Ainda acerca da formação profissional

Já por vários vezes aqui escrevi acerca da formação profissional brandida como arma política (aqui, aqui e aqui, por exemplo).
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Este meu pensamento está completamente deslocado da religião que pontifica no mainstream que nos governa. Assim, foi com surpresa que encontrei estas palavras no livro de Kames K. Galbraith "The Predator State - How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too":
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"Job training is a canonical example of the well-brought-up liberal's (atenção à conotação americana para o termo) urge to make markets work. The policy follows from an argument about the nature of unemployment and low wages, and as with neraly all similar exercices, the argument begins by assuming the existence of a market. In this case, the market is known as the "labor market," and it supposedly matches demand for labor, which comes from businesses, to the supply offered by individuals. If individuals lack the minimal skills that business requires, they cannot compete for jobs. Unemployment must result. The purpose of job training therefore is to move individuals into a position from which they can effectively compete for available employment.
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In this analysis every detail is correct: there are businesses that require labor, and there are individuals who would like jobs but do not qualify for them. It is true that a job-training program can help. Yet the sum of these details falls far short of the claim made for them as a whole. It does not follow that job-training programs reduce unemployment or poverty. It is not even clear that they foster the creation of a single additional job.
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The problem is that poverty and unemployment are not much influenced by the qualities and qualifications of the workforce. They depend, rather, on the state of demand for labor. They depend on whether firms want to hire all the workers who may be available and at the pay rates that firms are willing, or required, to offer, especially to the lowest paid.
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Firms in the happy position of strongly expanding markets and bright profit prospects can almost always find the workers they need, either pulling directly from the pool of the unemployed or poaching qualified workers from other firms (or nations). For such firm, the costs of rudimentary job training for unskilled and semiskilled positions are secondary (como se prova facilmente com o exemplo dos portugueses que emigram para a Alemanha ou Suiça); if workers with appropriate training are not readilly available, they can be trained in-house. Conversely, firms facing stagnant demand and bleak prospects do not add workers simply because trained candidates happen to be available.
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Job traing in most offices is extremely specific to that office: its systems, its bosses, its routines. Generic training programs, the only kind government can provide, cannot duplicate this function.
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if companies are not hiring, job training is irrelevant.
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if you really want to reduce unemployment and poverty, it is obvious from recent history that job training has nothing to do with it." (a não ser na cosmética dos número do desemprego, já que quem frequenta a formação não contribui para os números do desemprego).