Megan McArdle has perhaps one of the best blog posts I’ve read in a long time. She actually comes up with a smart, viable suggestion for retraining workers.

But given my own experience, it strikes me that we might do better by targeting employment–offering employers a subsidy for hiring displaced workers into a job that pays $10 or more an hour.  For skilled work, you might need to pair this with training.  But that would give the workers what they actually need–a job on the resume and a new skill–rather than a useless diploma.

She uses her personal experience to demonstrate why so many training programs fail to lead to jobs and how through a fortuitous set of circumstances she was able to lever training and experience into a new job.

It’s a good read and really topical.