“America Needs to Make Its Bad Jobs Better” in The Financial Times.A growing chorus of commentators believes America faces an increasingly jobless future. They argue that the US economy can no longer create meaningful numbers of high-paying jobs, especially for less skilled workers who lack college or more advanced degrees.
There is no question that millions of high-paying jobs have been eliminated and private sector job creation has been anaemic. The US unemployment level did fall to 9.5 per cent in the latest figures released on Friday, but this decrease was mostly because more than half a million people gave up looking for work at all.
Periods of crisis and creative destruction such as the current one are when new categories of jobs are created as old categories of jobs are destroyed. The key to a sustained recovery is to turn as many of these – as well as existing lower-paying jobs – into better, family-supporting jobs.
“Why Canada Needs a Great Reset” in Ottawa Citizen.
With the G8 and G20 summits behind us, most Canadians now realize how comparatively unscathed we’ve come through the great economic crisis. But we shouldn’t be too hasty to pat ourselves on the back. Our economy is badly in need of significant structural changes. Without the pressure of a crisis, there’s a real danger that we’ll settle for complacency, instead…
Thanks to Canada’s risk-averse system of financial regulation, its banks are model citizens, admired around the globe; Canada’s housing markets swiftly rebounded and are already booming again. Though Canada’s gross domestic product declined just as precipitously as the U.S.’s did, we got off lightly when it came to unemployment. Some of Canada’s laid-off auto workers are being called back to work at formerly quiet factories from Windsor to Oshawa, and companies from Research in Motion to Loblaw are hiring new workers to support their growth.
Read the full piece here (PDF).
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Author: Richard Florida
