> ...SNIP...
>
> In the US case, today's unemployment has nothing to do with skills. The
> explicand we're talking about is the long-run growth of labor productivity,
> not the unemployment rate. This is the key point, in my view: skills can't
> have much to do with America's current economic problems because its current
> economic problems (going back at least 15 years) don't have anything to do
> with productivity. They have to do with unemployment and inequality. But
> yes, in principle, based on the general principle above, you should expect
> that productivity growth would have been higher with greater skills in the
> past, and will be limited in the future to the extent that skills don't
> increase as fast as they used to.
>
> That said, I'm certainly open to any good, well-grounded critiques of the
> human capital perspective. By well-grounded, I mean one that knows the
> existing literature and offers a solid theoretical and empirical challenge
> to it.
>
> SA
>
>
I thought the general argument for increases in productivity were rooted in
studies that show Americans working longer and harder for effectively no
more in wages and salaries - not in much of anything to do with the
development of new, more sophisticated skill sets.
Along these lines, the Take Back Your Time (http://www.timeday.org/) folks argue - pretty convincingly - that a less overworked, more rested, more cooperative and more overlapping workforce would be more productive. Now, all of this operates within the parameters of assuming the ongoing reproduction of existing labor-capital relations but enhancing profits by rationalizing labor demands and processes... but there you go.