Brad De Long wrote: > >I have heard Phil Harvey of Rutgers Law School use this story on more than > >one occasion in public presentations. No matter how much dogs are trained > >to be good bone gatherers, as long as the number of bones remain fixed, > >there will still be dogs left without bones. Even if all dogs had excellent > >training, this still holds. So training may be good, but by itself it does > >not address chronic bonelessness. If affirmative action programs are > >instituted, some dogs may be assisted in getting bones, but others will be > >displaced, leading to continued bonelessness as well as resentment... > ... > > Do y'all allow your students to learn that employment in the United > States has risen from 66 million in 1960 to 133 million today? > > The U.S. economy has lots of problems, but a fixed and ungrowing > supply of jobs is not one of them. And to suggest that > education-and-training programs are a scam because there is a fixed > supply of jobs seems to me to be very, very, very wrong... > > Brad DeLong ________________ My sense is that if we take a very long term view, say the whole of 20th century, then the labor market in the developed world probably faced a supply constraint rather than a demand constraint. Otherwise how do we explain such large scale immigration from other parts of the world during this century? My sense is that the supply constraint faced by the growing capital in the developed capitalist countries have been critically responsible for the rise in the real wages of the workers in this part of the world. Cheers, ajit sinha
