Subject: Jobs and Bathtub Model

Posted by Richard Turnock on 12/11/2008

Message:

Seems to me that the Obama administration has not calculated the dynamics of the workforce accurately.
They say:
• “Invest in a clean energy economy and create 5 million new green jobs” over the next 10 years
• create 2.5 million jobs over the next two years

There are between 125,000 and 150,000 additional people looking for work each month, besides the ones becoming unemployed each month. Both the number of unemployed persons (10.3 million) and the unemployment rate (6.7 percent) continued to increase in November.

I don’t have a working SD model of employment. This would seem like an opportunity to make SD modeling visible to more people and contribute, hopefully in a constructive way, to the conversation encouraged by Obama’s Transition Team ( www.change.gov ).

If 125,000 people (NET=new less those that stop looking for work) enter the workforce each month over 2 years, that’s 3 million new jobs needed. We need a jobs program that adds enough new jobs to meet future demand as well as put the unemployed, now and over the near term, back to work. Economists have technical terms and definitions for types of unemployment, causes and effects of intervention. But what about a simple model to explain to the President-elect that they need to have a bigger number of new jobs created?

Richard

Follow Ups:

Jobs and Bathtub Model - Jack Harich 12/11/2008