Economist says Wisconsin must better prepare students for modern economy

The chief economist for the state Department of Workforce Development says Wisconsin will be left behind in the modern economy unless it generates more talented and productive workers.

Economist Dennis Winters made his remarks to a special committee of state lawmakers and citizens studying ways to help high school kids be better prepared for the workforce. Winters says that under some projections, Wisconsin’s per capita income is set to start declining in less than a decade.

Winters says that in order to attract the kind of jobs that could turn that around, students need to come out of school with stronger analytical skills, since the routine, manual labor jobs that were once more common are going away. “If we don’t raise the productivity of the worker in Wisconsin, the whole economy potentially stagnates. Because if you don’t raise the productivity, you can’t pay them anymore, they can’t buy anything else, there’s no product demand for production, etc., etc. So this is very disconcerting as we go forward.”