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REF: http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-new-data-center-north-carolina-created-50-jobs-2011-11
While some certain executive might find Mr. Blodget’s position agreeable, that is the type of analysis that makes me want to bang my head against the wall, as it seems that, in Mr. Blodget’s world, job creation has to be quid pro quo – a company has to be directly issuing a paycheck to have created a job.
All these successful companies like Apple of course create more jobs than what their payrolls show directly. To begin with, being a member of S&P 500 and several other highly visible indices, Apple’s stock shares are held in a great number of investment accounts (please, try and find me one pension or 401(k) account in this country that does not hold at least some S&P companies). So all the profit generated will go to these people, most of whom are your average hard-working American middle class. Guess where all that money is going? That’s right, it’ll get spent or reinvested and create more jobs.
In order to generate all the profit, it doesn’t take only Apple’s own employees, but also employees from other American companies – IT, advertising, marketing, retail, etc. In a sense, Apple even helped creating Mr. Blodget’s own job. Without these successful companies, there wouldn’t be this vibrant investment market which Business Insider is all about.
More indirectly yet non-negligibly, the products of Apple and all the other companies produced will also help others improve their productivities, and in turn create more positive effect on the economy. Case in point, this new Apple data center will drive down the cost of cloud computing for that much, and will likely encourage more people into developing related technologies, products, and services, and doing so create more jobs.
The fundamental issue of Mr. Blodget’s analysis is not that it’s economically unsound, nor is it that it’s blindsided, but that it inevitably leads to the dangerous conclusion that, since only direct paychecks are counted as “jobs”, the job to create more jobs cannot be trusted upon the private sector whose entire purpose is chasing more profits, but rather we will have to rely on government which is the only entity with sufficient power and motivation, to keep on creating jobs, by Mr. Blodget’s standard at least, just for the sake of “creating jobs”.