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Just got back from another good trip, which I will write about soon. The hotel gave us a copy of the Sunday New York Times, and I threw the magazine in my bag and read it on the way home. I was initially attracted to a profile of Pedro Almodóvar, the reigning Spanish film giant. The piece was quite enjoyable; it turns out that he is just as passionate and idiosyncratic as one expects of a European director. I loved his last film and am excited for the new one.

Once I started reading, I was pleasantly surprised by an article about the politics of job creation. In the first page it eloquently said a number of things I have thought for years, and it stay engaging throughout. Here are the paragraphs I most wish I had written:

There are three problems with the breathless, scorecard approach to job numbers. First, most jobs are in the private sector, and the president is only one of many influences over whether a manager decides to hire or fire. Some of the others that come to mind: Alan Greenspan, the stock market, the strength of international economies, technological change, oil prices and the weather (try legislating that).

Another problem is that, assuming Washington does have some influence, attributing it to the appropriate officeholder is next to impossible. The labor market does not correspond to neat, quadrennial cycles, and the notion that the Bush team, which took office when the economy was already cooling, precipitated a decline in the job market that began 10 weeks later is simply implausible. Governmental decisions have a long half-life. The balanced budget achieved by Clinton in 1998 owed much to the 1990 budget agreement forged by the first President Bush, who had been kicked out of office as a failure. If you want to blame the current president for a recession, argues Jeffrey Frankel, a Harvard economist, blame him for the next recession, because the Bush deficits will seriously narrow the options available to whoever is unlucky enough to be presiding then.

The third, and most serious, flaw is that focusing on the number of jobs fosters a simplistic and illusory sense of what a president can do. It misdirects policy toward ”creating” jobs, which are, if anything, an outcome of good policy rather than an end. As Randy Kroszner, a former member of the Bush White House Council of Economic Advisers, puts it, ”To think we have a magic lever, blue for jobs, red for growth, that’s mistaken.” His real point is that the levers are not, in the long term, distinguishable. Jobs result from growth — from employers’ desire to increase profits, not from their desire to increase payrolls. Countries that have tried to target jobs specifically — say in Europe, by restricting the freedom of businesses to lay off workers — have discovered an unpleasant paradox. Lessened flexibility in the labor market leads to more tentative hiring and fewer jobs.

Moreover, since the economy benefits when companies are able to produce more goods and services with fewer workers, maximizing the number of jobs is not always in society’s interest. If it were, we would all have wonderful memories of the Carter administration, which recorded the fastest job growth of any president since the 1960’s.

But we don’t. Which means that job numbers are one, but only one, indicator of economic well-being.

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