> When the fact is the economy is efficient and they should be making goods even if they are not profitable, i.e. at cost... just to create employment, give people money, with which they can buy things.
People already have jobs, they have low-paying jobs. When someone is already spending every dollar they get, there is no way to make them spend more. All this talk of investment, inflation, job creation, it's missing the basic point that to get businesses to make more goods you first need someone able to buy them, and that in turn means getting them out of low-paying jobs and into high-paying jobs.
The way I see it, the problem is a skills gap. To get someone in a higher-paying job, they need skills that are more in demand. If you want to understand why people are stuck in low-paying jobs, look no further than a failed education system.
And yet in the market for skills provision, we see high prices, nondischargeable debt ... and low return for those supposedly enskilled.
I'm talking of higher education, of course.
My thought for some time has been that we cannot educate ourselves out of this mess. Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth both discounts education as a positive factor and sees debt and access as negatives.
People already have jobs, they have low-paying jobs. When someone is already spending every dollar they get, there is no way to make them spend more. All this talk of investment, inflation, job creation, it's missing the basic point that to get businesses to make more goods you first need someone able to buy them, and that in turn means getting them out of low-paying jobs and into high-paying jobs.
The way I see it, the problem is a skills gap. To get someone in a higher-paying job, they need skills that are more in demand. If you want to understand why people are stuck in low-paying jobs, look no further than a failed education system.