They tend to say things like, "We can't find enough workers that can write well enough to do their jobs," or, "We can't find enough workers that know how to think well enough to operate independently in a work environment." So what they're saying has to do with our education system and is valid, depending on your point of view.Employers say "we can't find enough workers," while demanding ability far in excess of what the market can supply. The market can supply the workers they need, just not at the level they demand.
We can't find enough workers that can write well enough to do their jobs
Eh, I was more referring to employers who say "We can't find enough software engineers who have 10 years of Ruby on Rails experience and know mongo, django, d3, iOS, backbone, jquery, coffeescript, php, java, groovy, and scala. And are passionate about Bioinformatics!"
Although it's more complex than that. Some employers cry wolf from lack of skills they're unwilling to train. But some complain about intellectual level. This is especially prevalent in software; I don't know about other fields. Interviews need to select. If a CS graduate doesn't understand OO or recursion, yeah, you shouldn't hire them, they probably can't be taught. But the selection process has recently become unbalanced. Interviews contain problems which can only be solved by the brightest 1%. They occasionally find that 1%, so they say "clearly they're out there" and refuse to hire anyone else. I think the underlying problem is a combination of employers being unwilling to train, and being unwilling to settle for the top 30-50% because globalisation has made the top 1% imminently visible. How do we fix it? I dunno. Adam Smith thinks it'll fix itself. Maybe it will. We'll see.Solution, job training
Yep.
It will ... maybe. The process of blanketing the entire world as opposed to western Europe with a free market is going to be long and painful for everyone and only in the extreme long run (hundreds of years) will the highest gains be realized. You're right.