Back tomorrow with a fresh DJ. As for today, I’m feeling rather green.
RALEIGH – Do you have a green-collar job?
As if things weren’t already confusing enough in the vocational-neckwear department, they just had to go and add another category. The whole business started with the familiar distinction between white-collar managerial or professional jobs and blue-collar laborers, an archaic one that ignored the sartorial reality of high-flying corporate execs dressed in teal, artsy professionals sporting chartreuse, and construction foremen clad in charcoal gray – not to mention “no-collar” software entrepreneurs playing ping-pong in t-shirts.
Then along came “pink-collar jobs,” low-paying positions to which women were supposedly relegated, and “gray-collar jobs,” referring to those held by older Americans who wouldn’t or couldn’t retire. Someone even wrote an entire 1985 book about “gold-collar workers,” defined as highly intelligent but averse to traditional corporate tracks and rules.
The latest rage is the green-collar job, popularly but not very precisely defined as devoted to work of an environmentally conscious nature. Politicians such as President Obama and our own Gov. Beverly Perdue have taken to promising to create multitudes of these green-collar jobs through new government regulations and taxes.
But there are some conceptual and practical problems with all this. How do you know whether your particular job creates a net environmental benefit? What if you work in an industry that recycles some of its inputs but consumes a lot of energy? What if you have a small carbon footprint but emit waste products that are difficult to bury, burn, or recycle? And how are policymakers to know whether taxing resources from one part of the economy to create “green jobs” in another is socially beneficial?
Four university researchers – Andrew Morriss, William Bogart, Andrew Dorchak, and Roger Meiners – decided to take a crack at answering some of these questions. Their research paper has just been published by the University of Illinois College of Law. The authors identify seven myths about green-collar employment, concluding that “the special interest groups promoting the idea of green jobs have embedded dubious assumptions and techniques within their analyses.”
Yes the authors said that “special interests” were behind the green-collar hype. Don’t be so shocked. There’s always someone behind these terminological fads – an author, journalist, huckster, or bailout-seeker – who stand to gain from their widespread acceptance.
Here are the seven key points made in the paper:
• No standard definition of a green job exists.
• Predictions of green-job creation include many administrative, clerical, and regulatory-compliance positions that have little to do with producing goods and services for production.
• Most predictions of green-job creation are fanciful, based on faulty economic models and dubious assumptions.
• By promoting more jobs instead of higher productivity, “green jobs” programs actually encourage low-wage employment in less desirable conditions.
• By discouraging workers in particular communities, states, and countries from focusing on what they are best at, “green jobs” programs will make people poorer, not wealthier.
• Government mandates are an ineffective means of encourage the efficient use of resources.
• Many of the technologies assumed in “green jobs” programs can’t be productively employed at the scale envisioned by their advocates.
Other than these small problems, green jobs are clearly the wave of the future – at least until someone invents purple-collar jobs, no doubt involving interplanetary travel, psychic phenomenon, or harnessing the awesome power of celebrity narcissism as an inexhaustible source of energy.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation