June 21, 2015
The usually insightful Matt Yglesias takes a big swing and a miss in his effort to explain why it appears that so many vacancies are going unfilled. He notes the rise in vacancies and also the increased period of time that employers are taking to fill vacant positions.
He then asks the obvious question as to why employers don’t raise wages if they aren’t getting qualified applicants. Remarkably, he accepts the argument that there may be no point in offering hiring wages since workers with the necessary skills do not exist.
This is nonsense. There are people in the country who have almost any conceivable skill needed by an employer. These people may not currently be unemployed, but that just means an employer needs to offer more money to pull the people with the necessary skills away from their competitors.
For example, if the Washington football team wants a top-notch quarterback then Dan Snyder will have to put tens of millions of dollars on the table to get someone like Peyton Manning or Tom Brady to move over from their current team. That is the way labor markets work. This means that if a software designer in Silicon Valley needs top quality engineers then he or she will have to pay enough money to get them to leave Google, Facebook, or wherever else people with the necessary skills might be working.
We are still not seeing rapid wage increases in any major sector of the economy. This implies that either there are not real shortages, just whiny employers, or alternatively we have employers that are so ignorant of the workings of the labor market that they don’t realize they can attract more skilled workers by offering higher wages.
It’s got to be pretty much one or the other; take your pick.
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