@Tamerlane I've read a fair amount about the "skills" explanation for unemployment and poverty, as well as a fair amount of stuff strongly disagreeing with it. In my opinion, it does not hold water. Consider that the current young generation are the most educated there has ever been--it's not even close. Also consider that the current younger generation are about the most underemployed there has ever been. They all accepted the "get the skills and the jobs will come" deal and it evaporated. Taxi drivers with doctorates used to be an immigrant thing, now it's baristas and Amazon warehouse workers with doctorates except they're not immigrants, they're young people who if current trends continue will never be able to buy a home. Another thing that is rampant is credentialism--jobs that don't really require a particular qualification, but they ask anyway because there are so many people with those qualifications that they can. What we are
not seeing is a lot of available jobs going unfilled because there are no qualified applicants, which is what we
ought to see if the bad-skills explanation was true.
I've seen it evolve in real time. I work in a university. When I started, a degree in library science meant if you got a library job you had full time employment at a decent wage plus good benefits, with very strong prospects of that wage going up over time to a decidedly upper-middle-class wage. Now, we got all these kids with library science degrees and often a couple of other degrees and certificates as well. They get six month contracts which they hope will recur, often part time, with diddly benefits. Poor buggers are constantly shuffling around from one position to another, hoping and praying to eventually land one of the full time ones. Most of 'em are taking more courses at night at the same time, hoping one more bit of alphabet that doesn't actually make them any better at their jobs will give them an edge. At this point you're better off without qualifications because then you're in the union and it's way harder to fuck you over. Although at that, nearly all the union library clerks also have degrees--they get part time jobs shelving books while they're students, it gets them an "in", they finish their degree, find there's no decent jobs in their field and grab for a stable library job so they don't end up serving those coffees. The same kind of thing is true for the faculty--there are hardly any tenure-track full time faculty positions any more, it's all disposable "sessionals" who are hired to teach a course or two for a semester and then gone, hoping to land another gig, often working at two or three universities and colleges at once. But the university itself, what it does and how and the nature of work, hasn't really changed much in that time, and it's been a public institution all along, so it's not that the fundamental economic nature of the place is different. Political and social changes are what has changed the work conditions.
Bill Gates makes a very interesting example of the kind of economic issue economists tend to ignore. Bill Gates
in specific is incredibly rich because he's a shark; reading about his early career is quite interesting. But somebody
like Bill Gates, and various other people like Bill Gates, becoming very rich is based on the workings of modern copyright and other "intellectual property" law. Without those things Bill Gates would have no money and everyone would be using software that was in effect open source although it wouldn't have that name. That would almost certainly be better for general prosperity than the current state of affairs. So Gates is a stark example of the way economics is not some pristine thing with an inherent nature that can be studied in isolation--it is intertwined with politics, law, and the (changing) nature of society right down to the roots. It would be a far better field of study if they still called it "Political Economy".
One important thing to remember about unemployment is that in the 80s and 90s it was deliberately created. Governments moved away from policies designed to create full or nearly full employment towards enforcing a certain level of unemployment. This was ostensibly based on an economic hypothesis, the "NAIRU" or "Non-Accelerating-Inflation Rate of Unemployment"--the idea that if unemployment got too low, inflation would not merely increase, but begin to constantly accelerate. But the real point was that when there is full employment, employers need to compete more for employees than the other way around, and so workers have the bargaining power to gain increased wages, which may lead to some inflation but more importantly will tend to reduce profits. So during those decades, whenever employment got too close to full central banks would jack up interest rates, triggering a recession and more unemployment, until there was no threat of
the economy becoming overheated wages increasing. More recently, that hasn't been an issue in the first world because jobs have been systematically moved to the third world and wage discipline maintained by threatening to do it more if anyone asks for a raise. Also, wage increases have been avoided by making employment very contingent--the "gig economy"--and systematically breaking unions and passing laws to make unions hard to start or maintain.
But again, getting down to the "political economy" level, one question that never seems to be asked is why a "job" has to be defined the way we do. We're not dealing with a situation of fundamental scarcity right now. With current technology we can fairly easily produce more than anyone needs to buy, particularly since a lot of our "goods" now are digital and can be infinitely copied for barely more than free (manga online, for instance). But with our current economic paradigms, if we could make everything we need with 20 hours of work per week from each person available to work, that would mean a 50% unemployment rate, or maybe 30% plus a lot of people trying to scrape by with inadequate part-time. I'm constantly seeing articles saying that the advance of automation is going to ravage the employment world because everyone will lose their jobs. But inherently, more production for less labour is a
good thing--it's only bad because of how we structure work. It would take a social and political shift to redefine a "job" as 20 hours of work, or whatever an even share worked out to, so everyone could make a living and also have a good deal of leisure.