Eideard

It’s no secret that the rise of smartphones, tablets and social networking has fostered an entirely new market for app developers, but a freshly released study has now attempted to quantify this impact, in terms of real jobs.

According to TechNet, a bipartisan network of tech execs, the so-called “App Economy” has created an estimated 466,000 jobs since 2007, when the iPhone was first unveiled.

The report specifies that this estimate includes all jobs at Facebook-focused companies like Zynga, as well as dev gigs at Amazon, AT&T and Electronic Arts, in addition to the obvious heavyweights, Apple and Google.

As far as geography goes, California leads the way as the most app-friendly state, though New York City tops the list of metropolitan areas. It’s not an entirely bi-coastal affair, though, with some two-thirds of all app-related jobs located outside of California and New York.

TechNet acknowledges that the App Economy “is only four years old and extremely fluid,” so it’s likely that these numbers will fluctuate in the years to come, though the organization says these numbers underscore a fundamental principle: “Innovation creates jobs, and in this case, lots of them.”

You can read the full report at technet.org.

And don’t get your shorts bunched figuring the numbers are going to diminish or decline. When it comes to the predominance of the mobile web – you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

Just part of cultural history – Kelpies – sculpture

A pioneering police division has cut serious violent crime by a record 20% by identifying and tackling specific “problem families” and helping to find jobs for young people in trouble.

Police in North Lanarkshire have identified the most prolific problem families in different council wards and used a combination of persuasion and compulsion to get young people into work, sport and training.

The new figures from the police division show there have been 90 fewer victims of serious assault in the past year – with estimated savings of £2 million for the police and NHS…

Divisional Commander Chief Superintendent Graham Cairns said: “We know that a small number of people are responsible for most of our crime.

“By mapping out diversionary activities and connecting kids into ongoing activities that interest them we have reduced youth disorder by 43% in the last two years and that is massive. We cut serious assaults by 20% last year and they are down a further 14% so far this financial year…overall violence has been cut by 22% and that includes murder and attempted murder.

“We ran a Pathfinder initiative for kids who are emerging on our radar and we work with them over consecutive months before going on an outward-bound weekend with them.

“They get to know the cops and we get to know them, but they also get to break down barriers with the other local kids whom they perhaps saw as a threat…As an extension of this we have now had meetings with employability agencies and are trying to connect those kids into training for employment.

“Some kids come from families with maybe three generations of worklessness and if we are to break that cycle then we have to be proactive in doing it.

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About 10,000 opponents of a proposed pipeline for carrying oil from Canada to the Gulf Coast surrounded the White House on Sunday – exactly a year before the 2012 election – seeking to pressure President Barack Obama to reject the project.

If approved, the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline, to be built by Calgary-based TransCanada Corp., would carry crude from the tar sands region in Alberta to Gulf Coast refineries in Texas, passing through six states.

Supporters such as oil industry groups and some labor unions say the pipeline would reduce U.S. reliance on oil from the volatile Mideast and create 20,000 jobs in a U.S. economy that desperately needs the boost.

Environmental groups despise the project and call it a needlessly risky method of producing dirty energy. They say the pipeline could leak, endangering drinking water. They say extracting the thick crude from tar sands is itself a greenhouse-gas producing, wasteful process. And they say the promise of jobs is a false one, claiming it would produce only about 6,000 temporary jobs…

The Keystone decision poses a political dilemma for Obama, with an approaching election that likely will hinge on the economy. He will inevitably anger one of his constituencies – either the unions supporting the project or environmentalists and others opposing it.

The Obama administration must issue a permit to approve Keystone because it would cross the U.S.-Canada border. Though Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has said she’s “inclined” to approve the project, the final verdict rests with Obama, who recently said he will wait until after the State Department finishes its review of the proposal.

I support a couple of the environmental groups involved in this political battle. Doesn’t mean I think they’re completely in the right. When they stretch facts and presume statistical likelihoods of pipeline failure, oil spills resulting from pipelines transiting the United States north-to-south, they haven’t a leg to stand on. The number of failures in the lower 48 over the decades [and miles] of pipeline is negligible.

The issue has to be decided on sound environmental practices. Whether or not you can have confidence on both governments doing the right thing on behalf of citizens of both countries? Can they be trusted to work to standards sufficiently high to protect the environment in Canada and the United States?

