The Education-Jobs Gap

A rigorous, beautifully crafted, and stunningly successful shredding of the human capital enterprise. This splendidly executed investigation offers us a timely picture of 'human capital theory' as the social sciences' own Titanic. -- Ivar Berg, University of Pennsylvania D.W. Livingstone has written a superb book notable for its effective synthesis of quantitative, qualitative, historical, and theoretical approaches. He explores an issue of vital importance: the growing disjunction between education and paid work in advanced industrial economies, and shows how beneath the rhetoric of a 'healthy economy' lies a much more complex reality of underemployment and wasted talent. His book deserves a wide audience among social scientists interested in education, work, or economic policy. -- Beverley H. Burris, University of New Mexico

This text's basic argument is that our knowledge generally far exceeds our job opportunities.

From the Preface: "The education-jobs gap refers to the discrepancy between our work-related knowledge and our opportunities to use this knowledge in interesting and fairly compensated work. [This text's] basic argument is that our knowledge generally far exceeds our job opportunities. We are wasting large human learning capacities and achievements through our failure to recognize the existence of a massive 'knowledge society' in a vast array of formally organized and informal learning practices...

"Most of this book is devoted to documenting the unprecedented amount of present learning activity, assessing the extensive and multi-faceted 'underemployment' of this learning in paid workplaces, and offering an explanation for why this wastage is happening. The pressures in private market-based economies to sell more cheaply than competitors by reducing labour costs and automating production have led to unprecedented numbers of willing workers being made redundant in terms of one or more of the many faces of underemployment. Each of these faces, namely the talent use gap, structural unemployment, involuntary reduced employment, the credential gap, the performance gap, and subjective underemployment, is carefully scrutinized."