The Birds and the Bees of Economics

Trump says more Americans are working than ever. There’s a remarkably intimate explanation.

If you watch Ali Velshi’s face in this clip, you’ll see the precise moment he realizes we won’t be having a conventional discussion about the labor market.

The claim in question: President Trump says there are more people working than ever before.

That’s not technically false. But it’s economically empty.

There are more Americans working because there are more Americans. That’s the entire analysis.

And yet, this claim gets repeated endlessly. And respectable (or at least respectably dressed) economists are asked to analyze it.

So when I’m asked why employment is at an all-time high, I return to first principles:

“When a mum and a dad love each other very much, they cuddle. Nine months later, a baby comes out. And 18 years later, we get a new worker. And if mums and dads like to cuddle enough, the population keeps growing… that’s the birds and the bees of economics.”

And nearly every president inherits the same bragging right:

“every president, almost every year in American history, has said we’ve got more jobs than we ever had before.”

The plain truth is, Trump is claiming credit for a trend whose true architects were feeling frisky in 2008. Or to put the matter in slightly less technical language:

the president keeps boasting about things that simply reflect the fact that people copulated 18 years earlier.

And that’s the moment Velshi’s polite smile becomes a mischievous grin: we’ll be treating the president’s claim with all the seriousness it deserves.