The economic recovery has begun! And while Chairman Bernanke is apparently miffed that he doesn't get more credit for the spectacular turnaround, all it really represents is a widening gap between the official assessment of economic well-being (Obama just tapped the guy for a second term) and how the rest of us are actually feeling.
When I first heard the phrase "jobless recovery," it confirmed my worst suspicions about the long-term results of a government policy that was too much bank bailout and too little public spending stimulus. But I was also struck by the absurdity of the very term -- indeed, a contradiction thereof. Just what the hell do we mean by "recovery" if it doesn't create jobs?
Financial journalists breathlessly use the phrase without realizing that it explodes the myth that "what's good for the market is necessarily good for the rest of us" -- perhaps even more so than the crash itself. Paul Krugman wittily calls this a "postmodern recovery", although I'm not sure he grasps the full irony of the phenomenon.
The whole "jobless recovery" business highlights just how piss-poor our metrics have been all along. Folks on the left have long decried that a bump in GDP can reflect things of nefarious social value -- from an expensive hospital death, to the sale of cigarettes to an old growth forest clearcut. The government, media and establishment economists are measuring our recovery by the GDP and stock prices -- the same measures they used to qualify our previous bubbles as reflecting real economic well-being. Pundit amnesia is everywhere, from celebration of the recent accounting-trick profit turnaround at our largest banks, to continuing acceptance of an economy driven by consumer spending, to gauging recovery by upticks in the amount of crap we'll buy and debt we'll go into to buy it. Some of global capitalism's most pernicious ideological scaffolding is still very much intact.
Take a look under the hood, and the machinery is still shot to hell -- and getting worse. The unemployment rate isn't returning to normal anytime soon -- and then there's the sky-high "misery rate," which takes into account the higher number of people who are underemployed or who have just plain given up looking. The uptick on Wall Street and celebrations at Jackson Hole certainly don't change the fact that our economy is increasingly based around services -- a smallish number of swank jobs at the high end, and a plethora of dead-end, minimum wage work on the low. The return of financial wealth by no means implies there will suddenly be working-class careers in the United States again. Indeed, the recession may just further eviscerate our manufacturing base. Without new manufacturing, the jobs will continue to be few and crappy.
In addition to continued economic pain, the imagined recovery also carries disquieting political risks. If Washington and Wall Street, auguring prosperity from stock indexes and earnings reports, prematurely celebrate a recovery, then the anti-bailout, anti-bonus fury of the past winter may reemerge -- and bear down upon Obama. Let's just hope there is a coherent and progressive political movement to channel this anger in a positive direction; if not, the reactionary outbursts of recent weeks might only be the beginning of a frenzy of good-old fashioned, misdirected and far-ranging American fury. The insurance and drug industries aren't leading the town hall fracas: this is a sweeping, unruly discontentment of the sort that fuels the ugliest forms of right-wing populism.