Who holds the jobs ball?

There's a supply-side versus demand-side battle raging in the nation's capital, which seems like old hat.  The new twist is the debate is about how to get Americans back to work, and the disagreement is about the root cause of our unemployment woes.

Is the root cause of persistently high unemployment the on-going recession and the lack of demand for goods and services (and the people who make or provide those goods and services)?  Or, is it the stickier "structural" problem of a disparity between the education and skill levels needed by employers and the lack of those in our labor pool?  My takeaway is that both issues ring-true in Greater New Haven, and I don't think we are all that unique.

Sadly, despite Connecticut's extreme pockets of wealth and density of institutions of higher education, we have a strong hold on the worst achievement gap in the nation. A new study by the Brooking Institution highlights how a long-standing issue for the region is impacting our recovery: "Metro areas with larger 'education gaps' -- shortages of educated workers relative to employer demand -- had consistently higher unemployment rates than other metro areas from 2005 to 2011."  Ben Casselman's blog at WSJ points out that the 1.7% disparity in metro regions' unemployment rates that can be tied to education disparity is compelling, but certainly not a silver-bullet.  

The local data on education attainment and labor market trends points to a supply-side crisis in Greater New Haven.  We must do better in providing quality educations and valuable workplaces skills (more next post on local efforts doing just that, or check-out Boost! and United Way's financial stability work in the meantime).  When resourced and focused on what works, we (that being the collective actions of employers, nonprofits, philanthropy, public entities, and the people affected) can do something about this.  What is much more elusive is affecting the demand-side of things.  Large scale job creation has not and is unlikely to rise out of the nonprofit sector.  We look to a combination of the federal government and the private sector to do this work. The private sector seems neither inspired nor willing to be bold.  And our federal policy makers are stuck debating if any of the tremendous resources under their control can or should be used to impact such things (spoiler alert: not doing anything doesn't make things better).

The situation pushes our thinking: action has to be both beyond one philosophical camp or another and outside business-as-usual. I think there is plenty of us willing to do that work. How about you?