The Unassuming Economist

My presentation at EMEE ranked countries’ energy security based on how diversified they were in the sources of their energy supplies.

 

At the Joint Economic Committee (JEC) hearing, Georgetown University public policy professor Harry Holzer said that “the ratio of job vacancies to new hires in manufacturing is higher than we find in any other major industry group, suggesting that employers are having some difficulty filling their newly created jobs (…) On its own, our system of higher education will not produce enough skills needed by American workers to prosper. Our education and work force systems largely operate in isolation from one another.” Indeed, BTE Technologies President Chuck Wetherington concurred with Holzer who said that “my job is getting a bit more technical. There are some micro and macroeconomic issues. Occasionally we have to recruit from abroad. There is a mismatch between skills and workers.” See the full article on the New York Times website. Also, a webcast of the hearing is available at the Joint Economic Committee site.

In an article for the Atlantic, Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute links the problem of structural unemployment with the lack of quality job training/workforce development. He writes “economist Prakash Loungani of the International Monetary Fund has estimated that 25 percent of the unemployed are out of work today due to skill-job mismatches. Georgetown’s Harry Holzer has calculated that today’s unemployment rate of 9.1 percent would be nearer to 8 percent if a majority of these jobs were filled (…) Fact is, America’s community colleges, job training, and workforce development are a mess. Community colleges suck up nearly $36 billion in taxpayer subsidies to provide training of uncertain quality, retain a balky and inconvenient academic calendar, and frequently do a lousy job of linking their instruction to local workforce needs (…) it can be hard for workers seeking retraining to find convenient, cost-effective, high-quality options (..) Absent high-quality retraining, it’s easy for workers in dying industries to get stuck, for their skills to atrophy, and for their networks and work habits to erode.”