Page 93 - The Drucker Lectures

74 [ The Drucker Lectures

Growth continues. In fact, it is usually not even interrupted.
But it shifts to new foundations. The same thing is happening
already. I therefore would like to talk today about some of the
new things you don’t find in the headlines that are likely to be
more important than the things you do find there. The head-
lines have a tendency to be focused on the events of yesterday.
One cannot write the headlines for tomorrow. And yet the only
important ones are the headlines of tomorrow.
And so let me say the most important structural change
is something very few people pay any attention to—the great
change in population. Let me say for those of you in this room
who are businessmen or business students, for instance, that you
would have made grievous mistakes the last few years if you
had based your business decisions on the unemployment fig-
ure. This is the only recession in recorded history in which total
employment in all categories, including black teenagers in the
inner-city ghetto, went up month after month. There were only
three months in which it didn’t increase in the last three years.
Unemployment also looked very high, and may even have been
quite high, though frankly I have my doubts. If you had made
business decisions on the unemployment figures, you would have
expected people to buy small cars, and that’s why GM made its
first marketing mistake, because it looked at unemployment fig-
ures but didn’t understand population dynamics.
One makes decisions by looking in this economy at three la-
bor figures. One is the number of male heads of households out
of work. That is still the single most important figure for labor
supply, despite the tremendous rush of women into the labor
force. The other one is the total number of people employed,
which, by the way, is higher now than it has ever been in Ameri-
can history except the last three months of World War II. Only
then do you look at total employment; that is primarily a political
figure, not an economic one. But if you look at only one of these