The easiest answer to the economic mess? "There are no easy answers." But is it true?

"I've been looking at what self-proclaimed experts were saying about unemployment during the Great Depression; it was almost identical to what Very Serious People are saying now. Unemployment cannot be brought down rapidly, declared one 1935 analysis, because the work force is 'unadaptable and untrained. It cannot respond to the opportunities which industry may offer.'"

-- Paul Krugman, in his NYT column yesterday,

"Structure of Excuses"

by Ken

I'm infinitely grateful that Howie keeps tabs on what the corporate Republicans and the teabaggers and the "centrist" right-wing Democrats are, for want of a better word, "thinking" about the economic mess we're in, and their "prescriptions," such as they are, for what ails us. If I had to try to take any of that rubbish seriously, I would have to dragged away kicking and screaming. Many of those prescribers are too stupid to know better, and many are too dishonest to acknowledge that they're spewing what they know to be nonsense. I become increasingly less certain that it matters to distinguish.

On the subject of unemployment, it turns out to be convenient for alibi-desperate mainstream Dems to throw up their hands in a chorus of the old refrain, "There are no easy answers."

Yesterday Paul Krugman posed the question: "What can be done about mass unemployment?"

All the wise heads agree: there are no quick or easy answers. There is work to be done, but workers aren't ready to do it -- they're in the wrong places, or they have the wrong skills. Our problems are "structural," and will take many years to solve.

But don't bother asking for evidence that justifies this bleak view. There isn't any. On the contrary, all the facts suggest that high unemployment in America is the result of inadequate demand -- full stop. Saying that there are no easy answers sounds wise, but it's actually foolish: our unemployment crisis could be cured very quickly if we had the intellectual clarity and political will to act.

In other words, structural unemployment is a fake problem, which mainly serves as an excuse for not pursuing real solutions.

And so, says Mr. K, we have Narayana Kocherlakota, president of the famously conservative Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, claiming, "Firms have jobs, but can't find appropriate workers. The workers want to work, but can't find appropriate jobs," and insisting, "It is hard to see how the Fed can do much to cure this problem." But we also have Bill Clinton telling an interviewer that unemployment remains high because "people don't have the job skills for the jobs that are open."

Krugman directs them to reports issued recently by the Roosevelt Institute and the Economic Policy Institute, which failed to find evidence of any such thing. The labor shortages that should exist -- somewhere -- because of the unfillability of those jobs for which too few candidates have suitable skills ("major industries that are trying to expand but are having trouble hiring, major classes of workers who find their skills in great demand, major parts of the country with low unemployment even as the rest of the nation suffers") are nowhere to be found, and for that matter no trace can be found of these businesses starved for qualified candidates. (Based on what small businesses are telling canvassers from the National Federation of Independent Business, "the percentage citing problems with labor quality is now at an all-time low, reflecting the reality that these days even highly skilled workers are desperate for employment.")

Why then, Mr. K wonders, is the claim that the problem is structural unemployment so common?

Part of the answer is that this is what always happens during periods of high unemployment — in part because pundits and analysts believe that declaring the problem deeply rooted, with no easy answers, makes them sound serious.
I've been looking at what self-proclaimed experts were saying about unemployment during the Great Depression; it was almost identical to what Very Serious People are saying now. Unemployment cannot be brought down rapidly, declared one 1935 analysis, because the work force is "unadaptable and untrained. It cannot respond to the opportunities which industry may offer." A few years later, a large defense buildup finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy's needs -- and suddenly industry was eager to employ those "unadaptable and untrained" workers.

But now, as then, powerful forces are ideologically opposed to the whole idea of government action on a sufficient scale to jump-start the economy. And that, fundamentally, is why claims that we face huge structural problems have been proliferating: they offer a reason to do nothing about the mass unemployment that is crippling our economy and our society.

"So what you need to know," he concludes, "is that there is no evidence whatsoever to back these claims."

We aren't suffering from a shortage of needed skills; we're suffering from a lack of policy resolve. As I said, structural unemployment isn't a real problem, it's an excuse -- a reason not to act on America's problems at a time when action is desperately needed.

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