About the jobs report

For a couple years now, every month has opened news-wise with reaction to the so-called "jobs report" or "jobs numbers", which indicate whether employment has eeked up, down, or stayed the same. This month's coverage includes the very predictable article "Bleak jobs report spells trouble for Obama re-election" via Reuters. Sure, most of the jobs report-related news refers to its impact on the election (as opposed to its impact on common welfare or anything else). No surprise there--we're going for the story.

More interestingly, the jobs report is a ritual now. For the press and its readers, the numbers stir the election season waters. But that is what you read on the surface. Systematically speaking, the the report is more importantly a function of security. It shows the Labor Department keeping tabs on employment--the extent to which the time of the populace is productively occupied with wealth generation; and through the report we live a shared experience, relating to each other on economic terms, as subjects of the economy, as economic constructs built into the economy--that complicated system of freedom and security-minded, neoliberal artificial market constructions.

Fluctuations are almost reassuring in this sense. The reporter asks, What will the Fed do? The economist answers, What can the Fed do?

Nobody does anything without first consulting the overall trend in the numbers. Has it been going down for six months? or up for six months? This discussion--and here the other mechanisms of security kick in--feeds an even larger discourse on the economy, composes and comprises its truths, truths which are repeated, amplified, and re-enforced via media in the minds of the economic subject. Too much bad news and the economic subject becomes electoral subject and modifies the leadership; and/or leadership modifies rates or removes barriers to commerce or flushes sectors with cash to stimulate commerce; tariffs are raised or lowered; immigration is encouraged or denied and on and on. Fluctuation and its many counter and co-fluctuations are part of a healthy, secured system. After all, there will always be something. What matters to the economic technocrat is not the something but how the various mechanisms of security relate within the "reality" of an economy prone to fluctuate.

(The real mother this time though is Europe, so I hear. And therein lies the way out.)