Too strong? Not really. As The Economist has recently argued--though in the face of many angry readers--the jobs lost are mainly a cyclical affair, not a structural one. They must also be set against the 24 million new jobs created during the 1990s. Certainly, the slow pace of job-creation today is without precedent, but so were the conditions that conspired to slow a booming economy at the beginning of the decade. A stock market bubble burst, and rampant business investment slumped. Then, when the economy was down, terrorist attacks were followed by a spate of scandals that undermined public trust in the way companies were run. These acted as powerful headwinds and, in the face of them, the last recession was remarkably mild. By the same token, the recovery is mild, too. Still, in the next year or so, today's high productivity growth will start to translate into more jobs. Whether that is in time for Mr. Bush is another matter.
As for outsourcing, it is implausible now, as Lawrence Katz at Harvard University argues, to think that outsourcing has profoundly changed the structure of the American economy over just the past three or four years. After all, outsourcing was in full swing--both in manufacturing and in services--throughout the job-creating 1990s. Government statisticians reckon that outsourced jobs are responsible for well under 1% of those signed up as unemployed. And the jobs lost to outsourcing pale in comparison with the number of jobs lost and created each month at home.
It seems that in the eyes of many Americans their unemployment is caused by ______.
A. the economic recession in November 2001
B. the forecasts of George Bush's economists
C. the flow of job chances into developing countries
D. the rich natural resources in China and India
The bill approved last week shows that the Americans ______.
A. have been carried away with their fear of the gloomy employment prospect
B. will be able to deliver more money than value to the taxpayers
C. decide that they would lay more emphasis on value than money
D. are becoming very curious about the government's outsourcing contracts
According to the conservative theory, wage inequality is necessary because ______.
A. it is a condition created by the labor market
B. there is an overall decline in the world's economy
C. technological innovation has not produced the desired result
D. the number of people on welfare has decreased
According to the passage, Galbraith's book ______.
A. is devoted to analyzing why economic boom usually goes with wage inequality
B. reviews the dominant neoclassical economic discourse of our time
C. recommend resolving the present problem by neoconservative social policy
D. attributes the present increasing wage inequality to several factors