Is the U.S. in a Disadvantaged Position?

This is a fair question, given uncertainties regarding employment prospects in the years ahead. Are there hidden elements affecting time use patterns which are hard to discern? How do supply and demand factors differ in the U.S. from other nations? However, my perspective is a bit different from some who recently forecast problems in terms of national labor "surplus" or "shortages".

Upon closer examination of several links, their employment concerns turned out to be too abstracted for my taste. That is, employment dislocations were presented as problematic for given nations and present day institutions, as opposed to the individuals and communities which bear the actual consequences. Therefore I decided not to link to the sources which prompted this post.

For one thing, human capital in aggregate does not readily conform to either national or institutional standards and expectations. Human capital is not some abstracted piece of flim flam to be shuttled back and forth to preserve the wealth of nations. While some individuals will remain able to move to nations and regions "where the jobs are", this is more likely to occur at the margins. Moving to wherever jobs appear to be, is not always as simple as it may seem - particularly as we get older. Indeed, it's not always easy for individuals and families to move to another state, unless the job on offer includes a substantial wage.

Instead of thinking in terms of mass labor movements, solutions to mismatches in skills formations need to be internalized and decentralized. It's possible to do so by envisioning skills, services and product formation on person to person terms. In the process, many valuable choice sets and alternatives would be rediscovered: options which had long since been discarded or deemed "substandard" by enterprises and governments which had no room to utilize them.

The main reason we are having this quite ridiculous problem of skills set mismatches, are the artificial perimeters for economic access which governments and private industry have created. When one thinks how many have already given up on their own resourcefulness as a result, false limitations become a travesty. While governments may be reluctant to consider serious production reform, it is well past time to do so, just the same. Already, knowledge use work has begun a decline in the last decade, and production reform is needed to preserve the complexities of economic formation which matter most. What's more, production reform is needed to restore the growth trajectory which was abandoned in the outset of the Great Recession.

In summary: it's not about what nations are anxious to do with their existing capital and infrastructure formations, but how capital and infrastructure can be better adapted to work for individuals and communities through decentralization and cooperative, voluntary efforts. When individuals can't always move to wherever jobs happen to be, it's time to rediscover how to make skills potential count in the places we already inhabit.