Dropping back the frame for a bit - Jeff Sachs is on EconTalk this week, and he says what ( IMO ) should be the idea under scrutiny - employment prospects for p

Dropping back the frame for a bit - Jeff Sachs is on EconTalk this week, and he says what ( IMO ) should be the idea under scrutiny - employment prospects for people without college degrees have declined quite a bit since 1973. The present relatively high debt/deficit load was a result of an attempt to trade debt/deficits for higher employment using a ... somewhat intentionally-blown housing bubble. It didn't work. Something mysterious is "regulating employment down" in the system, and we don't seem to have a good handle on it. Tyler Cowen has posited a weakish "zero marginal product worker" hypothesis that does not seem to be easily decidable. Sachs' idea is that this has been developing since about 1973 and we haven't addressed it yet, and that this failure is a failure grounded in weaknesses of social science itself. I can't find a more evenhanded and clear statement of the problem than his.