In the interest of inter-class peace and creedal coexistence, both labor markets and cultural institutions require a degree of regulation. Collective bargaining to set basic wages and workplace rights can take forms other than the failed American system of enterprise bargaining. There could be, for example, bargaining among representatives of all firms and employees in particular industries, occupation-specific wage boards or labor representation on corporate boards. As for the media and education, institutionalized consultation with religious institutions and other organizations represented on government oversight commissions could be part of a new Fairness Doctrine like the one that governed TV and radio in the 20th-century U.S.
It seemed to me that the essay could have been shorter, but it is an excerpt from a book. Hard to imagine.
I think that a more plausible path for social equilibrium is for the status of college education to fall sharply. We would be better off with a new set of prestige hierarchies.
This perspective makes the same bad assumption that Bryan Caplan makes about education, specifically, since the power of educational institutions to transform students into highly skilled adults can be shown to be minor then the main benefit of education is signalling (i.e. prestige).
This assumption ignores the ranking and matching functions of educational institutions. The fact that students who are accepted at Harvard but choose to attend a lower prestige institution do as well as Harvard graduates may show that the emergent ranking function is near optimal rather than animal spirit-like biases at play.
Adherence to the Golden Rule and Positive Sum Meritocracy is the solution to social discord, in my opinion. I don’t think Charles Murray’s multi-generational Fishtown is as dystopian as he does.
Full article at the Internet Archive.
Industry/occupation-wide bargaining would lead directly to economic disaster. It would put more power in the hands of bigger businesses, making it even harder than it already is for startups and smaller companies to compete, leading to less competition, less job creation and less innovation. Heck, I’d be out of work from my own jobif they were implemented in my industry, because I don’t have the money to pay myself as much as bigger firms in my field do to many of their people, much less the people I contract work out to.
But we could post eagle placards with the slogan, “We do our part.”
Back in 1966, Congress enacted 5 USC 3308 which banned degree requirements for federal employment. The law reads: “The Office of Personnel Management or other examining agency may not prescribe a minimum educational requirement for an examination for the competitive service except when the Office decides that the duties of a scientific, technical, or professional position cannot be performed by an individual who does not have a prescribed minimum education. The Office shall make the reasons for its decision under this section a part of its public records.” The ever-corrupt bureaucracy has of ignored the law and substituted degrees for examinations. But restoring the old civil service examinations in which job candidates sat for job related tests would be a good start for restoring integrity to the federal bureaucracy as well as eliminating the college degree industry’s monopoly on entry level access to middle-class jobs. Thinking of grander plans, I’d suggest pairing ban-the-box with ban-the-degree provisions. Degree requirements in most cases are more nefarious than occupational licensing.
Does anyone know if that provision has been amended? Or if court decisions have narrowed it? Has the OPM just given some b.s. reasons and the courts have accepted them?
A perhaps coming right wing cause is limiting “agency deference”. Right now, the courts will generally “defer” to an agency’s “expertise” in drafting regulations and interpreting a law. As long as they have followed proper procedures, agency interpretations are rarely struck down.
One of Trump’s problems is that he has very few people who are familiar with the procedures and are able to come up with reasons that sound good and that the courts will accept. Combine that with the fact that many judges hate Trump and a lot of his policies and you get the 2017-19 uptick in court pushback against executive actions.
Yes, the law was supplanted by a consent decree agreed to by the Clinton administration in its last few days. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luévano_v._Campbell
The Admintrative Careers and Outstanding Scholars programs are not examinations at all in the way the English language is normally used but rather euphemism for the unfettered cronyism that is the defining characteristic of the federal employment system today.
The link says 1981, so that would be the very end of the (Jimmy) Carter administration.
Thank you for the correction. At any rate, the consent decree was a politically motivated abuse of authority.
The date also explains why just about no one has heard about or talks about section 3308. It’s been a dead letter for 39 years.
Reading the WSJ piece I’m struck by the question, “what is populism?” Is it when people dishonestly claim to speak for the people? Is it when “we the people” naively attempt to run the institutions and discover they’re too fat, dumb, and uneducated to do so? Is it when a political movement starts a war with the convenient but wrong enemy? As usual with Lind, so many words but so little point.
I think that a more plausible path for social equilibrium is for the status of college education to fall sharply.
I’d say that college is the middle-class version of the lottery. By that I mean that they both provide the illusion, but rarely the substance, of economic and social opportunity. I don’t think America would be stable if its permanent underclass and middle class stopped believing that their situations weren’t permanent.
I don’t think America would be stable if its permanent underclass and middle class stopped believing that their situations weren’t permanent.
So education main value is keep children and young people in line with hopes of a better life. Of course show how that is wrong today or in the recent past. One reason why the 1950 most people were satisfied is because they living better than they grew up.
