Unfilled Jobs and High Unemployment...how can it be?
Economists say the main problem is a mismatch between available work and people qualified to do it. Millions of jobs with attractive pay and benefits that once drew legions of workers to the auto industry, construction, Wall Street and other sectors are gone, probably for good. And those who lost those jobs generally lack the right experience for new positions popping up in health care, energy and engineering.
The Austrian School of economics speaks to this exact phenomenon. The basic premise: recessions occur when there is a misallocation of capital that necessitates liquidation and reallocation to other more needed sectors. This is what we are seeing today. Many business sectors became over extended namely financial services, automotive and housing. Individuals, for a time flocked to those areas, the opportunity cost being lost time training in other potentially in demand jobs such as health care and energy. A recession might be looked at as a necessary lag time in which individuals previously employed in the “bubble sectors” retrain in new skilled areas such as nursing or technology.
