Justin Wolfers, NY Times - In the two hours that President-elect Donald J. Trump spent flying to Indiana on Thursday to boast that he saved 1,000 jobs, about 6,000 private-sector jobs in the United States were probably destroyed.
It’s a surprising statistic — one that speaks to the constant state of change in the labor market. My calculation is based on government data that shows that every three months roughly 6.7 million private-sector jobs are destroyed, which in an expanding labor market is offset by the creation of nearly 7.2 million jobs.
Over a full presidential term, more than 100 million jobs will be destroyed. Mr. Trump can’t expect to stanch much of that flow.
One lesson here is that Mr. Trump’s deal-cutting approach is wholly inadequate — and impractical — in view of the size of the American labor market. While the workers at Carrier benefited from Mr. Trump’s attention, the problem is that this approach doesn’t scale.
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