The State of the Union and the Power of Technological Change

President Obama made inequality a major theme of his State of the Union address last night, an unsurprising choice as he prepares to face Mitt Romney. Everyone now knows that just last year Mr. Romney paid a smaller share of his $21 million income in taxes than the average American paid on a $50,000 salary. But if inequality was the President’s theme, his main subject was jobs. For Obama, faster job growth depends on more government. We need Washington, for example, to retrain workers, reduce college costs, and provide special supports for manufacturers. For Romney, the answer for job creation is, what else, less government: Washington needs only to cut regulation and reduce taxes, especially for the wealthy people and corporations who, in the Romney worldview, create the jobs.

But not so fast — there are other options as well. A new report from the NDN think tank suggests that certain kinds of new technologies can spur job creation more effectively than most government programs or tax cuts. The new study, conducted by Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute and myself, found that the rapid spread of new 3G wireless devices from 2007 to 2011 led directly to the creation of nearly 1.6 million new jobs. And those job gains occurred even as the overall economy was shedding 5.3 million other jobs.

Our analysis tracked shifts by consumers and businesses from 2G wireless phones to 3G smart phones and tablets, quarter by quarter and state by state, from July 2007 to December 2011. We then analyzed the links between the shift to the more powerful 3G devices and changes in employment, quarter to quarter and state by state. We did the math and found that every 10 percentage point increase in the use of those devices generated more than 231,000 new jobs within a year.

It makes clear and compelling economic sense. As a growing share of Internet use shifts to wireless devices, the people and businesses that use them become more efficient and productive. Those gains, in turn, create new value which ultimately leads to more job creation. The spread of 3G wireless devices also created a platform for new services — for example, in mobile e-commerce, mobile social networking, and location-based services. The growth of those new services also led to more job creation.

And the best news for jobs is that another technological shift is occurring right now, from 3G to 4G wireless devices. 4G wireless networks and the Internet infrastructure that supports them have the potential to drive significant new efficiencies and innovations across the economy. Jobs already are being created in 4G-dependent areas such as cloud-based services and mobile health applications. According to industry analysts, 4G wireless networks in the near future could be used to create a Smart Electricity Grid and a national public safety system.

This analysis, then, can provide a new direction for job creation efforts: Adopt spectrum and other policies that will promote the broad and rapid deployment of 4G

Still, there are also kernels of economic truth in the Romney and Obama positions. Romney is not wrong, for example, when he says that lower taxes are usually better for the economy than higher taxes. But there’s no evidence that lower taxes on wealthy people or corporations would produce many jobs. And in a period of trillion-dollar budget deficits, calls for tax cuts seem at best irrelevant, and at worst politically cynical and misleading.

The President is on firmer ground. Greater access to higher education and retraining should increase productivity and growth, at least over the long haul. Since the direct benefits from those efforts would presumably go to people from modest or middle-income households, Obama’s approach also could help address inequality. And since the President seems prepared to raise the revenues to finance his proposals, they could be more than political window dressing.

For all of these good points, these approaches are not the answer to slow job creation. For that, President Obama and Mr. Romney have to directly address the forces that actually create and destroy private-sector jobs. One such force is technology, and our new analysis shows that the 3G and 4G wireless technologies can create many more jobs than they may destroy, and do so quickly. Another approach could focus on reducing the additional costs that businesses bear directly when they create new jobs. That could mean cuts on the employer side of the payroll tax or new measures to slow increases in the health care costs that businesses bear for their employees. At a minimum, any of these approaches would produce more economic benefits for more people than all of the tax cuts promoted by Obama’s opponents.