I usually like Paul Krugman’s writing a great deal, so I’m disappointed with his sarcastic take on job creation under President Bush.
He points to this graph to show the weakness of job creation:
and he asks:
Why were the last 8 years so bad? Even the good times weren’t all that good: by my quick count there were only 10 months under Bush in which the economy added as many jobs as it did in an average month under Clinton.
Asking why Bush was worse than Clinton strikes me as a boring question. When I look at that graph, the first thing that jumps out at me is that even the best of times, the peaks, have been getting lower and lower for the last 40 years:
The chart shows a long-term decline going back 40 years (or 60 years if you can ignore the slump in the 50s). The chart masks how bad things really were in the 70s and 80s, since that is when the Baby Boom would have entered the work force, and that is also when women were entering the work force. The late 70s and early 80s should have the highest peak on this graph, and the fact that they don’t suggests something was very wrong with the economy at that time.
For me, the interesting question is how do we get back to the highest peak on this chart? I’d like to ask “How do we get back to 1947?” Some people might say “Oh, it takes a war to do that!” I’m not sure that is the right response, since we had a war under President Bush and it did not boost the economy. But for those who feel World War II is in a class by itself, and not to be emulated, I’ll accept the 1960s as a relevant comparison. For me, the most interesting parts of the graph are the peaks:
How do we get back up to the interesting peaks? We should not try to emulate the Clinton years, since the best of times under Clinton were worse than the best of times of any earlier period. We need to figure out how to recreate the dynamic economy of the earlier periods.
