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MAREK GÓRA EDUCATION FOR LIFE-LONG ACTIVITY
preventative healthcare is much more effective than curing people and financing their pensions, I shall not discuss this issue in any further detail in this paper. Preventing skills inadequacy is similarly important. People retire early, not because they are old, but because their skills have become outdated. They are not necessarily low, but even if they are at a quite high level, they are simply not in demand on the labour market anymore.
Labour markets in the 21st century Labour markets changed radically at the end of the 20th century – a fact that needs to be taken into account as longer labour market activity is discussed. The changes are huge and complex. Three issues needing to be pointed out here are that: • labour used to be homogeneous (meaning that the vast majority of people were very similar as workers), while today labour is heterogeneous, with individual characteristics (especially education and skills) highly diversified, just like the jobs themselves – the matching of workers and jobs is thus increasingly difficult; • while economies have always developed in cycles (with quantitative adjustments), restructuring involving qualitative adjustment has happened only once per a number of cycles until the present era, which is one of permanent restructuring, and a coexistence of quantitative and qualitative adjustments that demands constant adjustments to the structure of the labour supply; • various kinds of (direct, indirect, quasi-) taxes used to reduce remuneration in the past by production factors (labour and capital) much less than they do today, when workers and entrepreneurs are strongly underpaid, receiving (together) as remuneration, only around half of the value of the product they produce – and the key reason for this is ageing (a change of population structure by age). Citizens of rich developed countries have partially lost their understanding of the fact that labour creates welfare. For a number of decades, the demographic dividend financed generous transfers, this leading to a perception known as the vicious circle of welfare without work. Labour market analysis has to take those changes into account. The application today of theoretical patterns that used to fit the reality decades ago may mislead and give rise to suboptimal decisions.
Consequences for education The new situation on labour markets requires that our thinking on many issues related to education be adjusted. Here I discuss only a few key issues related to the complex labour market – education relations.