[lit-ideas] Re: Points to Ponder as We Plan Our Lives and Politics
- From: Eric <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 12:34:12 -0500
Here's an interesting counter-argument:
http://workinglife.typepad.com/daily_blog/2005/08/robert_reich_ar.html
Robert Reich, Are You Listening?
One of my personal campaigns is to rid the world
of the idiotic notion that we're all dumb and we
just have to get smarter and better trained to
triumph in the economy of the future. It's been
one of those dumb theories that sound good on
paper--who is against being more educated--but has
very little to do with the real world, which is
completely about one thing: the drive to lower wages.
Robert Reich has been one purveyor of this
nonsense, along with some other academics who have
never had real jobs...and despite the evidence to
the contrary, they keep spewing this stuff.
Anyway, the smart people at the Economic
Policy Institute have something interesting to say
about this. It's actually part of their analysis
of the positive job results from last month
(payrolls expanded by 207,000 jobs). This is what
caught my eye:
"In this regard, a longer term view of
employment rate trends by education yields an
important insight into employers' skill demands
over the business cycle. Numerous policy makers,
including Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan,
have attributed the recent slump in employment to
a mismatch between the skills of the U.S.
workforce and the needs of employers. If so, this
would imply that the least skilled would have lost
the most ground in terms of employment rates and
that college-graduate employment rates would have
grown the fastest. In fact, since the last
economic peak in March 2001, the only group whose
employment rates have grown are the least-educated
workers—those who failed to complete high
school—which are up by 2.7 percentage points
(compared to the overall rate, which is still down
by 1.5 points). The share of high school
graduates employed remains down by 1.5 points, the
share with some college but no degree is down 2.9
points, and the share with college degrees is down
1.8 points." [I added the emphasis]
So, actually, being smarter didn't help
people get jobs. My guess is employment is up for
the least educated workers because those are where
more jobs are being created--at the lower end of
the pay scale.
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