A preliminary report of a collaborative study conducted by ITAA and a team of re-searchers from Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Like the original ITAA study, this one focused on vacancies, but it also looked at a broader range of firms from user sectors as well as from the IT industry. A panel presentation of a surprisingly wide range of views on the issue, including some quite critical of ITAA and the Commerce Department. People go hungry, freeze, stand in lines, and so on. The signs of a worker shortage may be more subtle, of course, but even more importantly, the concept of shortage itself turns out to be rather fragile in a market economy.
Prices go up.
One problem, of course, is that labor markets are not like the markets for most commodities. We can't simply plant a larger crop of computer scientists for delivery in six months, when prices will be high, and store the excess in silos when prices fall. Delay times are very long, and signals are imperfectly transmitted and imperfectly heard, particularly when we consider that they are affecting the future career choices of youngsters. On many occasions, projections of shortages and growth in demand have triggered surges of new students, who, by the time they graduate, face difficult and tight job markets. Even if market signals did get through clearly, the response time is on a time scale of years.