The Knead for New Jobs

[RS Davis]

[glow=red,2,300]Glenn Harlan Reynolds Wrote:[/glow]Virginia is undoubtedly correct that there are a lot more massage therapists than there used to be. I started getting professional massage nearly 20 years ago, when I was just out of law school, in response to computer-related neck and back problems. (I was on the leading edge of those, thank you very much.) Massage therapy was not unknown, but it was hard to find and was still confused in many people's minds with prostitution-oriented "massage parlors" of a wholly different nature.

Now massage therapists are everywhere, and they seem fully employed. (Just try to book an appointment at the last minute.) What's more, these are -- in the Michael Dukakis phrase that Democrats seem to be exhuming -- "good jobs at good wages." Massage therapists working in spas make upwards of thirty-five dollars an hour (often considerably upwards of that) and work in safe, pleasant conditions. Just compare a spa to the workplace of a steelworker or coal miner, where the conditions are much less salubrious and the wages generally somewhat lower, though these jobs are the traditional exemplars of high-paying employment available to people without advanced educational credentials. Shiatsu beats steelmaking any day.

- Rick

[RS Davis]

When I was practicing law in Washington back in the 1980s, I developed all the usual computer problems: Numbness and shooting pains in my wrists and hands, backache, neckache, headache, etc. My health plan then was the George Washington University HMO. That meant I got great care at a fancy teaching hospital, which did me no good at all. I was examined by neurologists, immunologists, occupational medicine specialists, and orthopedists. I had nerve conduction studies and electromyelograms. I was given powerful NSAIDs that upset my stomach but provided little relief. I was tested for lupus, myasthenia gravis, and Lou Gehrig's disease.

Then I went to a massage therapist, who dug her thumb into my back just inside a shoulderblade and asked "does this trigger your symptoms?" It did. She prescribed some stretches and exercises, and I got much better.

A pill that gave me an equivalent amount of relief would be considered a "product," and the worker who made it a "manufacturing job." But the pill would have side effects, and it would come out of a factory that consumed resources and energy, and produced pollution and waste, in a way that a massage therapist doesn't.

So the massage therapist is, in a sense, a replacement for that manufacturing job. What's more, the reason that there are more massage therapists, in part, is that more people can afford them. And the reason that more people can afford them is that increasing productivity makes manufactured stuff -- computers, clothing, food, etc. -- cheaper. So when companies shift to automation or outsourcing to lower their costs, it in fact does help to produce new jobs at home.

This is the unseen economic activity that protectionists miss. The average person's life gets better, their standard of living higher, as a result of their dollar going further from efficient businesses.

- Rick