When I open my morning newspaper (yes, I still get one of those) I see the market indexes right there in black and white. <\/p>\n
That scrawling black line measures the pulse of the American economy. <\/p>\n
But one of the troubling trends of this recession is that the Dow and Main Street seem less connected than ever before.<\/p>\n
The market is booming but unemployment — depending on how you measure it — is running between 9.5 and 15%. <\/p>\n
Many small businesses are suffering.<\/p>\n
That’s not exactly a high-octane recovery. <\/p>\n
So what if the “market pulse” of the American economy is actually measuring something different?<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
It would be cool to know how all that stacks up, month-by-month, against our competitors in Europe and Asia.<\/p>\n
We’ve learned in recent months that the stock market measures something far more ephemeral, trend-driven, and frankly deceptive.<\/p>\n
It’s like trying to understand the health of a family by watching its teenage children ping around.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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