This month, brace yourself to hear plenty of rhetoric coming out of Washington about “exports” and “jobs”. As a new Republican-dominated Congress starts work, energy companies are lobbying to drop a decades-old ban on exports of crude oil, arguing that such sales will create thousands of American jobs.

As pitches go, it is a powerful one. But there is another question about exports and jobs that Congress should be debating more urgently: the fact that US businesses are becoming so efficient that they require fewer workers than ever before to deliver growth, even — or especially — for exports.

Take a look at some fascinating data compiled by the Commerce Department, and quietly released last year. This shows that in the past few years, the number of American jobs supported by exports has risen as overseas sales have grown. In 2009, exports created 9.7m jobs; by 2013 the tally was 11.3m.