Not everyone's needs can all be met. Sometimes that is because there is not enough knowledge, as when medical cures are not yet known, engineering concepts not yet invented, and social problems not yet fully understood. Sometimes it is due to the forces of nature which still hold us at their mercy -- prolonged and widespread drought, tornado or hurricane, unexpected earthquake, flooding. Sometimes there are insufficient resources or materials to meet needs. Sometimes there are not enough people or sufficiently skilled people or tools at hand to do what needs to be done, or insufficient transportation to put them at hand. Sometimes those who could help are unaware of the particular needs of others and are simply not available though they could have been. All these kinds of problems have to do with our actual physical and knowledge limitations in the world, limitations that are not arbitrary or artificial, although people may negligently or irrationally compound problems, as when they build large cities in known earthquake zones or arid areas, willingly ruin good farmland in order to foster unnecessary construction projects, or irresponsibly lead risky or unhealthy life-styles.

And, of course, there are the human evils of meanness, inconsiderateness, and negligence that are not yet within our grasp to collectively eliminate. 

But there are also what I consider to be arbitrary or artificial problems, problems for which the remedy is known, but not applied, though for bad reasons. Many of these reasons have to do with practices, conventions, or rules that are either arbitrary or that have some merit, but not in the particular case. For example, when a university closes classes at 25, excluding one student who needs the course, and who could easily be accommodated in the course. Or when a pizza place has a special on one-item pizzas and would rather alienate potential customers and lose business by charging the regular, significantly higher, price for a two-item pizza instead of simply charging a little extra for the second topping when someone wants it. Or the famous Jack Nicholson scene from the movie Five Easy Pieces where the waitress would not serve the toast he wanted for any amount of money but would serve a chicken salad sandwich on toast with something like fries and pickle. (His solution, of course, was to order that, asking her then simply to "hold" the fries, the pickle, and the chicken salad -- although, to show his disdain for their stupid policy of not serving toast by itself, he added she should hold all those item "between her knees".) Or when the rules of a game do not allow for the obvious mistake of an official who errs badly on a crucial call.

Economic skewing is another one of those cases where strict adherence to otherwise useful general rules and policies or practices cause burdens and problems that are not otherwise difficult or impossible to solve. Skewing causes problems when there is work that needs to be done and people available to do it, but the two cannot come together simply because money is required, but unavailable, to bring them together, while at the same time "excess" or "potential" money is "somewhere else" not doing anything or not doing as much good as it could be doing in the hands of either of these people. Although money does not actually cause things to happen in the physical world that could not be caused by some other means or facilitated by some other incentive or motivation it is a convenient, psychologically effective, and often very efficient, productive, and frequently relatively uncoercive way to attract and utilize available resources and labor. All goes well (ignoring questions of fairness) if and when the flow and use of money efficiently, productively, and without coercion facilitates the utilization of resources and labor in a manner that provides the most benefit with the least burden. And new financial mechanisms are constantly being invented and incorporated in the financial realm when thought to be helpful in the physical world, and discarded when found to be detrimental there. But there are general situations in which the money realm actually impedes the utilization of labor and prevents benefits that could otherwise occur. This is where money, needs, and available labor do not "line up" right. It happens when there is either insufficient money altogether (though sufficient physical resources) or when the total amount of money is commensurate with physical resources available but has somehow become misaligned with it. In such a case money "pools up", aggregates, or collects where it is doing insufficient good, leaving too little money (again, compared with resources) to employ available resources where they are needed.

If any economic system that involves an intermediate means of exchange for labor is to actually be of the greatest real benefit, that means of exchange has to be in the right place at the right time, in order to be used properly. It is extremely difficult to get this to happen or to help it happen. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to guarantee this will always happen in any given economic system. Monitoring and judgment are needed. Monetary policy tries to do this after monitoring such things as unemployment, idle plant capacity, and GNP; but it is a somewhat blunt or indiscriminate instrument, particularly when it does not take into account the idle availability of resources that could be used to meet important problems. Increasing total money supply does not help when the money is still unable to get where it is needed, but only continues to be channeled away to unhelpful places. And increasing money supply too little does not help either.

Fiscal policy (specific government spending) can be a help, but generally it tends to be a blunt instrument as well, particularly when it creates more problems in the physical world (by taking money away from the places better served by its presence) than it tries to solve, and even more particularly when it does not solve the original problems anyway, often through bureaucratic ineptness. Spending money does not guarantee spending it effectively, whether in government or the private sector. 

Let me give an example of skewing involving private enterprise, a woman wanted to open an apparel shop that catered to women cancer patients who had had surgery or were undergoing radiation. Bankers in their infinite wisdom did not understand the market for such an enterprise and refused her loan requests. She borrowed from other sources and began anyway, is now successful, and is courted by banks who would like to loan her money. It is in general very difficult for bankers to know the viability of new products and services. Had she not been able to borrow from anyone, a need (and in this case, what economists call an effective demand -- one which consumers are able and willing to pay to have met) would have gone unmet, a market untapped, and her expertise and labor unused. There is no telling how many enterprises that would be successful are never able to begin, for lack of money, though that money could be available. And there are many which are known to fail for lack of sufficient start-up money to get through the initial period. Further, recession or depression can terminate a business that under normal (non-skewed) conditions would be perfectly successful. 

