Producing jobs

I have begun Emerging Trends interviews and one of my questions is "where are the next wave of jobs coming from? So far this decade the U.S. has been sluggish on the job creation front, netting only 5 million new jobs versus 22 million in the 1993-2000 period. Of course, more recently (the past six months) the country has experienced jobs losses not gains. And the real estate industry for one now appears to be very much in contraction mode. Financial services and construction related fields, as we all know, have suffered. Deal brokers start to see their numbers slashed -- jobs and compensation -- at least temporarily.

So far my conversations have not yielded many, if any, original ideas and everybody seems to operate under the assumption that the US will inevitably come up with something on the jobs front -- that proverbial new, new thing? We all seem to be waiting. It's a bit of a no brainer that the health care sector will grow as babyboomers age -- we'll need more doctors, nurses, therapists and administrators. The greater the number of older people, the more we need caregivers. And babyboomer wealth will require continuing financial management too. Younger folks may also come to realize, given the shrinking pension scene, that saving money rather than spending (and going into various forms of debt -- most notably credit card) may be the way to go -- that should be good for financial services too.

But these jobs don't necessarily create anything. Healthcare extends lives and financial services tends to prosperity.  All our many economic intermediaries don't create much either. I'm talking about brokers, bankers, lawyers, accountants, traders and the like, who take a cut from what's created, but don't do much creating -- the pr aside. I include here the hedge fund managers and private equity maestros. Their creativity has extended to making money for themselves out of other people's investments, often trading with one another to gin up their takes. Well that game may be over for a while. Google and Facebook certainly enable finding information, but they are not creating anything either.  Sports teams and entertainers engage us and take our disposable income, but aren't necessarily building a new industry (unless you count government subsidized stadiums and arenas). And Wal-Mart and its discount retailing ilk can't sop up all the blue collar workers who used to work in car plants and steel mills where they used to build things, not sell things (made elsewhere).

Essentially, we have turned ourselves into a consumer economy instead of a producer economy. Our recent creativity has centered on how to attract consumer dollars and get a piece of the wealth built up here over previous years of production since the Depression. But we're finding out now that's a zero sum game. And we won't emerge dramatically from our latest recession until we change the equation back to production and away from consumption.