Education: It's not everything

This past Friday, March 4, President Obama gave a speech at Miami Central High School alongside former Florida Governor Jeb Bush about the growing importance of education in our economy.  As we emerge from the recession, he argued, companies will be looking with unprecedented force for highly-educated workers to increase productivity and create a new generation of American prosperity.

Unfortunately for us humans, many companies have already found these high-skilled workers, and they work for free.

Paul Krugman, in a recent column entitled "Degrees and Dollars", refutes the conventional wisdom that receiving a college degree will dramatically increase your chances of getting a well-paying job.  Instead, citing a recent article in NYT, Krugman notes that rising levels of technology have allowed companies to efficiently carry out tasks for a fraction of the costs associated with college-educated human labor.

Today's economy in America is often described as increasingly "hollowed out".  This means that more jobs are available at the lowest and highest levels, but that middle-income jobs are less prevalent.  Technology has been blamed for this hollowing out, since mid-level jobs can often be completed by computers with much more efficiency than with humans.  But now, as the NYT article shows, technology has begun to fill higher-level jobs formerly done only by those with college and even doctorate degrees.

And, as this editorial from NYT shows, unemployment among college-educated Americans under 25 line up with average unemployment levels almost exactly.  So, nowadays, a college degree doesn't guarantee a job.

Still, as someone who anxiously awaits college notifications, I firmly believe that college is the best path to success, as it always has been in America.  First of all, America's universities are among the best in the world, and the innovation that has fed America's prosperity for decades is in large part due to their integral nature in our culture.  Second, innovation is predicated on humans with critical thinking and entrepreneurial abilities, things computers can never replicate.

But that doesn't change the fact that technology will increasingly hollow out the economy, creating greater class separations and eliminating the middle class, if not kept in check.  As I read through the hundreds of comments on Krugman's column, I noticed a great one making the connection between this hollowing out phenomenon and Karl Marx's prediction about capitalism.  He argued that, eventually, technology and globalization would drive down wages to the point that the proletariat would rebel and socialism would emerge.

Both Krugman and the NYT Editorial Board argue that health care reform and more collective bargaining rights for workers, to name a few, can help revitalize the middle class, keep wages up, and keep American capitalism working for everyone.

Now, how can education play a role in that success?  Although a college degree may not guarantee a well-paying career today, it can bring about the innovation that is key to the success of the American middle class in the future.  And the government must take an active role in improving primary, secondary, and higher education accessibility and standards for this innovation to take hold.

So, to sum up, Krugman is right, and so is Obama - but for different reasons.

Wisconsin: A Marxist Approach

Paul Krugman is a Marxist. 

No, you have not stumbled upon some right-wing blogger criticizing the liberal economist's every New York Times atricle.  In fact, I'm not criticizing Krugman at all.  Instead, I've noticed that his recent column about Wisconsin matched markedly with one of the critical approaches to literature and history that I have studied in my English class this week. 

I'm not calling Krugman a socialist.  But the way he has analyzed Governor Scott Walker's attempt to remove public-sector unions of their collective bargaining rights deals with power, class struggle, and other considerations that Marxist critics take into account. 

Let's remember that, before writing on economics, Karl Marx was a historian who viewed all of history in terms of class struggle.  Later, in Das Kapital, he added economic idealogies of socialism and communism as the eventual next step after capitalism, and thus we remember Marx as the founder of socialist thought.  But Marx's view of history in terms of power and class struggles - the oppression of the proletariat - applies clearly to Wisconsin's struggle today.

The crux of Krugman's argument is that unions are the last powerful lobbying voice for the working middle class among countless influential lobbies of Wall Street investors, bankers, and the rich.  This is the best argument I have heard for maintaining collective bargaining powers for workers - more convincing than merely arguing that budget shortfalls caused by this bargaining are not that bad, for everyone will have to sacrifice in the interest of fiscal responsibility.

And while articles like this, printed in The New York Times, note that this measure would not really cut debt but just put it off, Walker and other Republicans insist that workers must make sacrifices.  Furthermore, Walker has said that unions are not serious about coming to the negotiating table.  As both Krugman and the NYT article note, budget shortfalls could be corrected in other ways, such as higher taxes on the rich, but the Governor is unwilling to do this.

This case is just one example of what a Marxist critic would call class struggles in politics today.  Last year, when the Bush tax cuts were set to expire, Obama was forced to let the cuts continue for the rich as well as the middle class.  Although it was clear that tax cuts for the rich were economically unnecessary and fiscally irresponsible, many Americans and their representatives insisted that the rich continue to benefit at the expense of everybody else.  And even though about 55% of Americans supported ending these cuts for the rich, the bill went through, showing the power of the wealthy lobbies and the upper-class status of the legislators.  This is just one of many examples of the immense power of the upper class, and is an example of why Krugman calls modern America an oligarchy.

From a Marxist standpoint, it is clear to see that power is concentrated with the upper, ruling class.  At the end of the day, union workers will likely be powerless to stop passage of the budget bill stripping their rights.  Public sector unions will thus lose power in Wisconsin and, with the precedent set, possibly other states as well.  And the rich will gain even more influence within our state houses and in DC.

The angry protests of teachers, engineers, and other union workers in Wisconsin are a possible sign of the uprising of the proletariat.  In the Marxist view of history, this is just another step along the road from capitalism to socialism to communism.

I, however, would prefer to keep capitalism around.  So please, Wisconsin, say NO to the bill!