dictatorship of climate change becomes more demanding. Just for starters, we should expect to see many more jobs in these categories of work:

Monitoring the conditions of the entire earth and initiating counter measures when that “intermediate state” begins to wobble in the wrong way.
Repairing and replacing wealth that is increasingly lost to the extreme weather events and political upheavals that will necessarily be part of a less hospitable “intermediate state” earth.
Population control – anger management counselors, psychiatrists and psychologists, prison guards, prosecutors, police officers, soldiers (in regular armed forces, in insurgent armed forces, and in unregulated militias and criminal organizations).
Medical services – to handle victims of interpersonal violence, political violence, and disease epidemics facilitated by hotter temperatures and more moisture in the atmosphere.
Construction – to build and maintain sea walls and levies, to reinforce existing structures against more severe stresses, to relocate homes and businesses away from flood zones, and to build border walls to check the flow of desperation driven refugees fleeing from climate change ravaged parts of the world.
Governmental agencies — to manage and fund the far reaching global responses to climate change crises.
Manufacturing — to provide equipment and supplies to facilitate all the other workforce changes taking place.

These are some of the most visible global workforce changes coming our way. However, virtually no part of the world economy and no job will be untouched by the increasingly powerful dictatorship of climate change and the demands it is making.

Crisis and Recovery Work: the Future of Jobs in the World Economy

SOURCE ITEMS

Pipes carrying Flint River water are opened; the Detroit supply is shut off. The switch was made as a cost-saving measure for the struggling, black-majority city. Soon after, residents begin to complain about the water’s color, taste and odor, and report rashes and concerns about bacteria. … Flint urges residents to stop drinking water after government epidemiologists validate Dr. Hanna-Attisha’s finding of high lead levels. Mr. Snyder orders the distribution of filters, the testing of water in schools, and the expansion of water and blood testing.

Jeremy C.F. Lin, Jean Rutter and Haeyoun Park, Events That Led to Flint’s Water Crisis., New York Times, January 21, 2016. Accessed January 22, 2016.

—————

Health care employment expanded by 475,000 in 2015, compared with a gain of 309,000 in 2014. Chart-Job Growth by Sector 2015

Source: Current Employment Statistics Highlights, December 2015, Bureau of Labor Statistics, January 8, 2016. Accessed January 22, 2016.

—————

Air, sea and land transport networks continue to expand in reach, speed of travel and volume of passengers and goods carried. Pathogens and their vectors can now move further, faster and in greater numbers than ever before. Three important consequences of global transport network expansion are infectious disease pandemics, vector invasion events and vector-borne pathogen importation.

Tatem, A.J., D.J. Rogers, and S.I. Hay. Global Transport Networks and Infectious Disease Spread. Advances in parasitology 62 (2006): 293–343. PMC. Web. 22 Jan. 2016.

—————

Thus, the net gain in jobs in New Jersey over the four year period would be 270,000 (281,000 construction-related jobs less 11,000 Travel and Tourism-related jobs). Of the 281,000 construction-related jobs, about 218,000 will be direct construction jobs. …

If all of this money is spent on reconstruction, the influx of new spending will generate $53.1 billion in new total output in those 13 counties and about 352,000 new jobs. About 299,000 jobs will be construction jobs.

Economic Impact of Hurricane Sandy, Economics and Statistics Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce, September 2013

—————

Future warming will bring a more volatile, dangerous world, even if the world manages to keep temperature rises within a 2C limit to which governments have committed, Fischer’s research found. On average, any given place on Earth will experience 60% more extreme rain events and 27 extremely hot days.

Karl Mathiesen, Extreme weather already on increase due to climate change, study finds, The Guardian, U.S. Edition, April 27, 2015.

COMMENTS

Safe water is one of those items of wealth that comes to us as both natural wealth and fabricated wealth. We sip water purified by nature from natural springs and we sip water purified by factories from our water taps.

The water crisis in Flint Michigan illustrates the extent to which we humans have damaged the natural production of many forms of wealth and been forced to replace natural wealth with fabricated wealth. Therein lies the story of job growth in the 21^st century.

During the expansive years of capitalism (roughly the 16^th century through the first half of the 20^th century), we increasingly used fossil fuels to transform natural wealth into fabricated wealth. We had our eyes on the growing stock of fabricated wealth and failed to see the costs in natural wealth. Now we are beginning to see that there is no free lunch. The notion that humans figured out how to add to the total stock of wealth on the planet (the notion of creating fabricated wealth at no cost to natural wealth) has turned out to be an accounting sleight of hand.

