The awful truth: education won't stop the west getting poorer

[marmar]

from the Guardian UK:



The awful truth: education won't stop the west getting poorer
Skilled jobs will go to the lowest bidder worldwide. A decline in middle class pay and job satisfaction is only just beginning

Peter Wilby
guardian.co.uk, Monday 28 February 2011 21.30 GMT


Western Europeans and Americans are about to suffer a profound shock. For the past 30 years governments have explained that, while they can no longer protect jobs through traditional forms of state intervention such as subsidies and tariffs, they can expand and reform education to maximise opportunity. If enough people buckle down to acquiring higher-level skills and qualifications, Europeans and Americans will continue to enjoy rising living standards. If they work hard enough, each generation can still do better than its parents. All that is required is to bring schools up to scratch and persuade universities to teach "marketable" skills. That is the thinking behind Michael Gove's policies and those of all his recent predecessors as education secretary.

But the financial meltdown of 2008 and the subsequent squeeze on incomes is slowly revealing an awful truth. As figures out last week from the Office for National Statistics show, real UK wages have not risen since 2005, the longest sustained freeze in living standards since the 1920s. While it has not hit the elite in banking, the freeze affects most of the middle class as much as the working class. This is not a blip, nor the result of educational shortcomings. In the US, which introduced mass higher education long before Britain, the average graduate's purchasing power has barely risen in 30 years. Just as education failed to deliver social democratic promises of social equality and mobility, so it will fail to deliver neoliberal promises of universal opportunity for betterment.

"Knowledge work", supposedly the west's salvation, is now being exported like manual work. A global mass market in unskilled labour is being quickly succeeded by a market in middle-class work, particularly for industries, such as electronics, in which so much hope of employment opportunities and high wages was invested. As supply increases, employers inevitably go to the cheapest source. A chip designer in India costs 10 times less than a US one. The neoliberals forgot to read (or re-read) Marx. "As capital accumulates the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse."

We are familiar with the outsourcing of routine white-collar "back office" jobs such as data inputting. But now the middle office is going too. Analysing X-rays, drawing up legal contracts, processing tax returns, researching bank clients, and even designing industrial systems are examples of skilled jobs going offshore. Even teaching is not immune: last year a north London primary school hired mathematicians in India to provide one-to-one tutoring over the internet. Microsoft, Siemens, General Motors and Philips are among big firms that now do at least some of their research in China. The pace will quicken. The export of "knowledge work" requires only the transmission of electronic information, not factories and machinery. Alan Blinder, a former vice-chairman of the US Federal Reserve, has estimated that a quarter of all American service sector jobs could go overseas. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/28/education-jobs-middle-class-decline

[Jmaxfie1]

1. This is why Freetrade is BS!!! n/t

[vim876]

5. Free trade...

if that's what we had, might work. But since only capital can move freely across nation-state borders, while labor cannot, this isn't actually free trade. It's free exploitation. We haven't tried free trade.

[Lasher]

2. Neoliberals are blaming their failure on the US education system.

And they're using it as an excuse for even more neoliberalism in the form of privatized schools. It's all lies. Tax cuts don't trickle down. 'Free' trade agreements aren't good for anybody in the US except a few wealthy elite. Tariffs were a great idea and still are.

We Democrats urgently need a leader who is not a neoliberal.

[pnwmom]

3. I think this piece is horribly true. n/t

[WatsonT]

4. We could reduce the number of foreign

students allowed to get an education in the US.

Although that would have been a policy to start decades ago.

[Zanzoobar]

6. Entropy 101

[quaker bill]

7. This was obvious

The top 10% brightest of the people in India and China outnumber our entire population, and have since the beginning of this policy. This die was cast from the outset.