According to Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, creating jobs amidst today’s low-demand, high-debt environment is a tall order. It will require viable structural employment policies, unemployment insurance for laid off people, and -- in the case of the US – facing up to the inevitable shift out of the manufacturing sector into services. Stiglitz, who delivered a DEC Lecture at the World Bank on September 26 on ‘The State of the Global Economy: An Agenda for Job Creation’, warned that far more is broken than the banking and financial systems in high income countries. He argues that a lack of aggregate demand is a huge problem that can only be fixed through smart public as well as private investment in education, infrastructure, and innovative technologies to protect the environment. He also described the current phenomenon whereby productivity in manufacturing is exceeding the rate of growth in demand in the sector, which means jobs on factory floors are being shed. In other words, technical change can induce large distributive consequences and lead to long term unemployment. Listen to my interview with him about what can be done to cure our current ills.
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