Item — HN Reader

One question perhaps worth asking: Why do this piece and the many similarly tiresome pieces preceding it mostly fail to mention how higher salaries offered would motivate graduates and other unemployed people to acquire these missing skills?

Put a different way, fifteen or so years ago: "Economists who have studied occupational shortages generally hold the view that in an unconstrained market, supply will equal demand at the 'true' market price. If demand exceeds supply, salaries will be bid up until the market clears." [1]

Also of interest but perhaps unrelated, "At Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase average pay slipped by about 5% in the first nine months of last year, a figure that is probably representative of the wider industry." [2]

[1] http://www.bls.gov/mlr/1999/03/art2full.pdf

[2] http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21592642...

1 comments

In Europe, money isn't everything, especially for youngsters choosing to study for an academic degree. The idea of "following your dreams" or studying what you like is still big. Because studying is often subsidized, people can make that choice easily because they won't have an enormous amount of dept in return for a "worthless" degree. Before the crisis finding a job with whatever degree wasn't hard and the previous crisis (1980s) didn't do much to prevent choosing "worthless" degrees either.

Most of the people growing up since the late 1960s have had the possibility to do whatever they wanted without regard for future earnings and sustainability of their lives. Just re-schooling people with degrees in the humanities, fun-studies, social sciences, and so on to science, technology and engineering sounds easier than it is for these people have made conscious choices to neglect and dismiss mathematics and science courses since leaving primary school. To some degree, their whole social and cultural being seems to be incompatible with that of science and technology.