Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Is Job Creation Really Impossible?

. Tuesday, November 22, 2011

This is a strong conclusion to a good post from Krugman:

My point, then, is that this claim — and the lionization of high earners as people who make a vast contribution to society [via job creation] — is not, in fact, something that comes out of the free-market economic principles these people claim to believe in. Even if you believe that the top 1% or better yet the top 0.1% are actually earning the money they make, what they contribute is what they get, and they deserve no special solicitude.
Here are his assumptions earlier in the post: "Yet textbook economics says that in a competitive economy, the contribution any individual (or for that matter any factor of production) makes to the economy at the margin is what that individual earns — period." The upshot being that the entire idea of a "job creator" is misguided. All of the value that factors of production add to the economy is recouped by those factors of production, and none "trickles down" to anyone else.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the relevant "textbook economics" assume not only a competitive market but also constant returns to scale and no spillover effects? How often do we think all three of these things hold? Doesn't a Keynesian view of the world explicitly claim that in a depression there are often scale returns to be captured, as well as positive spillover effects from investment? How else could the Obama administration (like all administrations) claim that it has "saved or created" so many thousands of jobs via fiscal policy?

1 comments:

Thomas Oatley said...

And isn't most of Krugman's most original work focused on questioning precisely those assumptions of constant returns and no spillovers (e.g, strategic trade theory, geography and agglomeration effects).

Is Job Creation Really Impossible?
 

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