[kyllo]

IF that job last longer than 20 years and the salary increases at least in pace with inflation, then why is that so stupid? It's no stupider than a home mortgage lender spending $1,000,000 to create a $5,000/month 30-year mortgage...

[caseysoftware]

The salary increases don't have to keep pace with inflation... they need to keep pace with the interest rate on the $1M which is generally going to be higher than the inflation rate.

Regardless, that's an interesting perspective. My follow up would be "do you think the government is well-informed and future-thinking enough to pick the jobs with 20+ year lifespans?"

Personally, I don't think anyone is. Ten years ago, Microsoft was nearly unbeatable, Google hadn't IPO'd, Facebook didn't exist, and Apple was still a bit player. Ten years from now, who knows what it will look like.

(Granted, that's one field.. but outside of tech, the home construction market was the other boom.)

[kyllo]

Yeah, the thing about investing in job creation is that there is so much churn in the job market--not just in terms of employment rate, but in terms of the jobs themselves being created and destroyed, as we figure out how to use technology to automate them.

And I'd like to point out that just because that hypothetical job being created pays $50,000 per year, doesn't mean it only contributes that amount of value to the economy.

But you certainly wouldn't want to bet on any job that is repetitive (or "concave" to use a michaelochurch-ism) being around longer than a few years, because that work will be distilled into a software program and handed off to a machine sooner or later. It only makes sense to invest in creating jobs that involve creative, "convex" work, which has a smaller chance at a bigger payoff in terms of value creation.

[laughfactory]

If the interest rate on the $1M is 2% then each year the "cost" of the $50,000/yr job is $20,000. So even if we don't factor in inflation (which would certainly change these calculations), it would take more than 33 years to "pay off" the $1M. You'd have to have someone work well over 33 years at $50,000 to recoup much return on your initial investment of $1M. Besides which, as you pointed out, a lot can happen in 33 years...how many jobs remain today that were around 33 years ago? Some of them, certainly, but many of the current crop of high paying jobs have been created in the last 10-20 years by innovation occurring organically in the private sector.

[kyllo]

This is again assuming that the person who fills that $50k/year job contributes exactly $50k/year in value to the economy.

And at some point, when you are talking about investing public funds to create jobs in a period of high unemployment, you need to think of it in terms of subtracting the cost of that person's potential unemployment benefits, medicaid, and other costs that an unemployed person imposes on the public.

So, it's kind of complicated to do a full cost/benefit analysis of this.

[tunesmith]

It stuns me that you think the government doesn't do this. Arpanet, medical research, technological research, the list is endless.

[kyllo]

Yeah, this is all convex, creative/research work with a small chance of a huge payoff in terms of value creation. Companies focused on quarterly earnings won't invest in this sort of R&D type work anymore, so the government has to.