Thursday, February 23, 2006

A little well-founded alarmism...

On the nature of job market change.
As the friend who emailed this to me says:

This article was written by an editor of the Wall
Street Journal and a member of the Reagan
administration. Not exactly a liberal zapatista ...

Unemployment benefits were intended to help people over the down time in the cycle when workers were laid off. Today the unemployment is permanent, as entire occupations and industries are wiped out by labor arbitrage as corporations replace their American employees with foreign ones.

Economists who look beyond political press releases estimate the US unemployment rate to be between 7% and 8.5%. There are now hundreds of thousands of Americans who will never recover their investment in their university education.

He calls it " a jobs depression."

UPDATE: Here is another take on the same subject: a huge report just came out on offshoring.

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