Krugman: We need to stop making excuses for an economy that punishes workers

[HomerRamone]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/31/opinion/krugman-jobs-and-skills-and-zombies.html?_r=0

the belief that America suffers from a severe “skills gap” is one of those things that everyone important knows must be true, because everyone they know says it’s true. It’s a prime example of a zombie idea — an idea that should have been killed by evidence, but refuses to die.

<...>

Unfortunately, the skills myth — like the myth of a looming debt crisis — is having dire effects on real-world policy. Instead of focusing on the way disastrously wrongheaded fiscal policy and inadequate action by the Federal Reserve have crippled the economy and demanding action, important people piously wring their hands about the failings of American workers.

Moreover, by blaming workers for their own plight, the skills myth shifts attention away from the spectacle of soaring profits and bonuses even as employment and wages stagnate. Of course, that may be another reason corporate executives like the myth so much.

So we need to kill this zombie, if we can, and stop making excuses for an economy that punishes workers.

[Squinch]

1. Kicking all over the place!

[antigop]

2. +1000 K&R

[jazzimov]

3. Kick for Krugman (and R).

[sueh]

4. K&R!

[Cha]

5. KICK! thanks HomerRamone

[mindwalker_i]

6. Krugman's hit on some truths that deserve a lot more discussion than they're getting

America values capital and people who have it and doesn't value people who do actual work. That's what all this "skills gap" stuff is about: blaming the workers to provide intellectual cover for all the policies that benefit the people who have money so as to free "lawmakers" from having to worry about workers. The whole stock market has been turned into a device that skims money off of people who do work, and gives it to people who have money (already).

Then someone like Elizabeth Warren comes along and states the obvious, and we're all so surprised by it.

[senseandsensibility]

7. Kick for the truth.

[jwirr]

8. K&R

[Populist_Prole]

9. Excellent article

It's bad enough when the oligarchs wag their fingers at the 99 percent. What drives me up the wall are some working class types that are almost self-hating; as if they don't deserve respect just because they are working class. That is some seriously entrenched parochial ideology brainwashed into their fabric.

[rhett o rick]

10. k&r thanks for posting. nm