They also point out that if you prevent employers from checking credit scores as part of the job application process, you can significantly boost work-force levels in poor credit areas.

Ex-Offender Policies. Robert Cherry touts municipalities that delay asking about job applicants’ criminal records until the final stages of the hiring process. In one Minneapolis study, only 6 percent of the ex-offenders were hired when they had to announce their criminal record up front. When a new application form without that requirement was used, Minneapolis hired 60 percent of those with records.

Mobility vouchers. A great mobility divide has opened up in America. Since 2010, those with college degrees have increasingly been moving across state lines to get jobs. Those with a high school education or less have seen their mobility rates decline. Eli Lehrer and Lori Sanders recommend mobility grants, so the unemployed can move to where the jobs are. Migration zones would use federal and state tax credits to fund apprenticeship programs to ease the way for newcomers.

Career Pathways. In 2008, 90 percent of high school seniors said they were going to college. By 2013, only 32 percent of people in their mid-20s had a four-year degree. The “College for All” movement is misconceived, argue Robert Schwartz and Nancy Hoffman. The better approach is career and technical education, C.T.E.s. These can be schools that begin at the high school level and blend into the community college level and provide training for specific jobs without forcing students to complete a full four-year college course load.

Union Reform. Writing in City Journal, Oren Cass argues that worker co-ops, of the kind found in Sweden and Denmark, are better suited to today’s flexible labor markets than old-fashioned unions. These would be worker-controlled and worker-funded organizations that would train workers, represent workers and look after worker interests far beyond any individual workplace. They wouldn’t be compulsory, but they would be civic organizations providing support to workers in all aspects of their professional lives.

Right now, Republican politicians have shown astonishingly little interest in these and other ideas, except Senators Marco Rubio, Mike Lee and Tim Scott, Representative Kevin Yoder and a few others. And I confess, I don’t expect the G.O.P. to be hurt by the decision to stiff its own voters. The historical pattern is clear: The less Republicans do for workers, the more alienated the workers become and the more they vote Republican.

But doing something to address the biggest problem of the age, which is wrecking thousands of communities and millions of lives, would be good for the country. That used to be the sort of thing politicians were interested in.