Gene wrote: > The problem with quantitative easing and fiscal stimulus, besides the > exhaustion of the political space to execute them, is that they address the > wrong problem. They aim to deal with a job shortage. But if we look at the > problem as a worker surplus rather than a job shortage, a third tool for > dealing with the macro economy emerges. <
what's the difference between a job shortage and a worker surplus? both involve a deviation of the number of job vacancies available and the number of workers seeking jobs? By the way, the number of paid hours per week for jobs in the US private sector has generally been falling since the BLS started collecting the data. This has "created jobs" in a strange way: as I understand it, the yearly paid hours per worker (as opposed to per job) has risen as people compensated for stagnant hourly and weekly earnings by taking on more than one job (if they can find them) and (in what is now an old story) more of the adults in each household is doing paid rather than domestic work. This suggests that instead of limiting legal hours per job (as with classic 40 hours legislation), we have to somehow limit hours per year per person -- without a cut in hourly pay. -- Jim Devine "All science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence." -- KM _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
