Here we are, nearly seven years after the so-called Great Recession was declared to be officially over, yet the job market seems unable to catch up with the rest of the economy. Most mainstream economists are scratching their heads over this, with some of them proposing that the Great Recession has somehow shifted everything into a “new normal” of anemic job growth and stagnating wages.

As someone who has literally written a dissertation on underemployment, along with the review of the academic literature on this subject over the past four decades, my response is that there are major structural deficiencies in the U.S. labor market that create excess capacity (underutilized skills, or human capital), and that many forms of underemployment are not captured in Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data. For example, consider someone who was laid off from a corporate management job or a new graduate with a master’s degree who has to take a retail job just to survive because they can’t find anything more suitable.  So long as the job is not officially considered part-time, these individuals are considered fully employed according to BLS.

However, some economic think tanks have attempted to understand the post-Great Recession economy.  In 2011, the Brookings Institute asked the question whether continued high unemployment was due to lack of education (on the part of workers) or lack of demand (on the part of employers).  The study found that lack of demand was a greater contributor to unemployment in the early phase of the recession, but “the relative importance of industry demand and the education gap converged” after 2009.  The Brookings study came to the conclusion that both contribute roughly half of the unemployment rates, and recommend that metro regions with large “education gaps” develop policies to increase educational attainment.

Before I delve into a critique of the study (or parts of it), I want to point out some of its more interesting findings that tend to get buried in the fine print. First, states with policies that permitted banking deregulation—opening banks to mergers and acquisitions that led to the bubble and bust of the housing market— had significantly higher rates of unemployment.  Conversely, there was no corresponding higher unemployment rate in states that had a higher overall state tax burden or higher rates of unionization (i.e., were not “right-to-work” states). However, we are unlikely to ever hear this news in the mainstream media.  So thank you, Brookings Institute, for letting us know about this.

Now, the dominant worldview of the labor market in the U.S. is almost exclusively defined by the needs of employers. Politicians are bombarded almost daily by employer-funded think tanks and Chamber of Commerce types who demand that we (the taxpayers) do more to “fix” the workforce.  Yet, workers who are unable to find work commensurate with their skills, education and abilities are not only just ignored, they are not even counted.  The Brookings Institute can thus be forgiven because, as a respected, establishment think tank they are subject to the same unchallenged worldview, and their study data came from Census Bureau surveys and BLS-defined unemployment rates.

The Brookings study derived a measure they term the “education gap” and compared it with the unemployment rate in the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas. This “education gap” was derived by dividing the years of education demanded by the average job by the average years of education in the working adult population.  Nationwide, the average U.S. job required 13.54 years of education, while the average working age adult had just 13.48 years of education, a number that hardly seems to be hugely significant.  The authors of the study admit that their methodology tends to discount skills that were learned on the job or in non-academic settings (i.e., experience).  They also do not acknowledge the possibility of credentialism, or the upgrade of requirements for essentially the same job.  Credentialism serves employers both as a form of status-sorting and as an efficient screening mechanism when there are hundreds of minimally qualified applicants for every job announcement.

In the Brookings study, an education gap number over 1 was interpreted to mean that there was an insufficient supply of appropriately educated workers in that region. An education gap number below 1 was interpreted to mean that “the average typical worker has enough formal education to do the average job.”  Please take note that there is no mention (or even consideration of the possibility) that workers might actually be overeducated for the job.  Out of the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan regions, 55 regions had education gaps below 1 (i.e. the “average” worker was minimally suitable for the “average” job).  The average total education gap for these 100 largest metro areas was 0.999, which again suggests that a worker skills deficit is only a problem in certain regions, and certainly not the majority of them.

So, what’s wrong with this study? Technically, nothing. The problem is not with the study itself or even its methodology (based as it is on data that does not capture the full measurement of underemployment and unused worker skills).  It is rather that the way its findings are reported is so couched in the tone, language, and voice of the dominant ideology such that one can easily miss the bigger story.

The linguist Edward Sapir suggests that the power of language affects how we describe, interpret, and experience the objective world.  When this descriptive linguistics is totally captured by dominant elites, everyone else tends to believe that what is good for these elites is equally good for everyone else.  This thus explains the What’s the Matter With Kansas  phenomenon, where the regular workaday masses support policies that actually work against them.  The problem therefore is not so much that anything is amiss with the Brookings study, but rather where were the headlines shouting, “Study finds lack of jobs contributes to unemployment as much as lack of worker education:  Suggests shift in labor force policy”?  The answer is that it is much more convenient (for those in power) to perpetuate the theory that one’s inability to get a decent job—or any job—is solely due to one’s own shortcomings rather than any failure on the part of the job market.  Because to do otherwise would simply be too dangerous.