This is the title of this week’s This American Life episode, where they turned over the program to NPR’s simply amazing Planet Money Team. What is fantastic about this bit of financial reporting, is that Planet Money listens to the platitudes and Conventional Wisdom about job creation and goes off to see if any of it is true. They talk to employers (getting tax credits), politicians (taking credit for or promising jobs), economic development professionals, and folks trying to get the underemployed ready to get employed. These are the high profile ways that government promises to create jobs and this group gets well beyond the usual wisdom here to try to show how these policies work (or don’t). Act One (the tax credit one) is especially good — featuring multiple employers talking about how these tax credits actually get used. Which isn’t really for hiring unless you are doing so at some scale.
The Planet Money crew is doing some of the best financial reporting in the US right now — they aren’t burdened (mostly) by the typical financial narratives and they’ve been creative in getting explanations of why or why not things work in compelling fashion. Their interest is in how these things actually work — not in how someone with a vested interest wants you to think it works. Their interest is in making all of these abstractions that financial and business people like to throw about in an intimidating fashion and make them concrete. Top that with a bunch of genuinely curious reporters with excellent storytelling skills and you get financial reporting that you can’t turn away from. And that makes sure you know where your interests are in the story.
You can listen to How to Create a Job right from the web here. At that link, you can listen to each section as you want, rather than listing to all of it at once. You can also download an mp3 of the program at iTunes for free for the week — after this week, you can download it for .99.
Go give this a listen and hear what genuinely information-rich reporting sounds like. And every one of these stories should make you think about how we spend taxpayer funds (and how politicians position themselves) for *job creation* here in Delaware.