'Green jobs' studies contain fundamental flaws, think tank experts say
By: Mark Tapscott
Editorial Page Editor
06/25/09 6:44 PM EDT
There are three kinds of liars - liars, damned liars and statisticians, right?
Well, for nearly a decade, I have opened my Database 101, Computer-Assisted Research and Reporting (CARR) boot camps at the National Press Club for journalists and bloggers with a description of two of my dreams.
The first is that the day will soon come when all journalists and bloggers are as comfortable using spreadsheets and databases as they are now with dictionaries and spell-check. The second is that the day will soon come when every time a public official, think tank spokesman or individual expert claims to have a study proving X, the first question they will hear from a journalist or blogger is "May I see your datasets?"
Knowing somebody will look at your numbers and be able to point it out if you have manipulated them improperly should be a powerful disincentive to making insupportable public policy claims based on statistically flawed studies. Now, the Beacon Hill Institute at Suffolk University has just provided a sterling illustraton of that dream's immediate relevance.
As Congress debates this week the Obama-Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade anti-global warming bill, its advocates frequently claim that moving to alternative energy sources will create legions of new "green jobs." Those claims are often backed by reference to one or more of a trio of supposedly scientific studies:
It doesn't take much time on Google to see that each of these three studies has been cited thousands of times as authoritative projections of a rosy economic future based on the government-mandated conversion of the economy from one based on fossil fuels to one in which alternative energy sources dominate.
Problem is, accoding to Beacon Hill, all three are based on fundamentally flawed reasoning. With the UN study, Beacon Hill says:
"The U.N.’s report contains the most serious economic errors of the three reports we review. It argues for radical changes in industrial and agricultural policy that would have disastrous economic consequences and would likely result in widespread impoverishment and mass starvation. It mistakenly claims that increased labor productivity results in unemployment. As a
result it advocates moving to less productive modes of transport, farming, and energy production.
:Taking people out of taxies and putting them into rickshaws, forcing people to use more labor to produce fewer crops, and doing more work to produce the same amount of energy would plunge society back to pre-modern standards of living. Humanity has advanced as productivity has increased. As the labor force has expanded so have the number of jobs to be done. The U.N. report amounts to a call for a return to the stone-age."
Other than that, it's a fine study, right?
Regarding the Center for American Progress report, Beacon Hill found:
“The argument for the creation of green jobs should be made separately from proposals for economic recovery. This report makes a shameless effort to hijack the current crisis for purposes of creating a 'green' program that would do nothing to fix the crisis and would likely prolong it by subsidizing labor and capital to stay in some over-expanded bubble industries. If the green technology could pay for itself through cost savings as promised in the report, then the subsidies are not necessary.
“The report never performs a cost-benefit test to argue that the value created by the green jobs justifies their cost. The study uses an inappropriate input-output analysis for its forecast. And finally, the report overestimates the number of green jobs that could be created compared to alternative policies. In short, the study is a flawed attempt to justify a green subsidy program by attaching it to an economic recovery proposal.”
Ouch!
Finally, of the Global Solutions study, Beacon Hill said:
“This report, prepared by Global Insight, never attempts to argue that the creation of jobs, green or otherwise, is good. Nor does it argue that green polices are cost-benefit efficient. It simply tries to forecast how many green jobs will be created given legislative desires and market conditions. Unfortunately, because the Conference of Mayors’ leadership views the creation of green jobs as the benefit itself, the large increases in green jobs forecast by Global Insight has itself become the rationale for trying to make Global Insight’s predictions a reality.
“Even if one were counting jobs as a benefit, Global Insight’s work does not justify claiming any net increase in jobs. Nowhere does Global Insight analyze how the creation of green jobs will impact job (and value) creation in other sectors. More amazingly, their forecast number of green jobs is based on a single scenario with arbitrary assumptions which the report never attempts to justify. Despite its ostensible precision (4,214,700 green jobs), there is no reason to attach any weight to the forecast.”
The House is expected to pass the Obama-Waxman-Markey bill tomorrow. You can bet some or all of these three flawed studies will be cited multiple times during the floor speeches and statements for the Congressional Record. Somebody should do a study of how many times they are cited!
