The great work dilemma: Education, employment, and wages in the new global economy

Advanced industrial economies in the 1990s face a work crisis in creating wage employment in a changing job market without greatly increased wage inequality. But this crisis is political as well as economic, and the highly popular policy focus on more and better education as a solution to the crisis cannot be conceptually separated from the larger politics which surrounds it. The paper suggests that there is a fundamental conflict between a deregulatory philosophy of labor markets and policies that hope to use educational expansion as a means to increasing employment with higher productivity and wages. Rather than focusing on labor market deregulation, the paper argues, it is education and training that should be made more flexible. [JEL I 28] (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.