Knowing and Making

Talking of identity economics , I can now identify the author of almost every Worthwhile Canadian Initiative posting within the first couple of sentences. They are trying to confuse me by throwing two new authors into the mix, but I have figured out their wily ploy. So in the first Frances Woolley post I have recognised , she has mentioned in passing a mysterious fact. Squidward Tentacles, SpongeBob's co-worker, probably did better in school than SpongeBob did. He has intellectual pretensions, to play clarinet and to dance. But these aspirations only make him miserable in his job as a cashier at Krusty Krab. Canada, like many other countries, has expanded access to post-secondary education, but the demand for educated workers has not kept up to the supply. A study by Marc Frenette based on data from the 1980s and 1990s found over thirty percent of university graduates were over-qualified for their jobs. But the quantity demanded and supplied should be equal in equilibrium - at l...

I met someone last week who is starting a new business related to outplacement - which, in case you haven't met that piece of jargon, is " the process of helping to find new employment for redundant workers, especially executives ". It led me to wonder whether the labour market is more efficient nowadays - at least among professionals and younger people. In theory, information technology and the Internet should make it easier to find suitable jobs and also quicker to fill them with suitable candidates. If this is true, a recovery from recession should be faster. Here's why: All realistic models of the labour market will include some unfilled positions in new or evolving businesses. Any business as it changes to meet newly identified demand will create new positions (of course, other positions will be eliminated too - so there are always unemployed people as well as unfilled posts. The state of the economy will determine whether there are more of one or the other). Mar...