Fuzzy Math and Finance, Pt. 1

Normally, I pay about as much attention to Yahoo's financial blog as I do the Lady Gaga outfit analysis that accompanies it on my Mail homepage. Any "news" agency that doesn't have enough journalistic decency to separate the Libyan crisis from who's leading the "Most Annoying Celebrity" race on this week's top-rated reality nonsense show on their ticker isn't going to draw much intellectual interest from me. Against my better judgment (and mostly because the idea of being "Financially Fit" paints a vivid and hilarious picture of someone doing step aerobics while filling out their I-9), I clicked on Brian O'Connel's coverage of the Top 10 Comeback Jobs of 2011 as reported by CareerBliss.com this afternoon.

What interested me wasn't the list (though the idea of simply ranking occupations based on a statistical change in annual wages amuses me to no end. If someone makes 30% of what constitutes a livable income, and their annual salary increases 200%, they're still living 40% below the poverty line. Would that qualify the wage-earner's occupation as a "comeback" job of 2011? The median income of the top occupation on the chart, a tax preparer, is $39,000 a year. Certainly better than the less than $28,000 that same worker earned in 2009, but hardly what we'd call "living on easy street" in modern America. The article doesn't even mention if the increase in cost of living [which has occurred throughout the United States at a rate of 4.8% since 2009] was factored into the salary increase rate). It was the implications made by O'Connel at the end of the article.

"Unfortunately, the list is loaded with service jobs and has a dearth of manufacturing jobs, which have traditionally been the backbone of the U.S. economy," O'Connel writes. While the author is correct in pointing out that service jobs overwhelmingly comprise the list (flawed as said list may be), he also displays an ignorance of the evolving nature of the global economy. We should have no reason to expect the manufacturing industry to ever obtain a level of increased wages for its workers that would place it anywhere near the top of a list like this (even if it were constructed with any degree of statistical legitimacy). The new global economy is based upon service and information, not manufacturing. We cannot expect some kind of boom in manufacturing to pull this country out of its economic slump. The age of riveting warships and installing wheel axles to promote fiscal growth are over. In many ways, the list (limited as it is) should be unsurprising to the modern American. We don't "make" things in this country anymore to accrue ludicrous amounts of wealth. New ideas, technical breakthroughs, and innovative service plans are the path to financial security in 21st Century America and, by extension, the world.