Karl Smith tries to find skills mismatch to answer Paul Krugman's "it's the demand, stupid" story of unemployment, and cites an anectode of Extend Health, a Medicare health insurance exchange firm in Salt Lake City, Utah, which is struggling to find it's ideal candidate: "over 40, with a background of financial services in order to qualify for insurance licensing."
Wait... what??? We have a lack of people in their 40s with finance backgrounds? No, that can't be right. We have too many of them. They are just too busy grabbing bonuses on Wall Street (or have already retired to St Kitts) to bother showing up for an interview in Utah. This is an outrage, but not news: finance, as an industry, has weathered the crisis very well, despite having caused it.
Just goes to show that if only the fall in demand for finance industry professionals were commensurate with the peripheral damage they have caused, if they could somehow be forced to pay for the externalities of their activities, labor market efficiency would hardly suffer. Of course, were this to happen, we'd have "socialism."
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