EJ Antoni noted a year ago (Sept 6, 2024):
gov’t and the gov’t-dominated healthcare sector [employment growth].. it’s all tax-payer funded, and it’s not at all sustainable
I plot EJ Antoni’s definition of “sustainable” employment:
Figure 1: Change in EJ Antoni “Sustainable” Employment (bold black line), health and social services employment (tan bar), government (blue bar), and NFP ex-health and social services and government employment (green bar), 000’s, s.a. All statistics are based on preliminary benchmark revision. Assumes total downward revision in private education and health is equal to downward revision to health and social services. Source: BLS via FRED, BLS, and author’s calculations.
check
I don’t think little Antoni understands what “sustainable” means. Here’s a picture of his notion of what’s sustainable against what isn’t since 2010:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1MptK
Note how, over the period that ADP has reported on private healthcare and social services employment, government, healthcare and social services employment has held up better than those other kinds of jobs. What Menzie has shown for recent quarters also holds over the past 15 years. I’m confident one could make a similar demonstration over longer periods with BLS data, but little Antoni says BLS data aren’t “sustainable”.
Check with standard references, Britanica says “sustainability [is] the long-term viability of a community, set of social institutions, or societal practice. In general, sustainability is understood as a form of intergenerational ethics in which the environmental and economic actions taken by present persons do not diminish the opportunities of future persons to enjoy similar levels of wealth, utility, or welfare.”
Little Antoni is claiming that future generations suffer from today’s labor in support of education, governance and healthcare? A healthy, well-governed, educated workforce today reduces the welfare of future generations? I didn’t know that. Economic historians need to do some serious rethinking.
Wikipedia identifies sustainability as a normative concept. That makes sense; the data, which aren’t normative, show little Antoni’s “unsustainable” employment holding up better over time than his “sustainable” employment. Antoni is arguing for his norms, saying he’d rather not have an educated, healthy, well-governed country.
Anybody remember Amity Shlaes? She’s not really an economist, either. She insisted that certain forms of employment don’t count. She specifically claims that government employment doesn’t count. She piled up heaps of words in support of that claim, all of which boiled down to “because Amity says so”.
Little Antoni’s definition of sustainable employment seems to follow Shlaes’s thinking, but he hasn’t gone to the trouble of piling up any words in support of his claim. Probably something to do with the unsustainability of his education.