We have never been able to increase net total wealth (natural wealth + fabricated wealth). By defining nations as economies, we externalized all costs to other nations and to nature and counted only what we wanted to: fabricated wealth. Our riches seemed to grow without end. Now we can no longer expand the stock of fabricated wealth fast enough to stay ahead of normal wear and tear and a rising tide of social, geopolitical, and ecological disasters.

The work we want to do is steadily being replaced by the work we must do. Steadily, our working hands and minds are being turned to the task of fixing damage inflicted on our fabricated wealth by domestic conflicts, wars, climate events, and just plain old wear and tear; and to the task of fixing the damages we have inflicted and continue to inflict on natural wealth.

The rate at which the world’s fabricated and natural wealth are being damaged is growing fast, so more and more our jobs will be in industries that repair our bodies (and replace body parts), that repair and replace our essential fabricated items of wealth (e.g., homes, tools, transportation equipment, educational facilities, health care technologies) and that repair the planetary systems we have damaged. The proportion of jobs that produce goods and services that can be counted as net new fabricated wealth will go down.

Into the 20^th century, job growth was associated with expanding the production of net new fabricated wealth. That era is over. Job growth is now becoming associated with survival goals in place of greater affluence goals.

1st Quarter 2014 Economic Decline: Not Unique and Not Due to Idiosyncratic Factors

SOURCE ITEMS

Gross domestic product fell at a 2.9 percent annualized rate, more than forecast and the worst reading since the same three months in 2009, after a previously reported 1 percent drop, the Commerce Department said today in Washington. It marked the biggest downward revision from the agency’s second GDP estimate since records began in 1976.

Jeanna Smialek, U.S. Economy Shrank in First Quarter by Most in Five Years, Bloombert.com, June 25, 2014.

—————

A combination of shrinking business inventories, terrible winter weather and a surprise contraction in health care spending drove the first-quarter decline, which is the worst since the first quarter of 2009, when the economy shrank at a 5.4 percent rate.

…

But the economy was hit by an unlikely combination of negative forces that conspired to turn what seemed set to be another quarter of so-so growth into a considerably more gloomy experience.

Neil Irwin, Economy in First Quarter Was Worse Than Everybody Thought, New York Times, June 25, 2014.

—————

That’s one of the findings in a report published today called “Risky Business,” commissioned by some of America’s top business leaders to put price tags on climate threats. For example, by the end of the century, between $238 billion and $507 billion of existing coastal property in the U.S. will likely be subsumed by rising seas, and crop yields in some breadbasket states may decline as much 70 percent.

Tom Randall, Climate Forecast: A Heat More Deadly Than the U.S. Has Ever Seen, Bloomberg.com, June 24, 2014.

COMMENTS

Economists and other experts continue to describe economic bad news as temporary and to predict a return to “normal”. This is wishful thinking. The world we once knew is now on its head: frequent encounters with combinations of economic growth stopping events is the new normal.

Extreme weather is not temporary: we are well into a new weather world that is changing everything about what can be expected for growth in the world economy.
Reduced health care spending is not a surprise: any way you cut it, in the U.S. a huge part of health spending is funded by the federal government; cut federal spending and you cut health care spending.
Declining consumer spending is not temporary: consumer incomes have been stagnant or falling for decades, the labor force participation rate has been falling for decades, and neither trends in union membership nor trends in government wage protection and employment policies suggest that wages will rise and labor force participation will rise.
Geopolitical upheavals like the current insurgency in Iraq are here to stay: rising income and wealth inequalities have produced a world filled with hundreds of millions of people who are big losers; they are all looking for ways to reverse their fortunes.

February Job Numbers: Evidence for a Growth Trend or Just One More Outlier in an Era of Employment Volatility and Too Little Growth?

SOURCE ITEMS

Source: Employment Situation Summary Table B. Establishment data, seasonally adjusted, Bureau of Labor Statistics Economic News Release, March 8, 2013.

—————

Source: Employment Situation Summary Table B. Establishment data,seasonally adjusted, Bureau of Labor Statistics Economic News Release, March 8, 2013.

