February 2012, Dean Baker

There is a growing chorus of policy analysts and pundits telling the country that we could have millions more jobs in manufacturing, if only we had qualified workers. This claim has the interesting feature that it places responsibility for the lack of jobs on workers, not on the people who get paid to manage the economy (e.g. the Fed, Congress, the White House). This issue brief looks at data that contradicts the suggestion that so many people are out of work because they lack skills.

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