Across the rich world, an extraordinary jobs boom is under way

THE SECOND volume of “My Struggle”, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s enormous, maddening, brilliant autobiographical novels, contains some depressing life advice. “If I have learned one thing,” he sighs, “it is the following: don’t believe you are anybody. Don’t bloody believe you are somebody…Do not believe that you’re anything special. Do not believe that you’re worth anything, because you aren’t.” We like to tell ourselves that we deserve our successes, Mr Knausgaard’s book suggests, yet they are largely the product of forces over which we have no control. When he wrote those words he probably was not thinking about the boasts of politicians in the OECD, a club mainly of rich countries, about their jobs markets. But he might as well have been.

“Unemployment numbers best in 51 years. Wow!” tweeted Donald Trump, America’s president, last month. Theresa May, the British prime minister, bragged in February that “employment is at a near-record high and unemployment at a near-record low.” The month before, Scott Morrison, Australia’s prime minister, crowed that “more than 730 jobs were created every day last year under our government.” Around the same time his Japanese counterpart, Shinzo Abe, let it be known that “the employment rate for young people is at a level surpassing all previous records.” Hence the swagger of politicians, who believe that they are special. But they are not. Jobs abound because of forces that largely have nothing to do with them.