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What can be done to create jobs? Six leading ideas.

The job market has shown some very welcome signs of improvement lately, but it still has a long way to go before approaching something Americans would call normal. Here’s a look at some of the proposed solutions out there. 

4. Energize the job market, literally

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File
In this file photo, a worker for Thermal House blows bio-based, closed-cell foam insulation into a home in Jamaica, Vt., to make it more energy efficient. The home dates back to the 1700s.

  • By Mark Trumbull Staff writer

One of the economy's big needs, energy, can also be a big source of new jobs, economists say. This theme has been heard on the presidential campaign trail, as Republicans tout the promise of domestic natural-gas and shale-oil production. But this can be an area of bipartisan agreement. (A big part of Bill Clinton's recent book, "Back to Work," is about energy-related ideas.)

And it's not all about fossil fuels. Energy efficiency, for instance, could also be a ripe field for job creation. Efforts by the Obama administration to promote energy upgrades in US buildings haven't scored huge job gains, but a well-crafted incentive program could still work.

"The US has about 77 million freestanding houses, and only about 1 million of them are up to Energy Star standards, so this could create jobs for a while," writers Scott Bittle and Jean Johnson say in a book being released soon by William Morrow, called "Where Did the Jobs Go – and How Do We Get Them Back?"

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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