Stimulus Package Created Mostly Teaching Jobs
The best symbol of the $787 billion federal stimulus program turns out not to be a construction worker in a hard hat, but rather a classroom teacher saved from a layoff.
That's the latest news from the employment front. It seems that, of the over 600,000 jobs saved or created by the federal stimulus spending so far, over half have been in the field of education. For reasons this article explains, the figures are not entirely reliable, but the gist is correct (New York Times, 10/30/09). Obama's stimulus plan has so far benefited teachers and school administrators far more than anyone else.
Months ago, feminists were exultant that they had been able to convince the Obama administration to direct 42% of stimulus spending toward jobs held mostly by women despite the fact that some 80% of job losses had been incurred in male-dominated industries like construction and manufacturing. Now, apparently because of a time lag in actually spending stimulus money on construction, the lion's share of job creation has occurred in the female-dominated field of education. Some 89% of primary-school and 62% of secondary-school teachers in the United States are women.
Of course no one objects to job creation or retention in education. But in purely economic terms, service-sector jobs like education do little to create what Marx called surplus value. Construction and manufacturing do a lot to create surplus value. And it's surplus value that creates the standard of living to which we've become accustomed in the U.S. Stated another way, an economy that creates surplus value can then redistribute that wealth to those, like teachers, writers, musicians, doctors, etc., who don't create it themselves. If everyone in an economy were a teacher, economic activity would be a zero-sum game of swapping finite money among people. Surplus value expands the pie.
So while there's certainly nothing wrong with paying teachers, it doesn't contribute much to expanding surplus value. And that's what we need to do to get the economy rolling again. Any sensible stimulus program would concentrate on manufacturing and construction and activities related to them. That would expand the economy and everyone would benefit. So far we haven't done that.
As Monty Python says in The Meaning of Life, "I expect they'll get to that in the next bit."
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