For the most part, successful past societies have given young people signals for to accomplish to become an adult. Lots of education does this for the modern economy and conservatives need to make other signals for young people to accomplish to develop careers. (For more people it is military service for example.)
Business Insider gives some telling statistics about how Millennials’ wealth stacks up against previous generations. It says, for example, that Millennials own about 3% of total US wealth, and that Boomers owned about 21% at similar ages (remember, Millennials aren’t that young any more). And the cost of college has risen excessively- a friend’s son is paying $25,000 per semester in tuition. My Boomer mother paid $50 per semester.
For structural, demographic, and ecological reasons, the great economic expansion that the Boomers took for granted has largely petered out in the developed world (and is starting to level off in China). In other words, the economy has lost much of its positive-sum character and has many more zero-sum interactions. Having more signals wouldn’t change that, but having cheaper signals would be worthwhile.
I don’t think it’s a fair comparison though. The average 22 year old is still in school and this in debt, while the average 22 year old 50-odd years ago had been working for a few years and thus was much more likely to have a positive net worth. Then there’s the significant minority still accruing education – and still in the red wealth-wise – into their mid or late 20s. This isn’t proof that young people today are poorer than young people in the 60s. It could just be proof that they’re materially better off, more economically secure, and expect a higher lifetime income than their forebears and are thus willing to spend more time and money on education, which delays wealth accumulation. Education and housing are overpriced and these surely do exacerbate their disparity between young people today and decades ago, but I think most of it would still exist regardless, and it isn’t necessarily a pernicious phenomenon.
“Millennials” were born between 1980 and 1996 (to use a commonly accepted definition), making the oldest 40 and the youngest 24. I agree that Millennials have invested more in their educations, but the investment hasn’t paid off nearly as well as it did for previous generations.
Great statistic from Business Insider: In the last twenty years the average net worth for households ages 20 to 35 has declined by $2,600. Households ages 52 to 70 have seen a $452,400 increase in net worth.
Combine that with this from The Economist a couple days ago: In 1990, a generation of baby boomers, with a median age of 35, owned a third of America’s real estate by value. In 2019, a similarly sized cohort of millennials, aged 31, owned just 4%.
I think that a more plausible path for social equilibrium is for the status of college education to fall sharply.
And how would you recommend to do this? As long as private (and public) employers prefer college degrees for certain higher positions there will be a demand for college degrees. Could it drop the 10 years? Yes but college attendance always goes up in Recessions which sooner or later.
When reading puritanical economist like Bryan Caplan:
1) They dream that the optimal society was Victorian England and US gilded age of 1890s. Read up on how average working class lived back then and show me why people would to return.
2) I love how Caplan always ends up proving Marx ‘Religion is the Opium of the masses.’ So free markets need puritanical religion to convince the masses to keep in line without resorting to money or higher wages.
3) There is a lot wrong with Progressive ideals, but they are stating the key to success is focus more on education and there is a lot of success doing that today.
Tighter and tighter labor markets is the answer.
“In the 19 years from 1969 to 1989, we built over 4.3 million houses in England; in the 19 years from 1994 to 2012, we built fewer than 2.7 million.” (Paul Cheshire)
Evidence that tighter and tighter housing markets has been, and is, the problem in England. Ignored by Michael Lind.
But Lind’s story leaves out Jeremy Corbyn. Youth is pro-Corbyn and anti-Brexit. The lazy media narrative purports to “explain populism” (as if the EU had been popular in 2006, or 2012, or 1996) because the young voted against Brexit and for Corbyn.
Lind’s “college-educated managers and professionals” voted for the anti-Semitic Marxist. A Marxist who promised populist freebies. (And aren’t Corbyn’s freebies more populist than Johnson’s?)
“[I]nter-class peace and creedal coexistence”!? Can’t we all just get along (without needing government regulation)?
Cowen links today to a study that demonstrates employer requirements for degrees are unrelated to the nature of the work: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/01/credentialism-run-amok.html
The USA labor market is thoroughly distorted by the legal guild rent-seeking upon which the credentials industry piggyback s. Ironically, the victims of discrimination would be much better off without all the pecuniary rewards to elites to foment discord and hate.
Perhaps you are overestimating the efficacy of human agency in bringing about desired outcomes. Introducing a bit of adversity and hardship in-place of the well-trodden path may bring out the best in people. When the going gets tough the tough get going. Its hard to keep a good man down.
Call it the Boy-Named-Sue principle after the Johnny Cash song.
I don’t think that you can get a new set of prestige hierarchies without a huge change in relative wages. Which means college remains important, especially to women, who really do need that college degree to get higher wages in medical professions.
That is a good point about the female cognitive elite; they tend to cluster in professions (Kling’s commanding heights) that require educational credentials. Most of the professions, like software development, that are more open to meritocracy seem to be male dominated.