January 02, 2014
That is not exactly what he said, but that is what his comments in a Washington Post interview mean. Dimon said that the United States is suffering from a skills gap where firms can’t find workers with the skills they need. Dimon claimed that this skills shortage could be raising the unemployment rate by 1-2 percentage points.
In a market economy when there is a shortage of particular item, in this case skilled workers, the price is supposed to rise. There is no substantial sector of labor market seeing wages that are even keeping pace with overall productivity growth, much less rising due to shortages.
If firms really have slots going open because they can’t find workers with the skills they need then the problem is that we have employers who don’t understand how markets work. If they raised wages firms could attract skilled workers away from their competitors and more workers would try to acquire the necessary skills for their open positions. Perhaps if CEOs were required to take introductory economics courses we could solve this problem.
As a practical matter, we see no evidence to support Dimon’s assertion. There are no major occupational groupings with high ratios of vacancies to unemployed workers, nor do we see increases in the length of workweeks, which is another way that employers would deal with a shortage of skilled workers.
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