WATSON: LEAVE LABOUR MARKET ALONE.

If the Liberal platform is a guide — and we’re a democracy so it should be — next week’s budget will contain $ 775 million of new money for various “labour market development” initiatives. Though any support for markets among left-of-centre parties is to be encouraged, the thing about markets is that they don’t actually need lots of support. They are places, by definition, where people come together to trade. In labour markets, in particular, suppliers need work while demanders need workers. Governments may have to enforce legal contracts between workers and employers, but beyond that, governments may not be required. Participants in labour markets have compelling economic reasons to handle matters all on their own.

Yes, yes, we know: Markets can fail in myriad ways that economists have spent the last half- century elaborating. But the fact that labour markets can evolve in mysterious ways, with demand and supply taking completely unexpected turns, doesn’t give government any special insight into their future evolution.

One thing governments can do, however, is provide information about labour markets. A good example is a new Statistics Canada study on what university graduates from different fields of study earn. The data are from the 2011 National Household Survey, which replaced the compulsory Long Form Census. They show what male, female, college, bachelor’s and master’s graduates with degrees in detailed fields of study earned on average in 2010.

If you or a family member or friend are trying to decide what to specialize in, the study will at least tell you what graduates from different disciplines were e arning in 2010 who wer e working f ull- year and full- time and were between 25 and 54 years of age. ( The study calculates these averages only if 200 people or more people were working in any gender/discipline/ degree category, so some of the entries for females are blank).

Money isn’t everything, but if you do want to max out your earnings, studying money seems to be the best job for making it. Bachelor’s graduates in management science and quantitative methods made $130,000 on average if they were male, $ 95,000 if female. But then, in 2010 Michael Lewis’s The Big Short also showed us the unhelpful role “quants” played in creating the financial market disturbances of 2008 and beyond, so maybe the market has been shorting these incomes since these data were collected.

Finance, accounting and general business/ commerce graduates also did well, with males averaging over $100,000 and females one-fifth to one-quarter less than that.

At the bottom end of the distribution are theologians, social workers and philosophers. Maybe society should value their work more, but it apparently doesn’t. Still, their labour presumably brings its own (untaxable!) satisfactions.

As an economist, I’m happy to see that econ grads do several thousand dollars a year better than the average university graduate. As someone who writes for newspapers I’m sorry to see that my male journalist colleagues do $ 14,000 worse than the average for all fields. On the other hand, female journalists do $3,000 better than female grads in general.

Data about what was happening in 2010 obviously won’t tell you what demand and supply will be doing in 2020, 2030 or 2040. And money isn’t and shouldn’t be everything in choosing one’s university studies. But information such as this study provides can’t hurt and almost certainly will help as people come to make their post-high-school decisions about what to study. In fact, for informed decision-making it would be useful to have even more detail: how much variation around the average is there in each discipline? What’s the typical age- earnings profile? How many employed graduates of each discipline are there and how quickly has employment been growing (or declining)?

Private businesses could produce comprehensive data of this sort. But once they had gone to the considerable expense of doing so, how could they make sure only those customers willing to pay for it would be privy to it? Providing detailed information about what’s going on in the labour market may therefore be something government needs to do to help the labour market. Despite what you may read in next week’s budget, that may be all it needs to do.

PARTICIPANTS IN LABOUR MARKETS CAN HANDLE MATTERS ALL ON THEIR OWN.