October 14, 2015
The NYT was unfair in its fact check of the Democratic presidential candidates’ claim that spending on the environment can be an engine for economic growth. The piece quotes Keith Hall, the former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
“The goal should be to secure the largest possible environmental benefit at the lowest economic cost. Counting green jobs equates to counting part of the economic cost of achieving this environmental impact. We want this to be small, not large.”
This is true in the context of an economy at full employment, just as we should want as few people as possible to be employed in Silicon Valley designing our software or Wall Street managing finance. If the economy is at full employment then jobs in any sector are coming at the expense of meeting other needs. If we can get our energy with fewer workers, this would be mean we would have more people who could meet our health care or education needs. There would be a similar story if the Fed thought we were at full employment, even if it were wrong, and it was raising interest rates to slow the economy and prevent more job creation.
However, during the recession and for any period where the economy is below full employment, spending on the environment is a job creator. This means that additional support for environmental spending over the last eight years would have created jobs. And, this would quite possibly be the case for years into the future, depending on the strength of the economy.
Comments