Trump’s High-Pressure Economy
“In the 1970s, Arthur Okun, one of the founding fathers of modern macroeconomics, popularized the term ‘high-pressure economy’ to refer to a state of affairs in which unemployment is low and overall economic growth is high. Workers who might struggle to find remunerative employment in a low-pressure economy, where the opposite conditions prevail, thrive in a high-pressure one, when employers have little choice but to invest in improving their production techniques and providing all of their workers with the capital they need to increase output. Eventually, employers might have no choice but to invest more in training low-skill workers, in the hopes of boosting their productivity levels. Judging by past experience, they’ll invest in training only as a last resort. But they’ll get there.”