Unemployment represents a crisis of imagination, a failure to figure out how to make potential workers productive in the modern economy.(Via Arnold Kling.)
The Tragic Consequence of imagination, Professor Glaeser seems to suggest, is that imagination can become entrenched, and entrenched can become sclerotic. The Great Lakes Rust Belt, after all, probably put Silicon Valley to shame, whether with Bessemer steel in Pittsburgh or Ford's assembly lines in Detroit or Armour's packing houses in Chicago. Scientific Management in the Taylor-Gilbreth mode, after all, augmented the productive capacity of people with limited intellectual capital (at the cost of turning the worker into an appendage of the machine, to borrow from Karl Marx). To some extent touch screens at fast food joints that allow semiliterate people to enter food orders do the same thing, although with relatively less labor augmentation.
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