Notice, I am not talking here about money that is all tied up in other ventures which need labor and which thus need these loan applicants to come and work in them instead of trying to start their own businesses. I am talking about money that is available to bring together effective demand with effective labor, but money which is not employed for that purpose. The opposite is when money is poured into enterprises which are unnecessary or for which there is insufficient real (non-monetary) demand or need.

Misalignment of needs, labor, and money seem apparent in a number of larger areas. Children and the elderly need care that family members are not now willing or able to provide. And there are many people out of work who could care for them if there was money available. But children and the elderly without money cannot pay these people. And these people cannot afford to work for free, if they are to pay their own bills. So needs go unmet and labor that could meet them goes unused.

Second, many competent women and minorities are having to compete against white males for a limited number of good jobs instead of there being an expansion of new business and ever greater productivity to absorb all the new people who want to work. Instead of women and minorities being treated as if they were more hands and minds to do important work, they are being treated as more mouths to have to share a fixed amount of money and labor demand, even though there are countless unmet real needs in society. 

This seems particularly wrong when monetary wealth attracts or siphons off labor to produce luxuries and conveniences for the more wealthy, while the less wealthy are not able to purchase sufficient labor to meet more basic needs. Poorer people may be better customers for financial institutions that make large numbers of small loans to them at profitable interest rates, but for the most part poor people are not the best customers for most businesses. In skewed economic situations where money flows more to the already wealthy, without the invention of new luxuries or conveniences the number of profitable careers tends to dwindle relative to the number of people qualified for them, while at the same time the less wealthy do not have sufficient money to put labor to use effectively.

The old joke is that "it is a recession when your neighbor loses his job; a depression, when you lose yours. That reflects the problem in a non-compassionate society that government is not forced to intervene to halt skewing until allowed to or forced to by a constituency that it listens to -- whether in terms of numbers or importance. This does not happen until that constituency itself is confronted by the skewing process. And that can take a long time, since many people, particularly wealthier people, are not personally affected in any tangible way by the loss of labor that does not serve them in some important, fairly direct way. In the meantime large numbers of people are psychologically tormented and their talents are squandered because society does not have a way to put them to use. That waste of talent and labor tends not to be an influential factor in social attitudes and policy making because loss of potential increased benefit is almost never as compelling as loss of current benefits. 

Education of the young, for example, is rarely seen as a community investment with great potential for future community progress and prosperity, but is seen as a drain on community resources. Even parents of school children think of education as being of benefit to their children and to themselves through their children. They do not see it as a benefit to themselves that their neighbors' children are educated. They would if they could see that their neighbors' child was going to discover a cure for heart disease or cancer or the deterioration of old age. Everyone is grateful for the work of Jonas Salk, but few want to make the effort to produce the next Salk. 

Recent political arguments have pointed to statistics that every dollar spent on developmental pre-school programs for the disadvantage, like Headstart, saves society many more dollars in the future on prisons, police, welfare, etc. Even this somewhat strong "negative" argument of how much worse off we will be without investment of this sort is apparently not all that politically persuasive, so never do you hear the "positive" argument of how much better than now we might be with such investment.

Remember, I am pointing out a problem -- the problem of money not being where it needs to be to put people's talents, potential, and labor to use -- I am not arguing for government intervention, automatic or otherwise, as the necessary solution. Private enterprise solves this problem to a certain extent by private loans and by investment opportunity. And, governmentally, in some cases there are tax advantages for risking capital to develop new ideas and potential benefits. But this does not do enough because there are too many people unemployed and underemployed, and it is too difficult for people who have ideas to have the opportunity to experiment with them to see whether they really would benefit others in society.

Finally, skewing on a simple level is avoided whenever people do things for each other that does not require payment. Most of us do things for each other all the time without asking for payment in return, particularly monetary payment. We do things for our spouses or children or parents. We do things for neighbors, or sometimes for strangers in need. In many cases the subjects of our benevolence cannot pay us; in some cases we just don't want them to; in some cases it seems silly to pay or to have to do bookkeeping that is more trouble than the assistance one is offering in the first place -- as if at the dinner table we each had to pay for others to pass the food around to us before they would do it. And periodically there are major social efforts where skewing is solved by direct action that avoids waiting for money to get in to the right hands in order to allow the service to be performed. One example is when farmers from one region fly livestock food to farmers of another region of the country hit by severe weather that has ruined the feed crops. They have feed to spare for such an emergency, and want to do it even though the farmers in the damaged area cannot afford to pay for the food and its delivery. Similarly when people help each other after a disaster of some sort. If one waited for the economic system to come into play to bring about the work needed, it would not occur or would not occur in the necessary time frame.