It's a sad story, being played out in cities and towns across the country, including Indiana .  The factory or business is shutting down, and its workers are out of work.  The television cameras catch the gates being closed as the last shift ends, and the picture of the empty parking lot sends shivers through us all.

It would take a hypnotist to try to spin this as anything but bad news, right?  Perhaps.  But we should remember that what we witness in these kinds of news stories is a snapshot of what economists call the "gross flow" of employment.  Every week, every month and every quarter, people lose their jobs, while, at the same time, new jobs are created to hire others.  The net effect of these two streams produces net job growth, which for states and metropolitan areas is measured and published every month.

Here is where it begins to get a little more complicated.  The information revolution in government record-keeping has let us begin to actually measure these gross flows of job creation and job destruction, in addition to just recording the net result.  What emerges is a fascinating and challenging picture of how businesses grow and die, and how the whole process of job growth takes place.  It's quite a bit messier than many of us used to think.

It's a sad story, being played out in cities and towns across the country, including Indiana .  The factory or business is shutting down, and its workers are out of work.  The television cameras catch the gates being closed as the last shift ends, and the picture of the empty parking lot sends shivers through us all.

It would take a hypnotist to try to spin this as anything but bad news, right?  Perhaps.  But we should remember that what we witness in these kinds of news stories is a snapshot of what economists call the "gross flow" of employment.  Every week, every month and every quarter, people lose their jobs, while, at the same time, new jobs are created to hire others.  The net effect of these two streams produces net job growth, which for states and metropolitan areas is measured and published every month.

Here is where it begins to get a little more complicated.  The information revolution in government record-keeping has let us begin to actually measure these gross flows of job creation and job destruction, in addition to just recording the net result.  What emerges is a fascinating and challenging picture of how businesses grow and die, and how the whole process of job growth takes place.  It's quite a bit messier than many of us used to think.

A recent Bureau of Labor Statistics study on job markets in the major cities of Michigan , Ohio and Pennsylvania looked at these employment flows over the last twelve years, and came to some conclusions that may surprise you.  In almost every city, the process of job growth looks a little like the race between the tortoise and the hare.  New job creation is surprisingly stable, even as the economy races ahead or stalls.  On the other hand, job destruction is much less predictable, and more severe.

Not surprisingly, the companies that are most likely to lay off workers are smaller, younger, and pay lower wages.  But if you look at the metropolitan areas that led the pack in terms of net job growth, they tended to have younger business establishments, on average, than those that lagged behind.

It sounds a little confusing, until you hear a finding that is perhaps the most surprising of all.  The cities and metropolitan areas with the fastest rates of job growth also had much higher rates of both job creation and job destruction.  To state it more bluntly, job security and job growth do not go hand in hand.

In terms of visual metaphors, growing jobs is not adding bricks to a solid foundation.  It’s more like watching the foam expand in a souped up blender.

We know that manufacturing job losses have been severe of late.  But another surprising result of the BLS study is that the so-called "industry mix" of the economies of major cities in these three states explained very little of the variation in job growth over the last twelve years.  Whether they were high tech or rust belt, metro areas with high birth and death rates in jobs led the way in growth.

But there was another aspect of labor markets that did help explain differences in overall job growth.  That is firm size.  Areas with larger companies, on average, tended to have faster growth than areas with smaller firms.  Small companies create an enormous number of new jobs, but the data suggest that they simultaneously destroy a nearly equal number.  Indeed, the formula for any individual company's survival is one and the same with the recipe for net job growth -- get big, as fast as you can.

The research doesn't turn everything on its head.  Layoffs and plant closings are still disruptive, challenging events for individuals and entire economies.  But they are only part of the picture.  And if the employment flows data are any guide, in a world with growing job opportunities, we had better get used to them.