your old stand-by doesn't make any sense "there is no such thing as a labour shortage" is totally represented by a shortage of qualified people for the given compensation. This is the basis of every economics supply & demand graph, where explicitly refer to the misalignment as a surplus or shortage.
Can you clarify what you mean by "given compensation", because:
> is totally represented by a shortage of qualified people for the given compensation.
Sounds like "I want to pay X, there's not enough willing to work for X, therefore there is a labor shortage." I know plenty of people who only want to pay $30 an hour for web development work. It might feel like a labor shortage to these people since they can't find many people willing to work for that wage, but in reality where the price they've chosen lands on the supply/demand curve there is almost no supply, but if they increased the wage, amazingly supply goes up too. If 30 seems high enough, imagine $5 an hour instead of $30. The actual number doesn't matter, it's where it falls on the spectrum that is relevant for this example.
If by "given compensation" you meant "market rate" then I think we're largely in agreement.
Yes, this is a kind of insidious framings that Economics makes. By choosing which is the X vs the Y axis, it creates an implied causality [0]. An alternative way of looking at the same situation is that employers are not willing to pay enough for labor.
By framing it as a shortage of labor rather than a shorting of those looking to pay for labor, the employers hope to encourage more labor to flood the market [1] and lower prices further. This is a continuation of how we've gotten to the current predicament with most jobs being de-skilled commodities that don't pay enough to support their workers.
[0] another insidious framing is that by assuming instantaneous response, this downplays the importance of causality. But in the real world markets are not supercomputational.
[1] both private individuals choosing an educational path, and by government policy
It can however occur that a company requires skill x, cannot find a person for this position, and HR still refuses to increase salary for this position.
There is a mismatch in supply & demand of compensation. Not position.
That qualifier, "for the given compensation", being implicit is what confuses things.
It would make sense to say something like, "There is a shortage of skilled workers willing to work for $1 per hour", and no-one would be likely to argue with that - there certainly is a terrible shortage of such workers! But that makes it clear that the problem is the compensation, not the available workers.
If you just say "There is a shortage of skilled workers" without that context, it becomes a incomplete statement from an economics perspective, and the GP is essentially objecting to that and pointing out that once you take the necessary context into account, the problem is not some sort of more general shortage of workers.
