Skills Depreciate
Ultimately, the best recipe for fighting poverty is investment in human capital. This starts with improving our education system, an undertaking that should include experiments with digital learning, incentives for attracting good teachers and retooling community colleges so they provide marketable skills to less-advantaged Americans.
Human capital is also acquired at work, and that’s why unemployment is so dangerous. When workers leave the workforce, their skills depreciate and they end up locked out of prosperity.
As we reform the tax code, we must focus on providing stronger incentives to work, through the earned-income tax credit and reductions in the payroll tax for poorer Americans. The future of America depends on preventing a temporary economic crisis from becoming a permanent labor market catastrophe.
--Bloomberg News
(Edward Glaeser, an economics professor at Harvard University, is a Bloomberg View columnist. He is the author of “Triumph of the City.” The opinions expressed are his own.)