Why I (Still) Support Obamacare

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, NYT

AT the recent New York Times forum in Singapore, Eleonora Sharef, a co-founder of HireArt, was explaining what new skills employers were seeking from job applicants, but she really got the audience’s attention when she mentioned that her search firm was recently told by one employer that it wouldn’t look at any applicant for a marketing job who didn’t have at least 2,000 Twitter followers — and the more the better. She didn’t disclose the name of the firm, but she told me that it wasn’t Twitter.

At a meeting with students at Fudan University in Shanghai a few days earlier, I was struck by how anxious some of the Chinese students were about the question: “Am I going to have a job?” If you’re a software engineer in China, you’ll do fine, also a factory worker — but a plain-old college grad? The Times reported earlier this year that in China today “among people in their early 20s, those with a college degree were four times as likely to be unemployed as those with only an elementary school education.”

Stories like these explain why I really hope that Obamacare succeeds. Say what?

Here’s the logic: The Cold War era I grew up in was a world of insulated walls, both geopolitical and economic, so the pace of change was slower — you could work for the same company for 30 years — and because bosses had fewer alternatives, unions had greater leverage. The result was a middle class built on something called a high-wage or a decent-wage medium-skilled job, and the benefits that went with it.

(More here.)