William J. Holstein

What Recovery?
Jan. 9--The newspapers are filled with articles about "the recovery," whether it will be u-shaped or v-shaped or w-shaped, or whatever letter of the alphabet that you like. There is a consistent emphasis on the theme that the U.S. economy is "recovering" and we just have to wait for it to start feeling better.

I'm not sure I buy it, and the latest headlines showing that employers cut another 85,000 jobs in December certainly fuel my skepticism. We all know that unemployment is about 10 percent, but if you add in the people who have quit job hunting because they are so discouraged, the number is really about 17 percent. That's disastrous.

As I have argued in the past and will argue again in "The Next American Economy," it's a dangerous myth to conclude that we can simply sit back and wait for "recovery." We need a conscious national strategy to allow our ideas and technologies to blossom into new industries in solar and wind energy, advanced robotics, lithium ion batteries, new materials, smart grids and the like. We also need to continue the transformation of our older industries, like autos. There's precious little that the federal government can do in the short term to attack the fundamentals of what is destroying jobs. Stimulus spending will eventually run out. We need a national focus on the structure of our economy, not just on a cyclical recovery.