Capitalism has not been able to tell many good-news stories recently. The rich world's jobs boom is one of them
volume of “My Struggle”, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s enormous, maddening, brilliant autobiographical novels, contains some depressing life advice. “If I have learned one thing,” he sighs, “it is the following: don’t believe you are anybody. Don’t bloody believe you are somebody…Do not believe that you’re anything special. Do not believe that you’re worth anything, because you aren’t.
The relationship has started to rekindle. As unemployment has continued to fall wages are at last accelerating. A broader measure of whether work pays, where the total of all compensation is expressed as a share of national income, is rising in many rich countries, including America and Britain. Pay is still increasing more slowly than might have been expected given the tightness of the labour market. For that, blame weak productivity growth.
It is hard to dismiss the feeling that drudgery is the price Japan has paid for an average unemployment rate over the past half-century of just 3%, the lowest in the. At the baggage-collection area of Haneda airport, a woman spends her day straightening suitcases after they are placed on the conveyor belt. At an empty bar in Tokyo’s fashion district a world-beating gin martini is mixed by three people, who then stand around as it is drunk.
Yet tumbling unemployment is about much more than statistical trickery. The second big factor, technological change, is genuinely strengthening labour markets. Better tech improves the “matching” of employers with potential employees. Not long ago those hiring put an advert in a local newspaper or spread the word by mouth. Now employers can shoot from the hip, posting vacancies on a slew of jobs websites. In the ten years to 2016 the cost of filling a vacancy fell by 80% in real terms.
Such policies can have a large impact on labour-force participation, particularly for women, suggests research by Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn, published in 2013. Female employment rates have been edging up across theas a whole the pace of growth has quickened .workers with some form of higher education has risen from 22% in 2000 to nearly 40% today. These workers are more likely to be in employment than poorly qualified folk.
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