3Q 7.1% GDP? Just Where Have All The Jobs Been?????????

You see, GDP has been growing so much for it to engender a monumental paradox—the rejection of the G-R-O-W-T-H story of the previous administration by 16 million people. 

So, they elected a supposed anti-establishment president who has been popularly expected to deliver superhero results via short-term actions predicated on violence and repression.

But because the establishment benefits from the G-R-O-W-T-H story (via mainly access to credit), this remains the embedded theme.

Worst, we have been made to believe in statistically constructed data, even if it departs from on-the-ground events.

Here is a simple question: With all the fantastic growth numbers, just where have the jobs been??????

 

It is said that when numbers are tortured enough, they will confess to anything.

In order to project higher growth numbers, Monster.com even revised its employment index last June.

So instead of negative, growth numbers during the given (2Q) period became positive. Additionally, because they revised the current numbers, the older set had been truncated. Here is Monster.com’s September revised data.

Nevertheless, even when Monster’s numbers had been tortured enough, the confession just didn’t happen.

First, Monster’s online job numbers grew by 4.08% (that’s nominal). Understand that 3Q NGDP was 9.3% (real GDP 7.1%). So from Monster’s data perspective real jobs growth at 1.98% (adjusted for government’s 2.1% deflator), jobs severely underperformed GDP by less than half the latter’s growth rate—yes that’s 7.1 % versus 2%! That’s an ocean of a difference!

Second, despite the massaging of data, 2016 improvements were hardly substantial when compared to 2015. Yes, 2016’s slightly better than online job performance hardly even reached the diminished highs of 1H 2015.  Even with adjusted numbers, the base can be used to infer the relationship between old data and the new data.

And from here it is evident that the 2Q improvement was, unfortunately not sustained, as 3Q growth rates diminished or momentum declined (10% July, 4.26% August and NEGATIVE 2.04% September)

In short, with all so much statistical growth just where have the JOBS been??????????????????

Monster’s performance can’t be said as isolated.

That’s because another major (biggest) online job provider has resonated with Monster’s performance.

 

My own weekly Thursday 12 pm tabulation of Jobstreet’s online posting has shown an even worse performance

Online posting growth has hardly recovered, year on year they have been NEGATIVE.

Again just where have the jobs been?

Has job recruitment shifted back to the old ways (traditional media)? Or have hirings been direct? How effective has the latter two been?

The simple economic logic is that lackluster job postings have signified a symptom of inadequate investments or investments that had been made that were less labor intensive.

Either way, this is just one of the major indicators that flagrantly contradict the G-R-O-W-T-H story.

Next. Government Revenues/Fiscal Balance.

A New Trend in Job Hiring? Hiring Absent Resumes (Blind Hiring)

Some companies have been experimenting on hiring or acquiring employees by doing away with credentials (social signaling) to focus instead on testing for talent through actual work. 

From the Wall Street Journal’s The Boss Doesn’t Want Your Résumé (hat tip Econolog) 

Compose Inc. asks a lot of job applicants. Anyone who wants to be hired at the San Mateo, Calif., cloud-storage firm must write a short story about data, spend a day working on a mock project and complete an assignment. 

There is one thing the company doesn't ask for: a résumé. 

Compose is among a handful of companies trying to judge potential hires by their abilities, not their résumés. So-called "blind hiring" redacts information like a person's name or alma mater, so that hiring managers form opinions based only on that person's work. In other cases, companies invite job candidates to perform a challenge--writing a software program, say--and bring the top performers in for interviews or, eventually, job offers. 

Bosses say blind hiring reveals true talents and results in more diverse hires. And the notion that career success could stem from what you know, and not who you know, is a tantalizing one. But it can be tough to conceal a person's identity for long. 

Kurt Mackey, Compose's chief executive, realized his managers tended to pick hires based on whom they connected with personally, or those with name-brand employers like Google Inc. on their résumés--factors that had little bearing on job performance, he says. 

Will this innovative human resource management become a trend?

Politics: It’s Not About Jobs But About Income or Value Producing Opportunities

Speaking about the controversial political issue on employment or jobs, I’d like to share my experience.

Technically I am jobless; that’s because I don’t have an employer who pays me in salary. I also don’t run a formal business or enterprise, so I am not a business person.

Yet to survive, my livelihood depends on a mishmash of several accrued tasks; particularly free lance sales agent work for clients who trades the Philippine equity market, my own personal investments or trades, provides consultancy work for a broker firm via newsletters and doing this blog (where I earn a smidgen from sponsored ads).

In other words, while I am technically unemployed (if measured in wages), I have many jobs.

So the issue isn’t the lack of jobs- that’s because basically everyone can find something to do (like me)-but one of income or the willingness of someone to pay for service rendered and whose payment is acceptable to those providing the labor.

And here we find GMU's Professor Don Boudreaux arguments fundamentally valid and applicable, (bold highlights mine)

``The reason you refuse my offer of a (full-time!) job is because what you really want is not the opportunity to toil for someone else but, rather, the income that you can earn by toiling.

``No matter how prestigious the job, few of us are willing to toil unless we're paid to do so.

``The reverse, of course, isn't true. Nearly all of us are willing to be paid without having to toil for it.

``Only a moment of reflection is necessary to make clear that no society can survive if significant numbers of its denizens try living without working -- without producing. So the reverse course of action -- being paid without working -- is impossible to generalize. It's impossible to establish such a course of action as a general policy open to all.”

My comment:

Put differently, the politically colored issue of unemployment or the lack of jobs is essentially a diversion to promote entitlement "free lunch" privileges by means of interventionism.

Yet, interventionism precludes the elementary societal function that requires that we have to provide or produce what the markets needs or wants for us to be able to consume and survive.

Again Professor Boudreaux,(bold highlights mine)

``By speaking incessantly about "jobs" we lose sight of the above realities. What each person ultimately wants is not a job. What each person wants is income -- the ability to consume -- that enables ready access to a rich, and hopefully growing, array of goods and services.

``And in a society that affords widespread prosperity, income is attainable for each willing worker not by merely producing, but by producing goods and services that other people value.

``Rather than speak of "jobs," therefore, I wish that people who discuss economics would speak instead of "value-producing opportunities."

``Such a term is unquestionably awkward. But the clarity of thought that would be promoted by replacing "job" with "value-producing opportunity" would more than offset the cumbersome terminology.

``This change in word usage would make clearer that what people seek are not opportunities to toil. It would indicate more directly that what people want is maximum possible opportunities to produce value, for only by producing something that other people value will those other people pay a worker handsomely for his or her toiling.

``Substituting "value-producing opportunity" would also help expose the flaws in policies such as protectionism and government make-work programs. Such policies can indeed transfer wealth from society at large to people whose jobs exist only because government relieves them of the need to participate fairly in the market process. But such "jobs" clearly are not "value-producing opportunities" -- for the amount of value that such workers produce is less than they are paid.

``And no society can long survive by institutionalizing such unproductive policies on a widespread scale.”

My comment

As a final thought, interventionism via inflationism that essentially redirects resources from what is required by the market aimed at promoting the interest of a politically vested few leads NOT to more “value producing opportunity” or job based INCOME but LESS. That's because governments essentially don't create wealth, they can only tax and redistribute.

Yet we can’t expect an economy to become wealthy by simply having everyone to dig holes and fill them. Unfortunately, politicians, academic dogmatists and mainstream media tells us otherwise.

It's odd how deception can be construed and imbued as the truth.