
A Recession-Era Economic Myth Goes Up in Smoke - Futurebot
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/01/economics-unemployment-labor-market-skills-gap
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wallacoloo
The article seems weirdly insistent on dividing things into "left-wing vs
right-wing", but I guess the takeaway is: many companies claimed they weren't
hiring because they couldn't find talent. Recently, these companies began
hiring ex-convicts, a policy which they presumably weren't exercising before.
Presumably these workers are cheaper to hire, while still having the necessary
skills. So the conclusion is that companies weren't hiring not due to a lack
of available skill, but due to a lack of available _affordable_ skill. I'm not
sure what's enlightening about this - supply availablity isn't usually
presented as a binary exists/doesn't exist thing, but as how much exists for a
given price (especially given that workers can often be trained, for a price).
So when companies claim there's not enough supply of talent, implicit in that
statement to begin with is "[given our budget]". As might be obvious, I'm not
sure what this article is trying to get at.

