(Community Matters) Paul Krugman brings the equivalent of the AAS’s PolitiFact (fact check) to bear on the narrative being built around unemployment – today’s column on current mass unemployment. In fact, I was just in a conversation about this issue last week, my colleague citing several instances of which they were aware.
But, Krugman asserts that arguments of a structural shift in employment are unfounded and that researchers are unable to locate those mythical companies with lots of jobs and no qualified candidates.
Increasingly around dinner tables we’re hearing the executive class bemoaning Paul Krugman’s populism. His professorship at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public & Int’l Affairs, degrees from Yale & MIT, his Nobel Prize in Economics, and his int’l reputation in the academy (ranked 13th most influential from around the world) for research on intn’l economics & Japan’s liquidity trap, doesn’t faze us from dismissing his proposed solutions as scholarly naivety (probably as much because these proposed solutions don’t support our own perceived financial interests).
He’s exactly what we need today – a reputable, eminent economic advisor beholden to no political party or economic interests with a populist bend. I hope the shift in the Obama Administration’s economic team will bring more Keynesian theorists to influence – at least for the interim, then it’ll be time to shift influences.
like navigating between technical & fundamentalist analysis, there’s better and worse times for each
Community Matters 
Just wanted to point out – and I know you know this – Keynesianism and populism are two different things. The Tea Party is populist, but most of them oppose the stimulus. I’m not sure Krugman counts as a populist.
Complaints about structural unemployment due to outdated skills of older workers remind me of the eternal rich people’s lament about how you just can’t good help these days. This is the same tut-tutting that leads the Bush/business wing of the Republican and Democratic parties to favor high immigration rates. Need to get some good employees and if our homegrown people aren’t good enough, import ‘em. Which is fine if you are running the country like a business (dump the unproductive people, hire ambitious new go-getters), but we’re not.
As far as your rich friends’ apparent fear of populism and big deficits – if the alternative is paternalism and exclusive political class support for one sector of the economy (the financial sector) – I’ll take the populists.