America’s Next War

Like most Americans, and presumably everyone who reads this post, I have jobs on the brain. I read about them, hear them being discussed during coffee chats, think about them almost constantly and write about them often. The chairman of Gallup, Jim Clifton, is writing about them as well in his new book The Coming Jobs War.

Clifton’s big conclusion? That the next 30 years or so, to pick a random time period, won’t be led by political or military force, but rather by economic force. Specifically, a force driven primarily by job creation and quality GDP growth.

“The demands of leadership have changed,” he writes. “The highest levels of leadership require mastery of a new task: job creation. Traditional leadership through politics, military force, religion or personal values won’t work in the future like it has in the past. The nuances of personal values will be anchored in how they affect almighty jobs more than Almighty God.”

So what happens to cities and countries that fail at this? That don’t create jobs at the level necessary? He says societies will simply fall apart. That there will be suffering instability, chaos and revolution.

Occupy Wall Street anyone?

Clifton says that for all of the polling the Gallup Organization has done over the past 75 years, the thing he thinks would “fix the world” and suddenly create the long sought after “world peace” that the beauty pageant contestants always dream about, would be the sudden appearance of about 1.8 million jobs.

“The leadership problem is that an increasing number of people in the world are miserable, hopeless, suffering and becoming dangerously unhappy because they don’t have an almighty good job – and in most cases, no hope of getting one.”

“The leadership problem is that an increasing number of people in the world are miserable, hopeless, suffering and becoming dangerously unhappy because they don’t have an almighty good job – and in most cases, no hope of getting one.”

How does Clifton define a good job? He says it is steady work, at least 30 hours a week, and that there is an accompanying steady paycheck as well from an employer. Economists also refer to these types of jobs as formal jobs.

As anyone who has ever traveled to the third world knows though, there is an entire underground economy of people trading and bartering.

Clifton says these jobs create subsistence and survival but no real economic energy.

Here are some hard stats from the book, and they’re not pretty!

• Of the 7 billion people on Earth, there are 5 billion adults aged 15 and older.
• 3 billion of those 5 billion tell Gallup they want to work at full-time formal jobs.
• However, there are currently only 1.2 billion full-time, formal jobs in the world, leaving a global shortfall of 1.8 billion good jobs.
• Global unemployment for those looking for a formal job with a steady paycheck and 30-hours of work a week stands at a staggering 50%, with another 10% looking for part-time work.

I guess it’s numbers like those that compelled Clifton to write the book, and in the process state that the lack of good jobs will take precedence over almost all of the other global problems we will have to face in the future.

Indeed, he says the lack of good jobs is the root case of many of those problems, and that this is America’s next war for everything.

“The global war for jobs determines the leader of the free world. If the United States allows China or any country or region to out-enterprise it, out-job-create it, out-grow its GDP, everything changes.”