The Myth Of A ‘Skills Gap’ And Our Phony ‘Education Crisis’ | |
| By: DSWright Monday March 31, 2014 10:14 am | |
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Ask a Neoliberal why trickle down economics is not working in America and there are a few standard excuses offered. The excuses range from the fringier “inner city people are lazy” to the boilerplate “government is distorting markets” to the more establishment friendly “it’s a lack of education.” Let’s put racial dog whistles and reactionary ideology aside for a second and focus on the last excuse, education.
The 1% and their toadies love to claim America has an “education crisis” that the country is losing some subterranean academic competition with other countries for the best transnational corporate jobs and that’s the reason the economy is faltering. The problem being, of course, that’s bunk. America has no education crisis,especially in so-called STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). It’s a myth propagated by those trying to distract from the failures of Neoliberalism (and their useful idiots).
The reason America has been losing jobs is not because Americans are not adequately educated, it is because of the the lower wages that can be found outsourcing jobs which increases profits. Yes, capitalists care about capital. This is apparently a surprise to many intellectuals, many of whom (coincidentally of course) profit by consulting with Big Business.
Education is blamed for the so-called “skills gap.” The idea that unemployment is high not from rapacious corporations moving jobs overseas for their bottom line, but a lack of talent in the American workforce. Not surprisingly that is also bunk as Paul Krugman points out.
Wall Street can try to blame the uneducated all it likes but everyone has suffered from the financial crisis they and the Neoliberals created by recklessly deregulating finance not just those without “skills.” They[T]he belief that America suffers from a severe “skills gap” is one of those things that everyone important knows must be true, because everyone they know says it’s true. It’s a prime example of a zombie idea — an idea that should have been killed by evidence, but refuses to die...
Yes, workers with a lot of formal education have lower unemployment than those with less, but that’s always true, in good times and bad. The crucial point is thatunemployment remains much higher among workers at all education levels than it was before the financial crisis. The same is true across occupations: workers in every major category are doing worse than they were in 2007.