Last month President Obama finally unveiled a serious economic stimulus plan — far short of what I’d like to see, but a step in the right direction. Republicans, predictably, have blocked it. But the new plan, combined with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, seems to have shifted the national conversation. We are, suddenly, focused on what we should have been talking about all along: jobs.

So what is the G.O.P. jobs plan? The answer, in large part, is to allow more pollution. So what you need to know is that weakening environmental regulations would do little to create jobs and would make us both poorer and sicker…

Do you really need that explained to you? Are you as delusional as the Republican Party?

The important thing to understand is that the case for pollution control isn’t based on some kind of aesthetic distaste for industrial society. Pollution does real, measurable damage, especially to human health.

And policy makers should take that damage into account. We need more politicians like the courageous governor who supported environmental controls on a coal-fired power plant, despite warnings that the plant might be closed, because “I will not create jobs or hold jobs that kill people.”

Actually, that was Mitt Romney, back in 2003 — the same politician who now demands that we use more coal.

How big are these damages? A new study by researchers at Yale and Middlebury College brings together data from a variety of sources to put a dollar value on the environmental damage various industries inflict. The estimates are far from comprehensive, since they only consider air pollution…

For it turns out that there are a number of industries inflicting environmental damage that’s worth more than the sum of the wages they pay and the profits they earn — which means, in effect, that they destroy value rather than create it. High on the list, by the way, is coal-fired electricity generation, which the Mitt Romney-that-was used to stand up to.

As the study’s authors say, finding that an industry inflicts large environmental damage compared with its apparent economic return doesn’t necessarily mean that the industry should be shut down. What it means, instead, is that “the regulated levels of emissions from the industry are too high.” That is, environmental regulations aren’t strict enough.

Republicans ignore studies like that, the overwhelming body of industrial environment studies, BTW. Why start letting facts get in the way of profits for their largest contributors? Mining, power production industries are among the largest contributors to congressional Republicans. Simple-minded politicians who live the country-club life.

Their families, their kids are OK, Jack. The rest of us can go scramble for clean air and clean water whether we can afford it or not. There hasn’t been a Republican in office that I can recall fighting against pollution since that era before Ronald Reagan. Someone like that certainly wouldn’t be supported by today’s RNC or the KoolAid Party.

“We’re going to cooperate with who?”
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Those who said after President Barack Obama’s speech last week to Congress that government does not create wealth, does not create jobs and cannot stimulate the economy spoke nonsense. So do those who say that only private business creates wealth, as if any revenue going to taxes destroys wealth.

Adam Smith, who figured out market capitalism in his 1776 book “The Wealth of Nations,” could set them straight. We have plenty of equally competent economists who understand these issues today. They just do not get the attention that the news media lavish on high-profile politicians and pundits who speak with absolute certainty on matters about which their words show they know nothing.

So why are politicians and commentators who speak economic nonsense treated as sages? And why do so many journalists uncritically repeat their nonsense?

Sadly, the answer is that too few people in public life understand economics, numbers or algebra. Too few people learned, or remember, the crucial concept underlying matters of economics and finance known as accounting identities.

Accounting identities are statements that must be true no matter how you arrange the components. Thus 2+1=3 just as 3-1=2. Likewise, net worth equals assets minus liabilities just as assets equal liabilities plus net worth and profits equal revenue minus costs. But water plus flour does not equal steak.

In economics, Gross Domestic Product equals consumer spending plus government spending plus investment plus the net of exports and imports. Or in its simplest form: Spending = Output = Income.

Economics is like a circle, as Smith figured out 235 years ago. More spending by government creates jobs, whether at war plants making smart bombs, dredging ports so cargo moves efficiently or stimulating the gray matter between young ears to create productive adults. Bombs ultimately destroy value, while ports and education add value.

Now…consider these statements by three prominent Republican lawmakers:

“We need to cut spending now in order to create jobs in America” — House Speaker John Boehner on the floor of the House of Representatives in July 2010. “If government spending would stimulate the economy, we’d be in the middle of a boom” — Senator Mitch McConnell in March 2011. “Government doesn’t create jobs, you do” — Representative Nan Hayworth, M.D., speaking in January to business leaders in her New York district.

