Think about this: just how valuable is getting your bachelor's degree today, compared with 30 years ago? How about even 15 years ago? Not very. Although a bachelor's degree is a requirement for most "white collar" jobs — office jobs — it is hardly any longer guarantee of a comfortable economic existence. I'm sure the readers of this column are well aware of that.
Now, think about this factoid: only between three and four out of every 10 Chicagoans has a bachelor's degree. Think about that: having a bachelor's puts you in a minority in this huge, economically flush city. Free marketers would tell you that that means you should be in greater demand (due to your relative scarcity); yet, as we realized in that first paragraph, it hardly means much. And in fact, as more and more people get bachelor's degrees — and that number increases all the time — it will mean even less.
That is why I am against the idea that "education" is a cure-all.
Well, I'm not really against education. I'm against the myth, that really took shape during the Clinton presidency, that simply getting a post-high school degree is the solution to all of the economic violence that destroys so many American lives. This myth has done more to damage economic progress than anything since the creation of the modern Republican Party.
The two, of course, go hand in hand.
There was a time in this country where simply getting a full-time job meant you could be certain of at least some level of economic security. That time was the post-war era, when New Deal policies and high union density made sure that jobs were valuable and productivity was rewarded by wage increases.
The modern conservative movement, embodied in the person of probably demonic Ronald Reagan (remember the conspiracy theorists who pointed out that when you count the letters in Ronald Wilson Reagan you got 6 6 6?) put an end to all of that by deregulating everything and decimating collective bargaining. The result? Well, how abut this fact: between 2000 and 2006, worker productivity increased by an unheard of 18 percent, as Americans reacted to the Internet bubble burst by clinging desperately to their jobs. Did real wages, adjusted for inflation, increase by 18 percent, or anything even approaching it? Nope. In fact, if you guessed it was anything over 1 percent, you'd be wrong, because the correct answer is 1 percent. Or about $3.20 a week, according to a column by Bob Herbert in Monday's New York Times.
So people are working almost 20 percent harder for 1 percent more money. Do you want to guess how much CEO salaries have increased in that time period? By about $1 million, or close to 10 percent. In 1980, the average CEO made 40 times what the average American workers took home. In 2005 that number was 411. Conservatives cheer and say it's the free market, but of course its not. These corporate executives all sit on each other's board and vote themselves raises while crying about the labor costs their corporations face.
All this, and people are more educated than ever. The number of bachelor's degrees awarded between 1990 and 2004 increased by a full third, 33 percent. Here are some more numbers: in 1972, 12 percent of Americans had a bachelor's; in 2002 that number was 27 percent. But average Americans are still earning less in real dollars and are falling way behind executives.
In his column, Herbert points out that between 2000 and 2006, real earnings for Americans 93 million — that's 93,000,000 — non-supervisory, non-agricultural employees increased by about $15.4 billion. That is less than the executive bonuses given out by the top five Wall Street firms in one year.
More people with bachelor's degrees won't solve that problem. Dramatically changing an economic system where literally several thousand individuals control all of the wealth and choose to re-route it to themselves can be the only solution. In other words, reward work.
How do you reward work? First of all, you regulate corporate governance. Public corporations love to have all of the zillions of privileges that incorporation gives them — no liability for anything, near-infinite ability to raise funds, all of the rights of U.S. citizenship, and on and on and on — but whenever we try to regulate their myriad abuses, they mewl and puke about government. It's one way or the other — either government is good because it protects your rights as a "citizen" and grants you so many privileges and protections, or its evil for any regulation. Not both.
Next, you allow individuals to make the choice to bargain collectively. Conservatives want to deregulate all economic activity, as long as it doesn't benefit honest work or minorities. Collective bargaining has been turned into something political, but it isn't. It's business. Individuals get together and enter into an economic agreement with each other to bargain collectively for wages, benefits and conditions. This process has been made nearly impossible by 30 years of assault on collective bargaining. Protect this activity by removing the third party (e.g., the employer) from the decision making process.
Finally, you eviscerate the health insurance system that allows corporations, who are all so intertwined and interlocked, to offer ridiculously over-valued "benefits" as part of an employee's compensation (e.g., "I haven't gotten a raise in four years, but I get great health insurance!") while essentially not actually providing anything, because the insurance companies, despite being paid to provide a service, actively try to avoid providing that service.
Taking some night classes at a local vocational school will not cure poverty in this country. It may help the random individual or, more rarely, family, but it is not a systematic solution. If a single mother came to me and said, "I need to make more money to support my kid. I live with my mother so she can watch my kid occasionally." I would probably reply, "Have you considered maybe nursing school? It's hard work but nurses make pretty good money."
If the entire West Side of Chicago wrote you a letter saying, "Poverty is destroying our neighborhoods," would you reply with, "Take some classes at Truman College!" Of course not. It's not only wrong, it's ridiculous on its face.
Making sure that the average Americans' productivity is fairly rewarded will more or less wipe out systematic economic violence. Every American getting a bachelor's degree will just mean everybody has a bachelor's degree. The economy still needs tens if not hundreds of millions of people to work the low-level production, retail and service jobs that require basic education but more so just need warm bodies, ability to learn and a good work ethic. Until those jobs are meaningful, poverty will ravage communities, and the middle class will be tortured by an economic insecurity that tells us, over and over — with just a little bad luck, with just one extra-greedy, thieving CEO, we can be left with nothing — our retirement savings wiped out, our homes taken away, our health care neglected. So work harder. Like, 20 percent harder. But we're keeping that extra cash.
jerry 101 / January 10, 2007 9:56 AM
Has someone been reading David Sirota?
All kidding aside, great column. It should get greater visibility. Something like DailyKos or MyDD.