All Men are Dogs and Increasingly Under-Educated?

Underlying our great economic meltdown is the earth-shattering acceleration of the global labor marketplace reconfiguration that has been going on for years. Those Americans who lack relevant skills are relegated in significant part to competing with distant semi-skilled workers toiling at vast discounts to the cost of American labor, taking bottom-end construction, food services or agricultural jobs at the lowest rungs of American employment (many of which jobs U.S.-born workers simply will not take at any price) or working in marginal retail or service jobs that have low pay and little opportunity for advancement. As the educational standards of a worker rise, so do his or her chances of having a job and perhaps even a future.

“The marketplace is shouting loud and clear that going to college pays off. The unemployment rate in March for people with a bachelor’s degree or higher was just 4.2 percent…, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last Friday. The rate for people with a high school education was 8 percent, while the rate for people with no high school diploma was 12.6 percent.” Bloomberg Businessweek, April 11^th.

Not only is the American political voice suffering from extreme polarization, and not only does the top one percent control 42% of America’s wealth, but the educated classes in the country are rapidly pulling away from the vast hordes of undereducated Americans. Half of America now falls below the low income line these days, and according to the BLS, one quarter of Americans are living below the poverty line. As our educational and training programs crumble from top to bottom under the weight of ill-advised deficit reduction policies, the ability to get that education is continuing to drift farther and farther away from the grasp of an increasing array of Americans; they are destined to become a permanent, and you can assume angry, underclass.

The demographic shifts of who is getting educated and who is not are also helping to turn the traditional labor market upside down: men are increasingly less educated than women. Bloomberg Businessweek explains: “This chart, based on data …. downloaded … from the National Center for Education Statistics, shows the education gap between men and women is long-standing—and getting worse. By 2019, the center projects, there will be nearly three women in college classrooms for every two men.” The highest value-added work is calling for increased quantative skills which are far too rudimentary in the lower levels of American schooling and which produce insufficient college graduates at the top to fulfill America’s growth needs.

“So-called middle-skill jobs, typically well-paying work that doesn’t require extensive higher education, are vanishing, dividing the labor force into high- and low-skill positions. While women are moving up the knowledge ladder, male educational attainment is growing at a slower rate… ‘It is terrific that women are getting higher levels of education,’ [MIT economics professor David] Autor says. ‘The problem is that males are not.’…Men lagging behind on education raises problems for how fast the U.S. economy can grow because there aren’t enough highly skilled Americans, creating a mismatch between company demand and labor-market” Bloomberg, April 10^th.

With many Asian countries elevating their educational systems at superfast speeds, some even opening branches of prestigious American Ivy League Universities, it is clear that the countries with the highest skill levels win not only the economic jobs race but will undoubtedly accentuate their global political influence as well. American labor at every level – from the uneducated to the heavily-degreed – is in direct competition with their counterparts all over the planet.

It still stuns me that our government is seemingly incapable of making the most primitive assessment as to the deployment of capital, unable to distinguish between a cost (a discretionary expenditure that does not generate a rate of return) versus an investment (an economic decision with future upside). Except for the research component – which could easily be directed into new areas like energy and healthcare – our military is a cost, and a large military that goes beyond protecting the country’s immediate needs is literally a discretionary expenditure that is bankrupting the United States, death by slow strangulation.

Meanwhile, not investing in the “big three” – infrastructure, research (beyond military) and education – places the entire nation in jeopardy and relegates her population to a continuing downward spiral in their relative earning power and standard of living. Our budget-cutting frenzy in the wrong places is making the United States less valuable, weaker among nations and, except for a very few, slowly forcing Americans to live lives with little hope and vastly lowered expectations.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I am waiting for the big wakeup call that seems lost in a sea of meaningless and self-defeating political slogans that saturate the airways in lieu of common sense.