How Many Jobs Saved

In his column Monday, Paul Krugman wrote of the effect of the "stimulus" on employment: "reasonable estimates suggest that around a million more Americans are working now than would have been employed without that plan." Now John Stossel quotes the chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer, as saying of the stimulus, "employment is now about 485,000 jobs above what it otherwise would have been." How does Professor Krugman justify his claim that the stimulus created more than twice as many jobs as the White House's top economist claims it did? How does the White House economist justify her claim that the stimulus created half as many jobs as Professor Krugman claims it did? What is it about the entire debate that generates the feeling that these numbers are, as the White House would say, "fishy," and that, as Lawrence Summers would put it, "It is not even clear how we will know ultimately whether they have succeeded, because of the difficulty of constructing a counterfactual and knowing what would have happened without intervention."