Do you want to know why Americans really were angry enough to elect Trump as President?
Well, here it is — from an academic report with the dull title “The Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States 1995-2015,” which was researched and written by economics professors from Harvard and Princeton.
Their conclusion: 94 percent of the job growth over the last 10 years occurred in “alternative work arrangements.”
What’s an “alternative work arrangement?” Those are people who aren’t really attached to a particular company. They are freelancers, or temporary workers, or on-call workers and contractors.
According to Professors Alan B. Krueger (Princeton) and Lawrence Katz (Harvard) these alternative jobs now make up 15.8 percent of the workforce compared to just 10.7 percent before the Great Recession of 2008.
Only 0.4 percent of the millions of new jobs — or about 500,000 — were traditional employment arrangements.
Both of these professors are also members of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the organization that decides when there is a recession in the US. So Krueger and Katz are both influential.
Here’s the funny part, if you can laugh at numbers like this. Just a few years ago Krueger served as the assistant secretary for economic policy for the Obama Administration and he was also chief economic for the President’s Council of Economic Advisors.
So, the Democrats shouldn’t have been surprised that jobs and the economy were going to be a major issue in the last election.
As I’ve said again and again, the economy is always very important in presidential elections. But the weakness in the job market made it the most important issue last year despite the fact that the candidates, and the media and the pundits were distracted by a lot of other admittedly entertaining stuff
