Why don't all jobs matter?

US President Donald Trump is still promising to bring back coal jobs. But the underlying reasons for coal employment's decline - automation, falling electricity demand, cheap natural gas, technological progress in wind and solar - won't go away.

Meanwhile, last week the Treasury Department officially (and correctly) declined to name China as a currency manipulator, making nonsense of everything Mr Trump has said about reviving manufacturing.

So will the Trump administration ever do anything substantive to bring back mining and manufacturing jobs? Probably not.