It has taken economists, journalists, and the rest of us years to get used to the idea that over 80 percent of the jobs in any developed economy are service jobs. And that the "good old days" of relatively strenuous, dangerous, and boring manufacturing jobs are not coming back. Many of those jobs have been exported for good. Now we are confronted with a new reality: Service jobs are just as exportable as many of the manufacturing jobs that left the U.S. and other highly-developed economies before them. And not all of them are relatively boring and low-paying. How should we think and feel about these trends?
Much of the current commentary would lead us to believe that we are being left with jobs, many of them low-paying, that cannot be exported—those involving personal services such as face-to-face retailing and repair work. The Wal-Martization of work in the U.S. is emphasized while the fastest-growing types of service jobs in medicine, high-tech maintenance and development, and construction are downplayed.
At the risk of oversimplifying, job quantity and quality is a function of growth and productivity. If growth occurs that is roughly equivalent to increased productivity, little change occurs in the number of jobs although the quality of those jobs (assuming that higher output per person leads to higher income as well) should increase. Growth without a change in productivity ought to lead to more jobs, but jobs of about the same quality as before. Growth with a loss in productivity is likely to lead to more but poorer-paying jobs. Only when the growth rate exceeds productivity increases should more and better jobs be created. Of course, these relationships hold only as long as an economy is closed and self-contained with no exportation or importation of jobs. Those days are long gone.
What is the situation we face in the U.S. today? It appears that productivity increases are accommodating growth with little increase in jobs. But doesn't that suggest that the jobs that people do hold must be getting better? And to the extent that productivity can fuel growth that exceeds the rate of job export, doesn't that bode well for the future of employment in the U.S.?
On the other hand, it can be argued that jobs have an intrinsic value regardless of their quality. They keep people occupied and out of trouble. Crime rates historically have varied inversely with employment. The loss of any job has social costs greater than the loss of income. But do we have to export jobs in order to create better ones? Does it matter if the jobs exported are those involving relatively little "ownership" potential and they are replaced by those created by the entrepreneurial, small-business engine that has fueled the U.S. economy for decades with jobs that involve either psychic or actual ownership? How should we think about job export? What do you think?