Say What?

Beckett and I mosied over to Capitol Hill yesterday to hear CEPR economist John Schmitt debate Stephen Rose on the topic of good jobs. As Schmitt has documented in some excellent recent studies, we have a lot fewer good jobs than we should given economic growth and productivity trends. After the debate, I took a look at Rose's most recent paper, and ran across this puzzling statement:

As a general rule, middle-class jobs are not disappearing. Rather they are being replaced often—though not always—by higher-paying jobs.

Got that? Middle-class jobs aren't "disappearing", they're just being "replaced." Call me polemical, but this seems like hair-splitting. Regardless of the euphemism one uses to describe the trend, we have relatively fewer jobs that pay middle-class wages. Yes, we have relatively more jobs that pay better than middle-class wages, but we also have more jobs that pay less than middle-class wages (and don't provide middle-class benefits). This trend is what many people refer to non-euphemistically as an increase in inequality.

Part of Rose's argument seems to be political, ie, talking about the economy in critical terms isn't persuasive to most voters in his view. But given that more than half of Americans currently rate the national economy as "bad", "very bad", or "terrible", it's an odd time to be making that argument.