Charles Wheelan, Ph.D. The Naked Economist

I have a naïve request for the balance of the presidential campaign: I don't want to hear any candidate say one more thing about "creating jobs" or "bringing back jobs" or doing anything with the word "jobs" in it.

That might seem strange at a time when the economy is teetering on the brink of recession, and has eclipsed Iraq as the No. 1 issue on many voters' minds.

Here's my reason: Other than during the depths of the Great Depression, the government doesn't "create jobs." (World War II created most of the jobs then anyway, and I'm not sure that's the direction we should go.) Instead, a sensible government should help to create a skilled workforce and a decent business climate. If it does that, the jobs will take care of themselves.

Skills Gone South

To appreciate this distinction, consider two thought experiments. Here's the first one:

1. How many different jobs could you find in the next six or eight months if you had to? Not perfect jobs, but places where you could get hired and earn a salary reasonably close to what you're earning now.

I suspect this answer is going to vary widely among the people reading this column. For a star pediatric heart surgeon, the answer might be 10; every major children's hospital would love to have him or her on staff. For an unemployed autoworker in Michigan, the answer is zero -- or else he wouldn't be unemployed.

The crucial point is that unemployment and low wages are not a function of too few jobs, as most politicians would have you believe. They're a function of too few skills.

Joblessness in Context

We're used to hearing about the unemployment rate, which climbed to 5 percent in December. Even that figure is somewhat misleading, though, because there's extraordinary variance by education level. According to the most recent data from the Department of Labor, the unemployment rate is:

• 8.2 percent for high school dropouts.

• 4.7 percent for high school graduates with no college.

• 3.7 percent for workers with an associate's degree or some college.

• 2 percent for workers with a bachelor's degree and higher.

See the pattern?

Not Everybody's an A-Rod

Here's the second thought experiment, which gets at the heart of trade, outsourcing, and related causes of employment anxiety:

2. In December, the New York Yankees signed Alex Rodriguez to a 10-year, $275 million contract with a $30 million bonus if he breaks the all-time home run record. Why didn't the Yankees hire a Chinese or Indian worker who would take the job for $500 a year, with a free moped for breaking the home run record?

Because there's not a person in all of China or India (that we know of) who can hit a baseball like A-Rod. The Yankees can hire lots of people cheaper, but they won't get the job done. Rodriguez can command a unique salary because he has unique skills. The same is true everywhere else in the economy, albeit to a less extreme degree than in professional sports.

There's a crucial link between pay and productivity. Your job can't be outsourced if there's not someone in China or India or Vietnam capable of doing the same thing for less. Of course, the primary driver of productivity is education, broadly construed. That means everything from preschool education to highly specific skills learned on the job.

A Clear Distinction

That's why I find it both puzzling and frustrating to hear politicians talk so much more about jobs than skills. The sad fact is that if a modern automobile plant came to Flint, Mich., most of the unemployed workers there wouldn't have the right skills to get hired.

Could they write the software to run the automated assembly process? Do they have experience with hybrids and other green technologies that will be at the core of the next generation of vehicles? No one is going to get paid an above-average wage to screw bolts on an engine block. That's something that can be done cheaply just about anywhere else in the world.

This distinction between jobs and skills may seem like a semantic point; it's not. It's at the core of what constitutes good economic policy. Politicians who chase jobs tend to favor offering subsidies to attract or retain big employers. They favor making it more difficult to move jobs overseas and to buy foreign products and services. They view the world as having a fixed number of jobs that must be protected using government resources -- money that could otherwise be spent on programs that actually make workers more productive.

And that's just plain wrong. Remember, we decided that the star pediatric heart surgeon could find 10 jobs if he had to. And the unemployed guy in Flint couldn't find one. That's a skills problem, not a shortage of jobs.

Skillful Questions

So here are three things the presidential candidates (and any other politician) should be talking more about:

• Preschool education: The data are overwhelming that the economic returns on public investment in early childhood education are huge, particularly for disadvantaged children. If we teach three- and four-year-olds how to learn more effectively, then every subsequent dollar we spend on education becomes more productive.

As James Heckman, the 2000 Nobel Laureate in economics, wrote recently in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, "Early interventions for disadvantaged children promote schooling, raise the quality of the work force, enhance the productivity of schools, and reduce crime, teenage pregnancy, and welfare dependency."

A rigorous study of Perry Preschool Program, an enrichment program for disadvantaged children similar to Head Start, followed students who were randomly selected for the program and compared them to a control group who were not selected all the way up to age 40. The benefits of the program exceeded the costs by a ratio of 8 to 1.

• The high school completion rate for African Americans and Hispanics: Nearly a third of Hispanic 16- to 24-year-olds have dropped out of high school -- triple the proportion for non-Hispanic whites. That's an alarming number given the large and growing Hispanic population in the United States.

The fraction of African American youths who have dropped out (13 percent) is twice that for whites -- a gap that was narrowing steadily during the 1970s and '80s, but then stopped narrowing at the beginning of the '90s. If you want to understand the lagging performance of U.S. minorities, start here.

• A plateau in the proportion of Americans getting a college degree: This is an odd one. The economic benefits of a college degree are huge and growing, but the proportion of American high school graduates who enroll in college has been stalled since the early '90s. In fact, the rate of college participation for African American and Hispanic high school graduates has actually been falling.

Other countries around the globe are narrowing the income gap with the United States in large part because they're sending an increasing proportion of their young people to college and we're not.

So here's my challenge to anyone who wants to be president (or governor, or mayor): You show me the skills, and I'll show you the jobs.