Bill Clinton says the unemployed don’t have the right skills. It’s not so. [View all]

[salvorhardin]

One of the few outright false statements in Bill Clinton’s speech last night was his claim that unemployment remains high because workers just don’t have the right skills... ...the New York Fed, found that a skills mismatch caused only 1.5 points of the 5 point increase in unemployment after the financial crisis. ... Edward Lazear, a Stanford economist who served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisors for George W. Bush from 2006 to 2009, and James Speltzer of the Census Bureau, found (pdf) the same thing. ... Lazear and Speltzer also found that unemployment shows the same trends across education groups, indicating that what’s causing unemployment is low demand, not that people don’t have the skills necessary to be employed. ... Jesse Rothstein of the University of California at Berkeley, found, like Lazear and Speltzer, that unemployment rose about the same amount across all education groups. He also tries to figure out whether wages have increased. If employers are having a hard time finding skilled workers, they should increase their wages. Did they? No — not even for new job postings, and not even if you correct for changes in the number of people employed by each industry due to the Recession...

Full article with graphs: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/09/06/bill-clinton-says-the-unemployed-dont-have-the-right-skills-its-not-so