College Grads / A demand problem, not a skills problem

The same factors that are hurting the job market are making it hard for start-ups and small businesses to succeed: consumers aren’t spending enough money to create an expansion on their own, and austerity-driven cuts in government spending are weakening economic growth.

As Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute puts it, the declining prospects of young college graduates are clearly the result of “a demand problem, not a skills problem.”

Individual effort and ingenuity can’t guarantee success in either finding or inventing jobs.

Our national problem may be that we assume entrepreneurs are superheroes who can leap over macroeconomic constraints in a single bound, especially if liberated from the villainous clutches of government.

But entrepreneurs can be crippled by a shortfall of demand for the goods and services they offer. And like the rest of us, they need bread, or at least cake, to survive.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor

via Nancy Folbre: Let Them Make Their Own Jobs – NYTimes.com.