—————

Looking at a series of economic indicators, and going back to the costliest 18 hurricanes of postwar history along with the Northridge earthquake of 1994, Goldman’s research team found that retail sales, construction spending, and industrial production “show a clear dip in the month of the disaster, followed by a significant recovery within 1-3 months that typically takes their growth rate above that seen prior to the disaster.”

Agustino Fontevecchia, Despite $50B In Damages, Hurricane Sandy Will Be Good For The Economy, Goldman Says, Forbes, 11/06/2012.

—————

Chart generated by BLS State and Area Employment web site.

—————

The largest global disasters of 2012 were Hurricane Sandy (with a cost of $65 billion) and the year-long Midwest/Plains drought ($35 billion), according to the company’s Annual Global Climate and Catastrophe Report, which was prepared by Aon Benfield’s Impact Forecasting division.

Doyle Rice, Hurricane Sandy, drought cost U.S. $100 billion, USA TODAY, January 25, 2013.

—————

Bruce R. Lindsay, Francis X. McCarthy, Stafford Act Declarations 1953-2011: Trends and Analyses, and Implications for Congress, Congressional Research Service, August 31, 2012

—————

Joel Naroff of Naroff Economic Advisors … expects average monthly job gains of 200,000-plus this year if the White House and Congress can agree to put off the budget cuts. If all the reductions occur, it likely would mean monthly gains of about 165,000, he says.

Paul Davidson, Employers add a stunning 236,000 jobs in Feb., USA TODAY, March 8, 2013.

COMMENTS

Stronger than usual February job growth is widely hailed as part of an economic recovery in the U.S. that many are seeing in recent positive market signals – rising housing prices and a flourishing stock market, for examples. The explicit expectation is that we will not look back a year from now and see February’s 236,000 added jobs as only an outlier in year of mostly disappointing employment news.

It is possible that job growth will be strong this year, but it is unlikely.

Several factors involved in the production of February’s job growth numbers suggest that job growth numbers will bounce up and down in 2013 as they have in the past and leave the U.S with unemployment, underemployment, and labor force participation rates much as they are today.

Job growth is weaker this year than last

The first indicator that we should not put much stock in February job growth numbers is that job growth numbers for January and February 2012 were considerably better than the numbers for January and February 2013. Yet 2012 ended with little progress toward getting Americans back to work.

Unpredictable weather events may be a factor in February job numbers

Both the Midwest/Plains drought and Hurricane Sandy damaged industries and destroyed property. Smaller weather events, such as severe winter storms, have also done damage.

Rebuilding after Hurricane Sandy and repairs following winter storms could well have contributed to February job numbers. In the case of Hurricane Sandy, which did $50 billion or more in damage, cleanup, redevelopment planning, negotiating insurance payments, and getting money flowing from government agencies may have pushed much of the impact on the demand for goods and services into 2013. So, it is possible that:

the impact of Hurricane Sandy on the construction and retail industries is just now peaking
hospitality and leisure are still be benefiting from housing people displaced by the hurricane
Hurricane Sandy still has a significant impact on the demand for social services
some professional and business services, such as legal, architectural, engineering, document preparation and clerical, security and surveillance, cleaning, and waste disposal services, are part of recovery efforts related to Hurricane Sandy.

Employment related to Hurricane Sandy and winter storms will fall off as the year progresses. Of course, other disasters and damaging weather events will strike. But, when and where those events strike and how much demand for goods and services they will generate can’t be known.

It is fairly certain, though, that the impact of large and small natural disasters on employment will grow larger over the coming years, adding more volatility to month to month job growth numbers.

Volatile government spending adds volatility to some private sector industries

Although jobs in health care and social services are listed in the private sector, many of those jobs are paid for by grants and contracts from local, state, and federal government agencies. The same is true for employment in most educational institutions and in many manufacturing business service industries that supply goods to government agencies.

Given the volatile political tugs-of-war over revenue and spending policies at all levels of government, jobs in industries with federal funding can come and go quickly. Perhaps some of this effect is in the February job numbers.

A final note

It is good to have job growth, but it is certainly less than optimal if a growing proportion of new jobs are associated with repairing and replacing the damaged wealth of those who already have it rather than creating new wealth to be shared with the very large number of Americans who have no net wealth at all.

Climate change and government gridlock are robbing both those of us with wealth and those of us without it.

Chronic Inflation

More and More Bad Jobs

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: