Excerpt:
Lots of responses to Paul Krugman’s column on the future of the labor force with computerization, especially the hollowing-out of mid-skill jobs:
But there are things education can’t do. In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.
So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.
What we can’t do is get where we need to go just by giving workers college degrees, which may be no more than tickets to jobs that don’t exist or don’t pay middle-class wages.
There’s a lot of blogging responses to the piece (Delong, Kevin Drum and Ezra Klein). This invokes David Autor’s excellent work on job polarization (“Rising demand for highly educated workers, combined with lagging supply, is contributing to higher levels of earnings inequality. Demand for middle-skill jobs is declining, and consequently, workers that do not obtain postsecondary education face a contracting set of job opportunities”).
I’m surprised nobody brought up one of the more important recent pieces of work in making sense of the low-skill service economy, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.
Continue here: Some Thoughts On The Expanding Service Industry: Nickel and Dimed, Decent Jobs, Pity-Charity Liberalism. « Rortybomb.
Picture credit: JESSE’S CAFÉ AMÉRICAIN
