NP - Structural w/ Austerity or Demand-Lack w/ Stimulus?

[Madeleine Maudlin]

Structure sounds important.

On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 9:50 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/11/opinion/krugman-easy-useless-economics.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
>
> Krugman:
>
> What does it mean to say that we have a structural unemployment
> problem? The usual version involves the claim that American workers
> are stuck in the wrong industries or with the wrong skills. A widely
> cited recent article by Raghuram Rajan of the University of Chicago
> asserts that the problem is the need to move workers out of the
> “bloated” housing, finance and government sectors.
>
> Actually, government employment per capita has been more or less flat
> for decades, but never mind — the main point is that contrary to what
> such stories suggest, job losses since the crisis began haven’t mainly
> been in industries that arguably got too big in the bubble years.
> Instead, the economy has bled jobs across the board, in just about
> every sector and every occupation, just as it did in the 1930s. Also,
> if the problem was that many workers have the wrong skills or are in
> the wrong place, you’d expect workers with the right skills in the
> right place to be getting big wage increases; in reality, there are
> very few winners in the work force.
>
> All of this strongly suggests that we’re suffering not from the
> teething pains of some kind of structural transition that must
> gradually run its course but rather from an overall lack of sufficient
> demand — the kind of lack that could and should be cured quickly with
> government programs designed to boost spending.
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20120511/a82abe60/attachment.html>