That is true, but it can also mean that the education system is not teaching to the real economy. There's definitely a significant place for an education which has no reference to the economy, but that is a failure if what you're supposed to be getting is a technical education, or if your aim is to increase productivity. Just because people have spent a lot of time learning something, it doesn't mean that skill or knowledge is actually in demand. Unfortunately there's a class prejudice on technical as opposed to academic education which limits everyone involved. Ideally everyone would study some balance of academic and technical, both before starting their career, and also intermittently throughout their life. For instance, a lot of academics could do with a technical methods-based education on stats, use of IT in particular areas, and so on. And a lot of people who have done academic degrees (whether in sciences of humanities) are a long way from actually being useful in a real job. A lot of people who are in careers which are over-supplied, low-paid, etc, really should be cutting their losses and training for another career. And a lot of people who are employed, even in high positions, have deficient understanding of areas which are necessary to do their job well.

On the other hand, a lot of poorly paid careers are actually somewhat important, they're just (unfortunately) treated terribly as far as pay and conditions go. For example, journalism, teaching and caring for the elderly are all career paths/areas which are low paid and (perhaps) over supplied, but I don't think I'd want people to start leaving these jobs en masse to say, work in marketing or finance.

And on the academic side, I'm not a fan of the idea that everything should be focused on the career side. A world without the humanities might get university graduates earning more money, but it'd feel poorer in some sense at the same time.

> It would be a massive waste of my training to be working in an unrelated field

This is an example of what I'm talking about.

What's more of a waste of your training? To be work in a career field only 60% overlapping with your training, or to be unemployed (with 0% overlap) ?

JFC

:(

Depends. If you never get a job in your field again because of downshifting into unskilled labour it's more of a waste than losing a year to unemployment and job search.

If you want to read more on this look up "search costs"

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1465-7295.1976....

Great point. Better to be employed than not, and of course no job is a perfect fit.

Would be interesting to count one as being only 60% employed, in the example you give. So if you had 100 million people all employed at 60% fit, that's an 'effective' employment of 60 million. Of course, I have no idea how one might measure that.

But I am not an economist, there may be similar (or superior) measures for underemployment.