From AG's speech to the National Governors' Assn today <http://www.bog.frb.fed.us/BoardDocs/Speeches/2000/20000711.htm>:
>An intriguing aspect of the recent wave of productivity acceleration
>is that U.S. businesses and workers appear to have benefited more
>from the recent advances in information technology than their
>counterparts in Europe or Japan. Those countries, of course, have
>also participated in this wave of invention and innovation, but they
>appear to have been slower to exploit it. The relatively inflexible
>and, hence, more costly labor markets of these economies appear to
>be a significant part of the explanation. The elevated rates of
>return offered by the newer technologies in the United States are
>largely the result of a reduction in labor costs per unit of output.
>The rates of return on investment in the same new technologies are
>correspondingly less in Europe and Japan because businesses there
>face higher costs of displacing workers than we do. Here, labor
>displacement is more readily countenanced both by law and by
>culture. Parenthetically, because our costs of dismissing workers
>are lower, the potential costs of hiring and the risks associated
>with expanding employment are less. The result of this significantly
>higher capacity for job dismissal has been, counterintuitively, a
>dramatic decline in the U.S. unemployment rate in recent years.
>
>But one less welcome byproduct of rapid economic and technological
>change, and the necessary heightened level of potential job
>dismissal that goes with it, is the evident insecurity felt by many
>workers despite the tightest labor markets in decades. This anxiety
>stems, I suspect, from a fear of job skill obsolescence, and one
>very tangible measure of it is the pressure on our education and
>training systems to prepare and adapt workers to effectively run the
>new technologies.
"Less welcome" - he's being coy, since that anxiety is exactly why he's let unemployment get so low, a point he's made more clearly in Congressional testimony.
Doug