In the Westminster bubble, Dan Jarvis's speech this morning is being seen as a leadership bid. To me, however, his speech seems to embody the same "poverty of ambition" which he deplores.

One reason for this is that whilst he is entirely correct to point out that living standards were stagnating even before the crisis, he misdiagnoses the problem in perhaps two ways.

First, I fear he overstates the problem of corporate short-termism. Historically, stock markets investors have overpaid for "growth" stocks, which implies they have if anything been irrationally long-termist. And insofar as some companies are "focusing on the short-term buck rather than long-term value" this might be a rational response to immense uncertainty. I applaud Jarvis's call for a rejigging of corporate taxes to remove the incentive (pdf) to take on debt rather than equity, but it's not a solution to our fundamental problem.

My second problem is this:

New Labour didn't see - with sufficient clarity - the downsides of globalization.
They knew it meant cheap consumer goods. But, they didn't recognize that too often, it meant cheap labour too.

If "globalization" is intended to be a euphemism for "immigration", we can dismiss Jarvis immediately as a Daily Mail-pandering ignoramus. At worst, immigration has had only a slight impact upon the wages of the low-paid.

But let's give him the benefit of the doubt. Let's assume he is speaking in the intelligent sense, and referring to the factor price equalization theorem. This tells us that - for a country like the UK - globalization can reduce unskilled wages even without a single immigrant: this is because when we import those cheap consumer goods we are in effect importing cheap labour.

The question is: what to do about this. The answer isn't restrictions on free trade: Jarvis is right not to mention these.

But nor is it to increase skills and education. Even the most highly educated of our young people -doctors and investment bankers - are unhappy. This tells us that education is not sufficient.And if Frey and Osborne are right, even "good" jobs will become increasingly scarce.

Instead, the solution is for the state to raise the demand for less skilled work through expansionary macro policy to create genuine full employment and a serious jobs guarantee. However, whilst Jarvis talks, reasonably, about infrastructure spending and regional policy, he stops well short of these more radical options.

Jarvis claims that capitalism "should work as servant, not as master." But this fails to acknowledge Kalecki's point - that if the task of job creation is entrusted to capitalism, it will continue to be the master.

I fear, therefore, that Jarvis's speech is yet another example of centrist utopianism - the delusion that smallish tweaks to capitalism can transform the lives of the worst off.