One reason at least: the vacuity of our public intellectuals on our economic challenges. Here’s Richard Florida’s big idea in today’s Financial Times, “America needs to make its bad jobs better”. In a nutshell, Florida notes that half of the jobs projected to be created over the next decade in the U.S. are low-wage service industry jobs. Florida’s solution? Make them high-paying jobs. Check out this example of Florida’s mind at work, from his op/ed:
[T]he blue-collar jobs we pine for were not always good jobs: we made them good jobs. When my father came back from the second world war, his poorly paid factory job had been transformed. He was able to buy a house, put his two sons through college and participate fully in the American dream. Some of this was due to the power of unions. Most of it was because of the enormous improvements in productivity wrought by improved technologies and management techniques.
“Improved technologies and management techniques”? Might Florida be missing a bigger factor here? Maybe the combination of post WWII global demand combined with the heaps of rubble certain other countries had where their factories used to be? Improved technology and management techniques is what made Walmart the country’s leading retailer, and yet its average employee makes a fraction of what a typical auto company manufacturing worker makes, because discount retailing is an inherently low-margin business, unlike manufacturing luxury SUVs.
Florida mentions Trader Joe’s as an example of a service business that pays decent wages to its workers without acknowledging how those wages are paid by Trader Joe’s higher prices, which are in turn paid by higher-income customers. How do you get those higher-income customers, who can support decent-paying service jobs? You need higher-paying jobs for that, and for higher-paying jobs, you need higher-margin businesses, such as luxury SUV manufacturers. How hard would it be to look at first world countries that have managed to maintain higher levels of high-paying manufacturing jobs than us and emulate some of their policies?
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