None of the comments makes sense. The first violates the accounting identity that spending equals income. The second assumes that the stimulus was big enough to make up for the fall in private sector jobs, when it was less than half what accounting identity algebra showed was needed. The third is just plain nonsense…

RTFA for a tad bit more Economics 101. I’m not going to turn this blog into an economics and history course. But, if you watched business news on business news channels – instead of the news as entertainment channels – you’d bump into a fair number of economists. Yes, there are a few who care more for ideology than history. Damned few compared to the clowns in Congress or the patent leather pundits on TV or cluttering up the Web.

Dissent from people like the Republicans and their Tea Party brown shirts – is generally of the “Hoover was right, screw the working people and The South will rise again!”

Why negotiate with terrorists?

These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took…

America’s real crisis is not a debt crisis. It’s an unemployment crisis. Yet this agreement not only doesn’t address unemployment, it’s guaranteed to make it worse. (Incredibly, the Democrats even abandoned their demand for extended unemployment benefits as part of the deal.) As Mohamed El-Erian, the chief executive of the bond investment firm Pimco, told me, fiscal policy includes both a numerator and a denominator. “The numerator is debt,” he said. “But the denominator is growth.” He added, “What we have done is accelerate forward, in a self-inflicted manner, the numerator. And, in the process, we have undermined the denominator.”…The spending cuts will shrink growth and raise the likelihood of pushing the country back into recession.

Inflicting more pain on their countrymen doesn’t much bother the Tea Party Republicans, as they’ve repeatedly proved. What is astonishing is that both the president and House speaker are claiming that the deal will help the economy. Do they really expect us to buy that? We’ve all heard what happened in 1937 when Franklin Roosevelt, believing the Depression was over, tried to rein in federal spending. Cutting spending spiraled the country right back into the Great Depression, where it stayed until the arrival of the stimulus package known as World War II. That’s the path we’re now on. Our enemies could not have designed a better plan to weaken the American economy than this debt-ceiling deal…

My own view is that Obama should have played the 14th Amendment card, using its language about “the validity of the public debt” to unilaterally raise the debt ceiling. Yes, he would have infuriated the Republicans, but so what? They already view him as the Antichrist. Legal scholars believe that Congress would not have been able to sue to overturn his decision. Inexplicably, he chose instead a course of action that maximized the leverage of the Republican extremists…

As has been explained ad nauseam, the threat of defense cuts is supposed to give the Republicans an incentive to play fair with the Democrats in the negotiations. But with our soldiers still fighting in Afghanistan, which side is going to blink if the proposed cuts threaten to damage national security? Just as they did with the much-loathed bank bailout, which most Republicans spurned even though financial calamity loomed, the Democrats will do the responsible thing. Apparently, that’s their problem.

For now, the Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests. But rest assured: They’ll have them on again soon enough. After all, they’ve gotten so much encouragement.

And they don’t give a damn how many Americans have to commit suicide to satisfy their crusade.

Thanks, Helen

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

When it comes to jobs, the hypocrisy of Republicans is working overtime.

They don’t think Barack Obama deserves any credit for creating even a sliver of new jobs, arguing that it’s the private sector, not the president, who has power of the nation’s economy.

But boy, are they giddy over Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who they say deserves all the credit in the world for singlehandedly creating new jobs in the Lone Star State. So, we are told, presidents don’t create jobs but governors do — especially if they’re in your party and thinking about running for president…

First, I should say that despite my better judgment, I like Rick Perry. I disagree with some of his politics, and I think a lot of what he says and does is just political theater designed to sell his favorite product: Rick Perry…

Up close, his secret weapon is that quality that Bill Clinton possessed — the ability to lock in on someone and make him feel as if he is the only person in the room. It’s one of the reasons that I’d like to see Perry run for president…

But none of that seems to matter much to his Republican supporters around the country. For them, Perry’s major selling points are jobs, jobs and more jobs. Many of those who are pushing Perry to enter the presidential race are fiscal conservatives who think his No. 1 asset is that Texas has been on a rampage for the past 10 years creating jobs and luring companies away from states such as New York and California.

The jobs are real enough. The Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas recently estimated that, since June 2009, Texas has produced about 37% of the new jobs in the country. Perry claims the figure is closer to 48%. Either way, it’s impressive.

It is no wonder that, according to data recently released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Texas has now become the second-largest economy in the United States. It displaced New York, and it seems to be closing in on California. Texas now represents 8.3% of the entire U.S. economy…

But, as long we’re being honest, we ought to acknowledge that there is another, not often talked about, dimension to the Texas Economic Miracle…

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It was the British economist John Maynard Keynes who famously wrote that ideas, “both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.” Right now, I’m worried about the damage that might be done by one particularly wrong-headed idea: the notion that, in stark contrast to Keynes’s teaching, government spending destroys jobs.

