http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/work-of-depressions-watch/
If you’re going to post a link, at least add a descriptive title and some sort of reason for why you are sharing it.
While structural unemployment may be the least relevant type of unemployment during a recession and the last thing we should be talking about, isn’t it fair to say that a large number of college graduates indeed don’t have marketable skills that they can sell for wages they want to earn?
Come on, I may be a layman and no proper trained economist, but hell, anyone may take a look around at one’s own college and see what it’s like. So many students taking courses that mean absolutely nothing - language students, history students, and so on. Sure they’ll be employed and earning well some day in the future, but I’ll be damned if this is going to give them a 30,000 rupee/month job here in the New Delhi area.
In United States, where colleges are so pervasive and student loans so generously given, is it not likely that there is going to be a significant number of people who are not supposed to be in college, who will take non-courses, and who will be unemployable afterwards? Education is an investment, and like any investment, it can be a bad investment.
Indeed, also please activate your hyperlinks (I’ve done this one for you).
Sorry was in a rush.
But the question I have is this:
Does the distortian in the capital structure actually mean there must be an area with high demand for labour?
@ Prateek Samjay
Agreed, Krugman makes a huge logical leap in assuming that all of recent college graduates should be considered “highly skilled” workers.
People get hired not because of their skills but because of the discounted marginal product they produce as an additional hired labour. It does not matter what university one has graduated from, how “prestigious” (prestige is determined from the market and is not static, because the market is not static, too) it is or what supposed skills one has. Of course there is structural unemployment.