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Strategies & Market Trends : Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
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To: mishedlo who wrote (40548)11/3/2005 2:04:59 PM
From: RealMuLan  Read Replies (1) of 116555
 
How Good is the Economy at Creating Good Jobs?

Executive Summary
Between 1979 and 2004, real gross domestic product (GDP) per person
in the United States increased about 60 percent. This report asks how well
the U.S. economy has done translating this economic growth into good jobs.

The report defines a “good” job as one that offers decent pay (at least $16
per hour or about $32,000 per year), employer-paid health insurance, and a
pension. In 2004 (the most recent year for which data are available), only
25.2 percent of American workers had a job that met all three criteria.

In both 1979 and 2004, about one-fourth of workers were in jobs that
qualified as “good” by the definition used here. The basically unchanged
good jobs rate across the two years suggests that the economy has failed to
convert long-term economic growth into an expanding supply of good jobs.
After controlling for improvements between 1979 and 2004 in the “human
capital” of the U.S. workforce —American workers today are, on average,
older and much better educated than they were at the end of the 1970s—
the economy now produces 25 to 30 percent fewer good jobs than it did 25
years ago.

In 2004, about one-fourth (26.6 percent) of Americans were in “bad” jobs,
defined as a job that pays less than $16, has no employer-provided health
insurance, and no pension. This is close to the share of Americans in bad
jobs in 1979 (27.9 percent).
If anything, the analysis presented here may paint an overly optimistic picture
of the current economy’s capacity to generate high-quality employment.
The data used here for health insurance and pensions do not allow us to
control for declines in the quality of many employer-provided health-insurance
plans (most importantly the rise in the employee share of the cost of
such plans) or for declines in the quality of pension plans (especially the shift
from defined-benefit to defined-contribution plans).

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