No, that’s not a typo. House Speaker John Boehner and other Republicans regularly rail against “job-killing government spending.” Think about that for a minute. The claim is that employment actually declines when federal spending rises. Using the same illogic, employment should soar if we made massive cuts in public spending—as some are advocating right now…

It is easy, but irrelevant, to understand how someone might object to any particular item in the federal budget—whether it is the war in Afghanistan, ethanol subsidies, Social Security benefits, or building bridges to nowhere. But even building bridges to nowhere would create jobs, not destroy them, as the congressman from nowhere knows. To be sure, that is not a valid argument for building them…

For example, the large fiscal stimulus enacted in 2009 was not “paid for.” Yet it has been claimed that it created essentially no jobs. Really? With spending under the Recovery Act exceeding $600 billion (and tax cuts exceeding $200 billion), that would be quite a trick…In fact, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, the stimulus’s effect on employment in 2010 was at least 1.3 million net new jobs, and perhaps as many as 3.3 million…

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Massachusetts’ technology sector is fueling strong growth, helping the state’s economy expand more than twice as fast as the nation’s in the first three months of this year, the University of Massachusetts reported yesterday.

Global demand for technology products and increased business spending on software and equipment have provided a strong boost in Massachusetts, which has a high concentration of companies that sell high-tech equipment, components, and services, particularly to other businesses…

“It’s the reason we have a stronger economy than the country as a whole,’’ lan Clayton-Matthews said. “We export a lot of science and technology-based goods and services to other countries around the world, especially developing countries like China and India.’’

The global tech boom helped the Massachusetts economy grow at a 4.2 percent annual rate, accelerating from 3.3 percent in the last quarter of 2010, UMass said. The US economy expanded at a 1.8 percent rate in the first quarter, after growing at a 3.1 percent rate the previous period, the Commerce Department reported yesterday.

In March, the state’s 8 percent unemployment rate, though historically high, remained well below the national rate of 8.8 percent.

Reflecting technology’s strength, some Massachusetts companies are fiercely competing for skilled workers, offering cash bounties to find them…

The same is happening on an even larger scale in Silicon Valley. Growth and expansion there requires another 150,000 staff and local sources can’t provide for the situation.

I note this – as I have been for years – that college-level education in one or another arena of technical prowess is what should be recommended to those with any apparent talent, a bent for geek adventure and economics. Ain’t nothing wrong with being overqualified until the right job happens along.

Good news, college grads: the entry-level job market is the best it has been in three years — but you may have to settle for less money and a position outside your preferred career path, a new report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas shows.

“There’s lots of positive news out there, and we’re finally seeing some significant job creation,” says John Challenger, chief executive officer. But before you start daydreaming about the corner office, he adds one caveat: The job market isn’t what it used to be, and it may not provide the “ideal job situation” for everyone…

“There’s still a long way to go, but I think it’s going to be a much better year for graduates than it was two years ago,” says Challenger…

…New grads have two advantages that their older peers don’t, Challenger says: For starters, the next generation of workers are a “blank slate,” allowing potential employers to influence their skills and work habits. Secondly, they’re flexible.

“I think a lot of companies are looking for people who can go where the work is and give up some of their work-life balance to find a role they want,” says Challenger. “Companies need flexibility in their workplace.”

On the flipside, new grads aren’t just competing with their classmates — they’re also going toe-to-toe with those who graduated three or four years ago and still haven’t landed their ideal job. “These are people who have experience to add to their job candidacy — they’re out there fighting to land the job they didn’t get when they left school,” Challenger says.

So where are the jobs? Research from job search website Indeed.com shows the outlook is particularly good for recent grads looking for careers in healthcare (physical therapists, registered nurses and physician assistants) and information technology (software engineers, network administrators). In fact, job postings have climbed 53 percent overall from March 2010 to March 2011, Indeed finds.

Even more encouraging, competition for jobs in the 50 largest metro areas has improved significantly, with nine cities now having one online job posting per unemployed person.

Encouraging info. And the Prism blog at Reuters is one of the shiny features brightening the scene at one of the world’s oldest and most professional news services.

RTFA for the numbers behind the analysis.