While I’m predisposed to agree with Jared Bernstein and Ben Spielberg that income inequality is a real problem that deserves serious attention, I’m quite disappointed in their prescriptions, most of which focus on education. Is education really the solution to income inequality? To my ear that sounds like a “Field of Dreams” strategy. It simply isn’t true that more people getting college degrees automatically creates more jobs for which college degrees are needed. What it does mean is that people with college degrees will crowd out people who don’t when competing for jobs that don’t require college degrees. The beneficiaries of such a system aren’t workers generally but educators.
Meanwhile, we’re already spending twice as much in real terms on education as we did 20 years ago even as during the same period income inequality increased substantially.
That raises several questions. How much do we need to spend on education and where will the money come from? And how do they reconcile their prescription with the tremendous increase in education spending contemporaneous with an increase in income inequality?
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For some people education is the answer to making a good income. For others, their skill sets are different, requiring a different approach. Nonetheless, In this country we have become subservient to the belief systems and recommendations of big brother government practicing under the guidelines of social progressive policies.
Consequently, everyone must adhere to big umbrella-like governance who decides everything that is good for us — including health care options, educational pathways, jobs, incomes, etc. Any derivation from the norm being set by progressive policymaking is immediately excoriated and labeled in one of the feared “ism” categories, dealing with race, class, gender and so on.
It’s been a successful political gig so far. However, in doing so the etiology (and real long term remedies) of our no-to-slow-growth economy, societal disruptions, and public pessimism, that nothing will change, are below the radar, brushed aside by political elites, supplanted by PC adamancy, especially in academia, which has effectively disallowed honest, contrary and ultimately critical thinking to flourish among the general populace.
All of this assumes there will be jobs of any type in large numbers, but until the Fed can get the economy back into bubble mode, nothing is going to happen.
On the other hand, Republicans and conservatives could be correct. Everything they believe could be the problem. That would mean that the regulations and anti-business atmosphere began when President Obama took office, and everything was peachy keen for the 25 years prior. Really!!!
As I’ve mentioned before one of my concerns is that higher education isn’t for everybody. 50% of the population, tops. What are the rest of the people supposed to do? Sit around and smoke dope all day? Brave New World!
TastyBits:
I certainly don’t number among those who think that all problems in the United States date to January 20, 2009. I think they go back quite a bit farther. I’d put the date at 1979.
However, I don’t think that the administration has been swinking tirelessly to improve the economy, either. I think they’ve just got the wrong instincts.
@Dave Schuler
You see a larger picture across a large spectrum. It crosses political administrations and congresses, and it is far from simply about politics.
I sound like a broken record because my theory is that the problem is at a fundamental level. If you use an ingredient that is a slow acting poison, it will take years to kill you, and if it tastes good, you will be reluctant to give it up. If somebody claims it will cure the problems it is causing, you will increase the amount you take.
This is what occuring in the education industry. Soon, a Masters degree will be considered entry level for many jobs.
“It simply isn’t true that more people getting college degrees automatically creates more jobs for which college degrees are needed.”
But Say’s Law……
Steve
Some figures that I discovered recently:
Mean years of schooling in 1980:
United States: 11.9
Japan: 8.9
United Kingdom: 7.5
Italy: 6.1
France: 6.0
Germany: 5.7
These are the original G6 countries, the countries with the largest advanced economies in 1980. UN Human Develoment Report Use of the mean here is akward, but I was pretty surprised at the number of Western European countries whose workforce didn’t receive secondary education.
Note that for the most recent year in that report, PD, that the U. S. is at the high end of mean educational attainment among OECD countries. For comparison here’s the U. S. median years of education. Translated that means that more than half of Americans have high school plus.
How that translates into a burning need for more formal education is lost on me. Considering my link a bit more closely they may think that as the U. S. becomes majority minority as the phrase has it we’re going to have a problem. I agree but the problem will be cultural not years of educational attainment.
Another problem is that income inequality is a growing problem in every developed country if you look at it prior to taxes and redistribution. Effective inequality appears much worse in the US because most other countries are much more redistributive than the US. So, income inequality may be the “new normal.”
A few years back — the early 1990’s — I was looking through a US Government publication called THE OCCUPATIONAL OUTLOOK HANDBOOK. (Standard Labor Department publication, published every other year, free — you’ve likely seen it somewhere.) I was looking for their prognosis of aeronautical engineering careers — it wasn’t encouraging, as I recall — but inevitably glanced through some of the preceding chapters and general statistics.
And I came across a short discussion, just a few paragraphs, mentioning that the number of college graduates in the population kept climbing at a steady pace but that it did not appear that jobs requiring college degrees increased at a similar rate, and that by 2005, the number of people with degrees would be greater than the number of jobs that needed degrees. It seemed likely that with people with degrees would increasingly displace non-degreed people in the job market, regardless of actual need. This was presented as simple fact; there was no discussion.
So that was 20 years ago, and the first point is, The people who study US employment have known for over 20 years that we would have a glut of college graduates. The second point is up to 2005 or so, it actually made sense as general policy to tell people to get some college, because college educated people would always find it easier to get decent jobs. The third point is that most of the people giving this kind of advice got their education in the 1950’s, 1960’s. 1970’s, etc. and most of their experience before 2005, and never had the slightest clue that their happy forecast of good employment for college grads would ever turn bad.
I mean, in the 6000 years or so in which we’ve divided advanced societies throughout the world into poorly educated and well educated categories of people, just how many times and places have there been where well educated people were a discardable surplus? Not too many, I’d think. And who on earth in those bygone days would have expected modern democratic America, famed for its egalitarianism and high degree of literacy, to be so determinedly brusque in its treatment of its unloved over educated excess?
Just so we are working with good data, public spending on higher education has actually decreased about 20% per student since 2009. The 29% increase in tuition since then is being paid for by parents and students.
Steve
Steve,
I think I’ve seen those figures. Still, there’s a substantial difference between 29% and 20%…
You guys may, or may not, be aware that Milton Friedman was decrying the (govt subsidized) expansion of post high school education some 40 years ago.
I mean, in the 6000 years or so in which we’ve divided advanced societies throughout the world into poorly educated and well educated categories of people, just how many times and places have there been where well educated people were a discardable surplus? Not too many, I’d think.
Peter Turchin would call this an over-abundance of elites )or symptomatic of same), and he’d also point out that it happens fairly regularly, in historical terms.
India has had more college grads and more post-grads than it’s had jobs for college grads or post-grads for the last half century or more. Indeed, at some points in that period it had more grads and post-grads than it had jobs period. There were times when to get any sort of job you needed a PhD.