Oh, dear. Once more the academic goes into the breach to provide cover for the further Keynsian priming of the pump.

That won’t work. The baby boom started retiring. Already and for the next 20 years the most productive members of the workforce will attrit from making positive GDP effort to being dependent. The 47% will grow to 75%.

Whether I endorse or oppose deficit spending doesn’t matter to me or you. What matters is that the population bulge of the baby boom is irreversibly moving productivity to dependency.

True “change” won’t happen until the taxpayers resent and outnumber and outvote the dependents.

In truth, an unemployment rate of around 20% is about right for an industrialized 21st Century nation. There is no such thing as a ‘High’ or ‘Low’ unemployment rate.Technology and disinter-mediation will actually lead to a demand adjusted employment rate of around 75% by 2020.
Indeed, as the author pointed out, the downwards bearing market pressure on wages is a reflection of a paradigm shift in the value of human workers in a New Millennium.This is a reality that the US, for example, fails to confront.
The solution is serious population reduction. This ugly reality eludes all industrialized nations except for China and Japan perhaps.
The Western nations such as the UK, USA and Western Europe only have population as a tool to keep unemployment manageable, since manufacturing is all but irretrievable, farming has been outsourced, and the US’s ‘human capital’ advantage in technology and education has slipped away.

So not only do the surviving workers still have to work to support themselves and create value for the business owners, but their depressed wages are further stretched to cover others. The still-employed people are less able to build equity, save for the future or cover current costs — unless they jettison their friends and relatives, and that doesn’t effect the social and taxation burden. Every person unemployed reduces the effective income of the employed, so 100 lost jobs can equal 200 or more hits to collective prosperity.

Thanks!