The decade that just ended has the ignominious distinction of being the first decade in at least 70 years with zero net job growth in the US, according to Barry C. Lynn and Phillip Longman.  In fact, they point out, every other decade since the 1940s saw at least 20% growth in US jobs.  Certainly the timing of the latest recession meant a lot of jobs were lost at the end of the decade.  But Lynn and Longman argue, in a piece in the latest Washington Monthly,  that the problem is more the result of lack of job creation, relative to past decades, and that lack predates the collapse of the real estate bubble. 

The problem of weak job creation certainly can’t be due to increased business taxes and regulation, since both were slashed during the Bush years. Nor can the explanation be insufficient consumer demand; throughout most of the last decade, consumers and the federal government engaged in a consumption binge of world-historical proportions.

Other, more plausible explanations have been floated for why the rate of job creation seems to have fallen. One is that the federal government made too few investments in the 1980s and ’90s in things like basic R&D, so the pipeline of technological innovation on which new jobs depend began to run dry in the 2000s. Another is that a basic shift in competitiveness has taken place—that countries like India, with educated but relatively low-cost workforces, have become more natural homes for jobs-producing sectors like IT.

But while the mystery of what killed the great American jobs machine has yielded no shortage of debatable answers, one of the more compelling potential explanations has been conspicuously absent from the national conversation: monopolization. The word itself feels anachronistic, a relic from the age of the Rockefellers and Carnegies. But the fact that the term has faded from our daily discourse doesn’t mean the thing itself has vanished—in fact, the opposite is true. In nearly every sector of our economy, far fewer firms control far greater shares of their markets than they did a generation ago.

Read Who Broke America's Jobs Machine here.  (Hat tip NYT's Economix Blog)