Older people like myself think of 'good jobs' or 'middle class jobs' as being like the one Fred Flintstone or Homer Simpson has. It means that one's pay-check suffices for an 'affluent Society' life-style where enough money is being saved for the kids to go to College and health care and generous pensions are taken for granted.



One problem with this nostalgic view is that people are living much longer- so pension provisions can't be as generous- and also that there is 'Baumol cost-inflation' in services like Health Care and Higher Education.



One way of squaring the circle is to embrace subsidiarity and 'Tiebout sorting' such that you have highly differentiated regional economies anchored by a technologically innovative 'Mittelstand' of SMEs which work closely with Schools and Training providers. Health Care costs can be kept down by investing in preventative 'Healthy Living' Public Health Programs tailored to the specific preferences and constraints of the local population. Older people can be given second careers of a meaningful and longevity increasing sort within their own communities. Youth, too, has a stable and supportive path from Education into Industry and integration into the Community.



This approach gives weighting to 'skin in the game' stakeholders rather than Olympian administrators or Public Intellectuals who prefer to continually raise compliance costs by shifting the burden of financing Socially desirable outcomes to the productive sector of the economy.



Economic duality, after all, is often about resource extraction from the backward sector. The current malaise of sclerotic advanced economies, like that of France, as well as that of emerging economies, like India, whose growth is stalling, involves a highly inequitable transfer of risk onto the shoulders of those least able to bear it. The flow of wealth, however, is in the other direction.



Bear in mind, it was Government policies which created the structural duality in the first place. In both France and India, there was a choice made by Mandarins to back capital intensive ventures while exploiting as 'cash cows' the labor intensive sector. The influence of 'Public intellectuals' prevented Higher Education becoming elastic in its response to the needs of both Employers as well as that of young people entering the labor market.



The fault here, surely, is that of the elites whose own progeny are assured of a rosy future.