January 22, 2015
By almost every measure there continues to be a great deal of slack in the labor market. Unemployment rates remain high even for college graduates and even college graduates with degrees in the STEM fields have since little increase in wages in recent years.
Given this backdrop, it is not clear what information the NYT thinks it is giving readers when it reports :
“His company [a cable start-up based in Denver] has created about 60 jobs in the past year, but Mr. Binder said that vacancies often showed the structural problems in the economy. His business sometimes struggles to find qualified candidates for technologically demanding positions, but it is deluged with 700 applicants when it needs to hire an accountant.”
The normal way in which businesses attract qualified candidates is by offering higher pay. Clearly these candidates exist, they just might work for Mr. Binder’s competitors. Insofar as Mr. Binder’s difficulties in getting qualified candidates for technologically demanding positions is evidence of a structural problem, the problem is that we have people in top positions in businesses who apparently do not understand how the labor market works.
Comments