Education Isn't Enough Anymore

On Friday,  Paul Krugman wrote that the technological revolution is leaving even some of the well educated behind:

Today, however, a much darker picture of the effects of technology on labor is emerging. In this picture, highly educated workers are as likely as less educated workers to find themselves displaced and devalued, and pushing for more education may create as many problems as it solves.

I’ve noted before that the nature of rising inequality in America changed around 2000. Until then, it was all about worker versus worker; the distribution of income between labor and capital — between wages and profits, if you like — had been stable for decades. Since then, however, labor’s share of the pie has fallen sharply. As it turns out, this is not a uniquely American phenomenon. A new report from the International Labor Organization points out that the same thing has been happening in many other countries, which is what you’d expect to see if global technological trends were turning against workers. 

As a retired teacher, I've always placed my faith in education. It gave me a good salary and stable employment. It's a faith I've passed on to my children. One son is trying to finish his doctoral dissertation. Our second son holds bachelor's and master's degrees, as well as a community college diploma. Only recently has he found good, steady employment -- at the age of 31. Our youngest son is working on a bachelor's degree; but he wonders if he will spend the rest of his life busing tables.

In short, my children wonder if they have been sold a bill of goods. And, given the new rules of the game, perhaps they have. Krugman writes that, unfortunately, education is no longer the solution to rising inequality. And it was rising inequality which was behind the meltdown of 2008.

What, then, do we do about it?  The answer, writes Krugman, is to rebuild the social safety net:

If the picture I’ve drawn is at all right, the only way we could have anything resembling a middle-class society — a society in which ordinary citizens have a reasonable assurance of maintaining a decent life as long as they work hard and play by the rules — would be by having a strong social safety net, one that guarantees not just health care but a minimum income, too. And with an ever-rising share of income going to capital rather than labor, that safety net would have to be paid for to an important extent via taxes on profits and/or investment income. 

His suggestion is not going to make conservatives happy. They have spent the last thirty years ripping the net apart, claiming it was only a refuge for the lazy. But the economic stabilisers which were put in place after the Great Depression kept the economy from going over the cliff -- until the Thatcherites and Reaganites got rid of them.

It's time the revolutionaries of the right faced the next generation, who feel that they've been lied to.

This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.