Terry, I appreciate the anecdote, but it really isn't data. Roach says, "low-end jobs accounted for about 44% of total hiring over the February to June interval, double their share in the workforce," and he's right -- in fact, more than right, as you'll see below.

Now, to Annenberg's spreadsheet, which I think is great. Ignore the annual-average year-over-year stuff they did, and focus on the "great job growth period" from February through June 2004, inclusive, to which both your anecdote and Roach's comment refer. Here's what I did (feel free to walk through this; it should only take a few minutes):
- sort by weekly salary, high to low
- add a column of salary*jobs as of June 2004
- add a column of a running total of this
- add a column of this divided by its total

That gives you a column of percentiles by salary weight for profession -- if it reads 15%, then 15% of all salaries are paid to that occupation and all those with a higher weekly salary. Got it?

OK, now simply figure the job and salary growth by quartiles. That is, what portion of all Feb-Jun job or wage growth went to each quartile, measured by total weekly wages?

qile....job growth....wage growth
1st.......-6%..........-14%
2d.........5%............8%
3d........18%...........37%
4th.......83%...........69%

Bottom line: substantially all of both wage and job growth have been concentrated not only in below-median jobs, but in bottom-quartile wage jobs.

For shame, Annenberg. When they say, "[w]e can't disprove Kerry's claim that bad jobs are replacing good jobs over the past few months," they aren't kidding. It's because Kerry and Roach are right.

Thanks for the link to the spreadsheet, though, and best regards.

It doesn't surprise me that energy
transmission companies would
thrive under the Bush admin.
What would surprise me is if
black employent (which is at its
lowest in 20 yrs.) were to improve
as well. After traditionally
holding them to the bottom rung
of our economic ladder for so long,
this Bush economy now threatens to
kick many off of it completely.
And what about college enrollment?
Job training? Where is the upward
mobility for the common man? I
have a good job, but I am no fool
to think that our economy is
booming just because my company is
doing well; it is the least of
us (the poor) who are the true
index of our prosperity, and their
ranks swell by the day.

Nathan,

I'm really glad you posted this because I, like Terry, saw that Fact Check analysis. It seemed to buck the trends (not to mention my intuition), but I ain't no economist, so what do I know?

Is the truth part of one report and part of the other--like the country, the picture for those in the upper-income brackets is different from those anywhere below? That also makes some sense. It also doesn't do the country any good. If we still have a bottoming-out of jobs for the bottom 75%, the fortunes of the top quarter aren't a lot to celebrate.

wcw's analysis sounds convincing, and of course it agrees with Roach.

Also -- the factcheck.com piece says "Some of the big gainers were construction jobs". Are these supposed to be good jobs? Even if they are (according to factcheck.com) "just barely in the higher-paying category" they are usually seasonal and temporary -- especially in an up-and-down economy.

better URL:

http://www.morganstanley.com/GEFdata/digests/20040709-fri.html#anchor0

a reader: construction jobs

Not to sound chauvinist, but here in the parts of California that I have traveled, the lingua franca at construction sites (and many other places & professions where so-called "low-end" services are provided) appears to be a south-of-the-border variety of Spanish.

To insinuate that most of those jobs are illegal would perhaps be unfair, but some good number of them probably are somewhere in the limelight. Which is not to say that those jobs are not official (I'm sure most of them are coutned in the statistics), but there appears to be quite some amount of looking-the-other-way in terms of enforcement of employment laws. But then a job is a job, whoever fills it.

The other thing about the Annenberg analysis is that they're using the wrong numbers, the population survey rather than the payroll survey. That's how they get positive job growth over three years, when the payroll survey shows job losses. While there are defenders of the household numbers, the conventional wisdom (i.e., Greenspan) says you need to follow the payroll data.

Viz http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/bank/hba93425.000/hba93425_0.htm

"..I wish I could say the household data were the more accurate. Everything we have looked at suggests that it is the payroll data which are the series which you have to follow..."

I don't know anything about Annenberg, but that piece reads not like a dispassionate explanation of complex issues by an expert, but as a partisan oratory by a partisan that is couched dishonestly as a disassionate explanation.

I've sent them a friendly email laying out my two main issues with their piece, but have not received a reply.

What, we have mostly low end jobs being created? Neocon Answer: Tax Cuts

What, we have a looming deficit growing and are undertaking enormously expensive projects?
Neocon Answer: Tax Cuts

What, we have a gay people daring to demand equal treatment?
Neocon Answer: uhh...Amend the Constitution AND Tax Cuts

40 million Americans with no healthcare?
Neocon Answer: TAX CUTS AND MORE TAX CUTS!

Call me knave, but I'm starting to see a trend here. Let's just eliminate taxes altogether and proceed straight to the resultant social paradise...

I second your high opinion of Roach. His analysis seems always to me to be filtered through a fundamental understanding that an economy is a social institution, meaning social welfare (e.g. job quality) is always a valid concern. So many econo-nerds hide from social welfare with ultimately meaningless manipulations of statistics.

Also the clarity of his writing, in his more specialist-oriented venue, rivals that of Krugman.

Oldman has a good comment on our sputtering employment situation:
As for the argument that spurred production will spur demand, I would remind everyone that this was only mainly true so long as many goods were produced domestically. There is no logical reason to conclude that spurred production in factories overseas will lead to more hiring and consumer spending. Modern economists have long touted the deflationary and anti-inflationary aspects of producing costs overseas. It's about time they faced up to the equally obvious fact that moving production overseas also breaks the traditional relationship between increased production and aggregate consumption. You can't have it both ways. If you want significantly lowered consumer prices from overseas produced goods, then you can't expect increased inventory stocking to cause an uptick in hiring or related consumer spending.

Hell, I thought truckdriving paid pretty well, although many of the conditions sucked. Arkansas is like a black hole, it's hard to even make enough money to leave...

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