Everyone is at it — Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, the G-7, the United Nations. All are in the business of “creating” green jobs.
Johnson wants 250,000 of them, to be “created” by clean energy technologies.
Biden promises no fewer than 10 million. Everything, I guess, is bigger in America.
Bigger still, though, is the logical flaw in their arguments. Indeed, it is so vast and so obvious that it is a wonder anyone takes them seriously. Do I really need to spell this out? Governments cannot “create” jobs — at least, not without destroying other jobs.
The state could, if it wanted, pay people to dig holes and fill them in again. But, to cover their wages, it would need to take the money from other people.
Some of those people would have spent the cash on hiring others. All would have used it to buy things, thereby calling more jobs into existence.
These jobs, not depending on state largesse but upon meeting spontaneous market demand, would have been more productive.
“There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one,” wrote the great French economist Frederic Bastiat. “The bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.”
Bastiat illustrated his point by imagining the effects of smashing a shop window. The shopkeeper would have to pay a glazier to replace it. The glazier would then have extra money to buy a new pair of shoes, the cobbler would be better off, and so on.
So why can’t a country make itself rich by hiring little boys to go around smashing shop windows? Because of the unseen costs. The shopkeeper would otherwise have had more money to invest in improving his shop, the glazier may have had to turn down another job, and so forth.
“Green jobs,” indeed, any jobs maintained by government intervention, necessarily work on the same principle. Each job is sustained with cash diverted from a more productive part of the economy. If this were not so, there would be no need for any legislation because investors would already be piling in.
Note that these costs are separate from the economic effects of more expensive energy. The fall in costs as we moved from candles to gas to electricity is arguably the single greatest factor in the increase of global living standards.
As the science writer Matt Ridley puts it, “Energy is not just another sector of the economy, it is the thermodynamic lifeblood of prosperity.” Making people work longer hours to afford the same quantum of heat and light will leave them palpably poorer.
But let’s put all that to one side and concentrate on the basic fallacy of the green jobs argument. It is this: Jobs are not a benefit. They are a cost.
Suppose that instead of “creating” 10 million green jobs, we left it to the market to produce power as cheaply and efficiently as possible.
Suppose that, in the absence of Biden’s regulations, a million people could generate the same amount of power from sources that have low labor requirements.
Shale, for example, employs very few people once the initial drilling has been done. Can we all agree that it would be better for the economy if a million people generated the power, releasing the other nine million to do other things?
But the idea that efficiencies raise living standards turns out to be very difficult to explain. When agriculture was being mechanized, our ancestors fretted that there would be mass unemployment.
They did not foresee that released from drudgery in the fields, farmhands would find better-paid jobs in factories. As Bastiat would put it, our ancestors confined themselves to the visible effect.
When we moved from manufacturing to services, precisely the same fears were voiced. People did not see service-sector jobs as real or solid, and again, they worried about mass unemployment. Again, they were wrong.
Released from the factories, people began to offer services that had never previously been imagined — as personal trainers, aromatherapists, and a million other things.
The story of human progress is the story of making more things with less labor. The easiest way to understand economic growth is that it means we can work shorter hours without any material loss. As stuff gets cheaper, we live better.
Top photo by Science in HD via Unsplash
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There were two studies in the early 2000’s about green jobs. One was in Spain and I don’t remember where the other was. One concluded that for every green job created, 2.7 traditional jobs were lost. The other was 2.3 jobs lost for every green job.
When liberals do a count of “green jobs” they are far from honest. Anyone working for a transit system or cab company is counted as having a “green job.” Though the use of such systems many reduce emissions, these jobs have always existed and are not what most people think of as a green job.
Environmentalists and the left love their slogans, but I’ve a slogan that is closer to reality than any of theirs.
“Expensive energy is expensive everything.”
This article alludes to it but it’s something that hasn’t been fully understood by the vast majority of people and that is that cheap, available, efficient and on demand energy is the core of modern civilization. Many of us would not be alive today if it weren’t for the industrial revolution and the cheap and efficient energy that so called fossil fuels provided. These modern doomsday cultist environmentalists have demonized industrialization and the hydrocarbon fuels that have freed the ordinary people from the short and miserable lives of subsistence agriculture and allowed a large portion of humanity to live longer with a level of food security and freedom not ever seen before throughout history. These environmentalists are very privileged people and their privilege has come from the very things they wish to destroy both capitalism and the use of hydrocarbon fuels. If these people get their way within a decade the western world would see poverty on a level that we haven’t seen since the great depression, because the cost of every type of goods and services would have skyrocketed due to expensive and inefficient energy sources.
You have to wonder what their lives would look like if they got their wishes? If it actually came about their lives and livelihoods would also be destroyed because there would be nobody to provide the products and services that they are used to. And given that at this point most wealth that anybody has is based on the fact that it is expected that those companies can actually produce products and services that people can afford to buy. The end result is they will be as poor as everyone else but unlike those who actually know how to grow food and hunt they are ill equipped to survive. Sucks to be them!
The issue at the heart of the Greens’ ideology is to DE-industrialize and ‘re-wild’. That is the reason they have vilified carbon dioxide BECAUSE this gas is emitted when cheap energy is burnt (at home, in power stations, on farms, wherever coal, oil or gas are used independently or to produce electricity.) The politicians and much of the public in the US and Europe have irrationally swallowed the lie that carbon dioxide emissions ruin the planet. Carbon dioxide will never ruin the planet but the activists think that’s a good way to sell their plot to DE-industrialize and ‘rewild.’
The Green Jobs just another idiotic idea dreamed up by a whole bunch of Nit-Wits who are hooked on the wacky weed and watching Gore and DiCaorios fake Documentries