Wisconsin got some mixed news on jobs this week.  The good news is that the newly released federal figures confirm the Walker Administration’s contention that there was net growth of more than 37,000 private sector jobs over the 12-month period from April 2011 through March of this year.   The bad news is that those Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers reinforce what many others have contended – that no matter which source of jobs data one uses, Wisconsin is lagging well behind the national rate of job growth.

Analyzing job numbers is generally a topic I tackle on the Wisconsin Budget Project Blog (see, for example, this June 28 post), but since we’re in the process of rebuilding the Budget Project website this week, I’ll share my thoughts on the job figures on this blog.

A good Journal Sentinel article by Paul Gores provides some interesting perspectives on the new data. Both his article and Mike Ivey’s in the Capital Times do a good job of going beyond the Dept. of Workforce Development press release and pointing out that Wisconsin’s job growth has been well below the national average and the growth in all or our neighboring states. The state’s net growth of 1.1% or about 28,000 total jobs (in the private and public sectors combined), was lower than all but 7 other states.In addition, the economists Gores interviewed make a couple of other interesting observations:

• Abdur Chowdhury, chairman of the economics department at Marquette, suggested that our state’s efforts are too concentrated on attracting more manufacturing jobs, instead of jobs in faster-growing sectors, such as information technology, education, and health.
• Economist Clare Zempel, of Zempel Strategic in Fox Point, noted that Wisconsin may be lagging behind some of its neighbors because their economies are “more tied into the automobile or steel industries than Wisconsin,” and he expressed opposition to government efforts to provide stimulus for particular industries.

We have noted on a number of occasions that there is relatively little that states can do to stimulate job creation in the short run, other than engage in the zero-sum game of poaching jobs from other states. With that in mind, I think much of the political debate about job growth in Wisconsin is overblown; yet it’s impossible to put that debate aside when the Governor the issue such a large part of his campaign promises and continues to claim credit for whatever growth occurs.

Given that job growth will be driven primarily by national and international trends, and by the sorts of sectoral trends that Zempel referenced, I think politicians should be careful about claiming credit for employment increases in their state (and conversely, shouldn’t automatically be blamed for economic malaise).  However, if they do take credit for job increases, I think the correct metric to be used is whether a state can do better than the general national growth (and that perspective has not been favorable for the Walker Administration).

Looking ahead, I hope politicians will be less obsessed with job numbers and will focus more on the quality of the jobs that their economies will attract and support.   Over the long haul, state fiscal policy choices do gradually make a significant difference, and a state needs to decide whether it wants to adopt policies that achieve the sort of rapid growth in low-wage jobs achieved in Texas, or growth in high-wage jobs, like Massachusetts and Minnesota.

Let’s hope that politicians and the public can engage in a robust conversation about those choices.

Jon Peacock