Steve Jobs' Jobs vs. "Jobs"
Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas.
Jan. 29, 2012 — -- On Tuesday afternoon, Apple said it earned $13 billion in the fourth quarter on $46 billion in revenue. Thirty-seven million iPhones and 15 million iPads sold in the quarter helped boost its market cap to $415 billion. A few hours later, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, in his State of the Union response message, contrasted the technology juggernaut with Washington's impotent jobs efforts: "The late Steve Jobs - what a fitting name he had - created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the President borrowed and blew."
First thing Wednesday morning, however, Paul Krugman countered with a devastating argument - "Mitch Daniels Doesn't Read the New York Times." Prof. Krugman referred to the first of the Times' multipart series on Apple's Chinese manufacturing operations.
From Sunday's Times:"Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.Steve Jobs designed great products. It's very, very hard to make the case that he created large numbers of jobs in this country. Obama's auto bailout, just by itself, saved a lot more jobs than Apple's U.S. employment.Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple's contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple's other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.
So the New York Times thinks all those Chinese Foxconn assembly workers are the primary employment effect of Apple. And Prof. Krugman sidesteps the argument by noting the "auto bailout" - not the stimulus - "saved" - not created, mind you - more jobs than Apple's under-roof American workforce.
CNNMoney jumped in:
"Daniels' math just doesn't add up, no matter how successful and valuable Apple has become. Not even close."
This little episode exposes quite a lot about the fundamentally different ways people think about the economy.
The economy is dynamic and complex. It's a cooperative, competitive, and evolutionary. In recent pre-Great Recession history, the U.S. lost around 15 millions jobs every year -- holy depression! But we created some 17 million a year, netting two million. There's no way to quantify Jobs' jobs impact exactly, which is one of the great virtues of capitalism.
An attempt to estimate in a very rough way, however, might be useful:
Apple
Apple has 60,000 total employees, around 43,000 in U.S.
Multiply these numbers by the years these jobs have existed, decades in the case of many. That's many hundreds of thousands of "job-years."
