Unemployment as a Macroeconomic Problem
Economists often use the term "structural unemployment" for employment problems that arise because of a mismatch between the needs of employers and the skills and training of the labor force. For example, if music schools were to educate many more oboe players than could get positions playing the oboe, we might find that many of them would have to get jobs in other fields. Lacking training for other skilled fields, some oboe players might be unable to get any jobs at all. This would be an instance of structural unemployment.
Structural unemployment raises some questions. If an oboe player were offered a job as a disk jockey, at very good pay, and refused the job because it was not the field for which he was trained, what should we make of that? Is the oboe player really "willing to work at the going wage?" Or should we consider the would-be oboe player as being out of the work force --unwilling to work in the opportunities available to him?
On the other hand, people with little in the way of training suffer more than average unemployment in most of the industrialized countries. This suggests that structural unemployment is really quite an important problem in the industrialized countries at the end of the twentieth century.
Unemployment as a Macroeconomic Problem
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