As if in direct response to the article "Forget Populism", discussed in my previous diary, "Elite Versailles horror of populism, part 2,356,781", we have the laterst installment Michael Lind's regular Tuesday column in Salon, "The fantasy of a vast upper middle class: College isn't for everyone. Neither is the stock market". While rabid anti-populists like Kevin Mattson can't for the life of themselves distinguish between left-wing and right-wing populism, Lind has little trouble distinquishing between center-right and center-left elitist narratives of never-unending triumphalism. His column begins thus:
Among the many theories exposed as fallacies by the Great Recession is the idea of the mass upper middle class. During the years of the American bubble economy, progressives and conservatives alike lauded the graduation of most citizens from the working class to a new elite that included the majority of Americans.
The center-left and center-right defined this alleged new class somewhat differently. In 19th century Germany, scholars distinguished the credentialed middle class (Bildungsbuergertum) from the propertied middle class (Besitzbuergertum). A similar divide separates America's progressive elite, based in the educational profession, civil service and nonprofit sector, from America's conservative elite, based in business and banking. Elite progressives and elite conservatives share the assumption that the ideal society is one in which most Americans would be more like them, in owning educational credentials (progressives) or capital (conservatives).
The folly of the conservative promise is obvious ("Bush boom", anyone?), but the neoliberal reflection is equally false:
Progressives love to claim that education is the key to upward mobility. But this is based on an obvious fallacy. The "college premium" that results in higher incomes for college graduates is the result of the relative scarcity of college degrees. If everyone had a B.A., then the value of a B.A. in generating high wages would drop. We know this to be the case, because access to college has expanded more rapidly in Europe, where the gap in wages between the college-educated and the rest as a result is smaller than in the U.S.
Nor is there any basis to the claim, repeated by politicians and pundits of both parties, that most of the jobs of the future require a college education. On the eve of the Great Recession, the Bureau of Labor Statistics identified the occupations with the largest numerical growth in 2008-2018: registered nurses; home health aides; customer service representatives; combined food preparation and serving workers, including fast food; personal and home care aides; retail salespersons; office clerks, general; accountants and auditors; nursing aides, orderlies, and attendants; and post-secondary teachers. Of these careers, only two -- accountants and auditors, and post-secondary teachers -- require a bachelor's degree rather than on-the-job training or an associate degree, and only one -- post-secondary teachers -- requires a graduate degree (a doctorate).
Lind is not immune from sloppy thinking himself, as I've pointed out often enough in the past--though not nearly on the scale of elite anti-populists. Still, using Europe as an example here is a bit suspect, since it ignores Europe's relatively strong support for labor as a whole compared to the US. For me, a much more effective way to make this point is to look at US data over time, as I did last year in my diary "Higher Education, Lower Wages", which included the following chart:
As can be seen, the average income of college-educated households barely increased at all from 1973 to 1990--just under 5% over 17 years. And the performance was scarcely any better from 1991 to 2008:
But let's not stop there. I generated a few new charts to help underscore the illusions Lind is talking about. First, the general illusion that everyone is getting affluent contrasts rather sharply with the fact of flat incomes for most Americans, combined with tremendous income growth among the wealthy few. To see this, I charted the Census data for different income levels against higher income levels. In the first chart, it's the different quintiles (20%, 40%, 60$, 80%) compared to the cut-off for the top 5%. In the later charts, I used IRS data for the top 1% and 0.1% to compare to the top 5% cut-off as well as the quintils. As can be quickly seen, there had been a long period of bottom-up growth since WWII, that just started to falter in the late 60s and early 70s, after which, everyone's relative income share declined:
The 1970s were not a good time for the true financial elite, and so the period of relative wage growth for the mass of American workers compared to the top 1% continued longer, and was stronger, only to be followed by a more noticeable declinem interrupted only by the early 2000s recession, which hurt the investor class even worse than it hurt others:
The results are similar, but even more extreme when we use the top 0.01% as the basis for our comparisons:
Turning to education, because the census categories changed, we only have one relevant measure for the entire time-period--college-education (4 years of more), but we can compare that income level to increasingly exclusive financial elites, starting with the top 1%, which shows a clear relative decline for the lowly college graduates:
The college grads are even more peon-like judged against the top 0.1% of income-earners (if, indeed, "earners" actually describes what most of them do):
And things are bleaker, still, when compared to the top 0.01%:
Marx once said that religion is the opiate of the masses. These charts suggest that nowadays, education has taken religion's place--or at the very least, joined with it.
STATE BLOGS
Powered by: SoapBlox