Economics isn’t a dismal science. But statistics sure can be.

Here’s an example, courtesy of economist Tyler Cowen writing in the Wall
Street Journal. “In a typical quarter of the year,” he writes, “about one in 13 jobs ends.”

Yikes.

But that’s just the statistic nearest at hand. Economists don’t stop there.
Cowen notes that recent research shows the positive effects, in the
aggregate, of job destruction. Job upgrading. “As workers lose jobs in one
niche or sector, they gain in another, moving on to better jobs and higher
pay,” He writes. That’s why “America is not becoming a nation of part-time
Wal-Mart cashiers or burger flippers.”

You probably suspected something like that. After all, if new jobs don’t get
created, in a few quarters we’d all be on the bread line.

One reason for the frequent panic over job numbers is that stats on new jobs
are harder to get and less reliable than un employment statistics. Why?
Because there are bureaucracies to help the newly unemployed, and those
bureaucracies report the stats we hear about so often. There are no
bureaucracies to help the newly employed.

But the government sure does ask a lot of questions on the census forms, and
that’s where the new study got its data, detailed in the new book “Economic
Turbulence: Is a Volatile Economy Good for America?”

Oh, and the answer to the title question is Yes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.