However, there is fatal flaw to this argument—as an overall macro strategyfor reducing poverty, it will be ineffective unless we also increase the overallquantity and quality of opportunities, particularly job opportunities, in society.In other words, by providing an individual with greater education, we havemade them more competitive in the job market, but only at the expense ofsomeone else. In this sense, the strategy is played as a zero-sum game.

Musical Chairs

One widely circulated report this summer—which appears to have caught Mr. Trump’s attention—estimates that China shed five million industrial jobs, 1.9 million of them directly because of U.S. tariffs, between the beginning of the trade conflict and the end of May this year.

That isn’t insubstantial. But it is still small compared with China’s urban labor force of 570 million. It also represents a slower pace than the 23 million manufacturing jobs shed in China between 2015 and 2017, according to the report, published by China International Capital Corp., an investment bank with Chinese state ownership.

Today’s American youth are entering a labor market strikingly different from earlier generations. Over the last decade, global economic integration and the collapse of the Soviet Union have led to what economist Richard Freeman (2008) has called a “dou-bling” of the global labor market, from a pool of 1.46 to 2.93 billion. This has created a chronic shortage of jobs relative to those who seek them. The economic downturn that resulted from the 2007 financial panic has worsened this shortfall (see Figures 1 and 2).2