Useful jobs

For a job to truly be useful it has to produce more than it costs. In today's society, that equation can be extremely difficult.

At one time it was generally simpler. Jobs often had a direct link to production and the amount produced could be fairly easily compared to the cost of the job and a decision made as to whether the job was worthwhile. Of course as everything got more complex, we started to have jobs that while useful in a way, had no clear link to production. These can be considered service jobs and are characterized by things such as accounting, human resources and management. Now, you have to have these things but they are overhead, and have to be supported by the production people who produce value.

Now, there is an equation for these jobs, where the cost of the job can be compared to the loss of production if the job isn't there. Effectively, does a manager get the producers to produce more than it costs to have him/her? For many other specialties, their lack would also hurt production, if producers didn't get paid or bills didn't get collected or new producers weren't hired in a timely fashion.

However, while useful, they do not in and of themselves produce value. We have at times lost sight of this. In fact, if you think about the American economy, service jobs now dominate. So more and more of us are living off the value created by the smaller and smaller number of producers.

Of course in an economy as complex as ours some service employees appear to create value for their firms. Lawyers for example, may book much more in revenue than they get paid for a law firm. So from the law firms point of view they look like producers. However on a macro view they do not produce anything of overall value such as food, raw materials or manufactured goods.

Further compounding the issue is that more and more of the producer jobs are leaving the country. Ultimately I would argue that as a country produces less and less 'real" value, it becomes less wealthy. Now, there are economists who would argue with that premise and it is clearly quite complex to track value streams across the world economy. However, ultimately, if we import a unit of energy, it has to be paid for somehow. We may pay for it by providing a service to the producer, but how long can that last?

If we want to increase the wealth of this country, we need to promote value producing industries and jobs. The most obvious area would be to internalize energy production. Another obvious one is to promote policies that lead to a revitalization of manufacturing in this country. Certainly we want world trade but we want the trade to be of a balanced nature, not that we export much more wealth than we actually create.