Of late we’ve been hearing a lot about an economic recovery. No one seems to know exactly when this might come to pass, but those who think it might happen soon all seem to agree it will be a “jobless recovery.” The economy will start to grow again, in other words, but for a variety of reasons this will not occur in tandem with a lot of presently unemployed people going back to work.
In thinking about such a state of affairs, I was at first totally confused. The two words “jobless” and “recovery” didn’t seem to have any business joined together in a single phrase. If more people aren’t working they aren’t buying, and those who still have jobs will likely save rather than shop because they’re afraid of losing their own posts. So if people aren’t buying, aren’t shopping, and 70 percent of the economy is based on such consumption, how could there be a “recovery?”
Then it dawned on me that perhaps “jobless recovery” is a kind of economic koan—a koan being a technique employed by Zen Buddhist teachers to help their students move closer to true understanding. A koan is a nonsensical riddle with no answer, like the famous: what is the sound of one hand clapping? You meditate on this nonsensical statement long and hard enough and maybe, just maybe, a flash of wisdom is bestowed.
So I meditated on the phrase “jobless recovery” long and hard. And sure enough, there was this blinding flash and at last I understood.
For my entire life as a business, financial and economic writer, I had believed there was a relationship, not always exact but always somehow there, between what economists and market watchers called “the economy” and the economic reality of most people’s lives. But the meditative wisdom spawned by focusing on the “jobless recovery” koan enriched my understanding, and I realized that these days the two are related hardly at all.
Markets can now levitate on clouds of institutional investors playing with a lot of OPM, on analyst blather, and on scads of new greenbacks churned out by Treasury printing presses. Corporate profits can increase on the savings realized by laying off more and more workers while making survivors work longer and harder for less. Add in a few numbers from the Labor Department and private bean counting organizations that can be interpreted in positive ways and lo! An economic recovery! The same number of folks languishing in the economic doldrums need not be acknowledged at all in this computation.
So now I, too, believe, that we are headed for a recovery in the near future, a jobless recovery. Wall Street will smug along happily. Government types will boast of their achievement. As for the rest of us, well, our role will simply be to cheer that which brings us no relief or cheer at all.