Embodied human capital unemployment

Adam Smith (1776) devoted the first three chapters to the division of labor in his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. This process, carried far enough, eventually results in a divergence between the distributions of supplies and demands of such horizontally-differentiated distinct types of human capital embodied in different persons, leading to the emergence of Embodied Human Capital Unemployment. We illustrate the relevance of this new concept of unemployment to the U.S economy in the first decade of the 21st Century. This helps achieve a deeper understanding of the current global economic crisis, and inter alia to identification of potentially effective, and potentially ineffective, public policies. (111 words).