5 October 2010 - structural unemployment

“Structural unemployment” is the root of an important paradox. It is an economics term whose simple technical definition, “unemployment due to mismatch between labor supply and demand,” is unable to find lodging in the normal human brain. The hard-working normal human who tries to understand structural unemployment, who works through the textbook examples and ponders meanings and implications, may grasp it for a short time, but the mental representation soon degenerates to “unemployment that doesn’t go away,” and then we have another doomsayer on our hands. I have money to solve this paradox, and I’ll put it to work as soon as I can find a suitably qualified psychologist.