Theology and the Jobs Crisis

          Reports last week of Apple’s decision to invest one hundred million dollars to begin some manufacturing in the U. S. seems like a lot.  It's pocket change at Apple whose total sales last year topped 128 billion. This means the promised investment comes to something like .0018 of 1 percent.  The purpose looks more like public relations.  CEO Tim Cook, who set-up Apple’s Asian supply chain in the first place, told NBC that it’s not the skills people have in China but the education network that trains them.  “The education system stopped producing them [back here].”  Certainly a self-fulfilling prophecy if there ever was one since the community colleges in the USA cannot train people to do jobs that have been moved 3000 miles away.   

News reports begrudged this skimpy investment in U. S. manufacturing but still treated it affectionately: “One Small Step Home for Apple and One Giant Leap for Mac-kind” said the Financial Times headline.  The Apple tech inventions are of course dazzling, but their bright sun  blinds our capacity to see the whole picture.

For example, last Friday’s jobs report (on Pearl Harbor Day) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was headlined as a decline in unemployment—all of 0.2 percent. The truth of the matter, as the BLS noted, is that the small decline was only because the labor force is shrinking under the weight of discouraged and part time workers. Dean Maki, chief United States economist at Barclays Capital remarked last Friday, that at the current pace of job creation, the unemployment rate would only gradually decline to 7.1 percent by December 2013. (as quoted in the FT)

While that’s a whole year from now, the NY Times on Friday was even more vividly realistic:

Factoring in people seeking work, as well as those who want jobs but have stopped looking and those forced to take part-time jobs because full-time employment was not available, the broad unemployment gauge dipped to 14.4 percent in November from 14.6 percent in October.    

Public attitudes, especially media attitudes toward the US unemployment problem have the same unrealism that was the order of the day in the Romney campaign.  If Romney’s brain trust simply could not make the connection from the all-white faces in their crowds to the reality of U. S. diversity, the analogy here is that we often don’t connect sagging standards of living under conditions of long term unemployment to a more dismal future now rapidly approaching.  

The problem is theological.  We are as beguiled by electronic wizardry as any ancient Greek crowd bowing before a giant statue of Athena or Canaanites praying at the altar for virgin sacrifice.

The Federal Reserve has now acted with some desperation (Wednesday, December 12th) to hold interest rates at zero until probably 2015 when they hope unemployment will have declined to 6.5 percent.   The theological trick lies in the beguilement provided by technological glitter, but there is always the devil to pay.

The same day media reports indicated that the nation has suffered the biggest trade deficit (meaning a decline in trade) in nearly four years. This devil is getting its due: weakening consumer demand, in spite of the recent Black Friday hullabaloo, make it clear that the big downturn many economists have predicted for next year may be near to happening. The jobless crisis simply comes to mean that consumers don’t have enough money to buy the gadgets, to say nothing of essentials like food and medicine.  

The trend is rapidly becoming gloomier. The recent hard fought electoral battle between conservatives who have and many others who have not may turn out to be only prologue when the New Year dawns, fiscal cliff or not.