The jobs ticker

When I open my morning newspaper (yes, I still get one of those) I see the market indexes right there in black and white.

That scrawling black line measures the pulse of the American economy.

But one of the troubling trends of this recession is that the Dow and Main Street seem less connected than ever before.

The market is booming but unemployment — depending on how you measure it — is running between 9.5 and 15%.

Many small businesses are suffering.

That’s not exactly a high-octane recovery.

So what if the “market pulse” of the American economy is actually measuring something different?

What if, say, those American corporations steadily picking up steam are really multi-national conglomerates, whose success and failure is only tangentially connected to the economic health of our communities?

What if the black line on our business pages (or the tickers on your Blackberry) tells us more about Chinese investment funds than the health of home-grown entrepreneurship?

It’s time, I think, for jobs numbers to be adopted as the true barometer of the national economy. And it should be a nuanced data-line.

We should know, for example, how many jobs in the mix are good jobs, with a living wage and benefits. We should know how productive our workers are.

It would be cool to know how all that stacks up, month-by-month, against our competitors in Europe and Asia.

We’ve learned in recent months that the stock market measures something far more ephemeral, trend-driven, and frankly deceptive.

It’s like trying to understand the health of a family by watching its teenage children ping around.

Put bluntly, I’m tired of obsessing about the whims of investors. I don’t trust that sector of the marketplace as a mirror of where we’re going as a nation.

A jobs ticker would give us a far clearer sense of what we’re making, building, doing. And it might also give policy-makers a better sense of where the dangers lie going forward.