The Best Job Creation Strategy.
Job
creation has always been important, of course, but with relative prosperity
and global ongoing economic development, policy makers may not have focused
on it with the concentrated attention that is now required, as the global
economy is rapidly spiraling into a major downturn.
Unfortunately,
government leaders and policy makers are placing their emphasis on other
issues rather than job creation. This is a big mistake.
Urgency and Renewed Focus
The
economic situation demands urgency and job creation should be the focus.
The reason that job creation should be the primary focus of economic policy
is because the process of natural job creation contains the seeds of economic
prosperity.
By
applying what we know about job creation (and we know pretty much everything
we need to know), we can formulate an economic strategy that will in fact
be most likely to help prevent economic disaster and certainly will mitigate
the effects of a deep recession.
In
other words, the best job creation strategy is also the best economic
strategy to address the current situation because that's where economic
systems are best leveraged!
Best Policy Basics: Needed Reminder
Ideally,
policy should be based on science, not politics or whim, especially not
when the lives of so many people are being threatened. In practice, the
policy process is often chaotic and decisions are made on the basis of
varied kinds of emotional and mental attachments.
Therefore,
it is useful to remind leaders and policy makers that every policy process
has or should have five basic parts as that may help them be more systematic.
Problem
Analysis =>
Policy Formulation =>
Policy Implementation =>
Policy Evaluation =>
Policy Accountability
If
any part of the process contains errors, the whole system is affected,
but problem analysis is especially critical because it is the basis for
identifying and defining the system that a policy is supposed to address.
For example, in the current economic crisis:
- If job creation
is the goal, then policy makers are not analyzing "the problem"
correctly.
- If economic
prosperity is the goal, policy makers are not analyzing the right
problem either.
Note:
The basic fact is that political leaders tend to operate in "political
mode" and/or "emergency mode" and pretty much forget
about the policy making process as a deliberative, scientific mode.
It happened after 9/11, with the Iraq war, and is happening now. Of
course, everybody ends up paying the price for that, which is why
politicians are reviled as a group.
To
re-iterate, in economic policy the foremost goal should be job creation.
That should be the focus of the policy process, and additionally, in new
circumstances, it should be looked at with creativity and innovation in
mind.
Outside-The-Box
Policy Making
In
the midst of a new crisis, policy makers tend to rely on their (inappropriate)
experiences and historical response patterns. The term "groupthink"
was invented to describe this phenomenon.
Unfortunately,
crises usually require exactly opposite response patterns, so called "outside-the-box"
solutions. An outside-the-box solution require an outside-the-box problem
analysis, and that is what is not being done with the current economic
crisis.
We
have to formulate an "outside-the-box" job creation strategy,
based on facts and knowledge, and develop a plan that can be implemented
quickly with widespread, effective mobilization of existing resources.
This
web site is intended to be a contribution toward such an effort.
Be
sure to read the blog page
and participate in the discussion.
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The
Jobs Problem Simplified