New post at Policy Shop. Excerpt:
You cannot fix a problem caused by there not being not enough available jobs by training people to do jobs. It won’t work. To be sure, it would help some people get jobs in areas where there not enough workers with the right skills, given that many employers say they can’t find qualified workers. And it would certainly be a good thing to do for reasons other than unemployment reduction, as a more skilled workforce is just generally better than a less skilled one. But the only time such a solution would be helpful in reducing unemployment is if the cause of the unemployment woes were structural, i.e. if workers’ existing skills were incompatible with employers’ needed skills. But as Paul Krugman has been explaining from the beginning, this is not the reality we find ourselves in.
Read the rest at Policy Shop.