Yes, the headline is correct. In this modern world, the solution to a better job in the U.S. is not education, and it's not going to be education for a while to come.
The reason is rather simple, and Krugman lays it out rather well:
The Times published an article about the growing use of software to perform legal research. Computers, it turns out, can quickly analyze millions of documents, cheaply performing a task that used to require armies of lawyers and paralegals. In this case, then, technological progress is actually reducing the demand for highly educated workers. ... As the article points out, software has also been replacing engineers in such tasks as chip design. More broadly, the idea that modern technology eliminates only menial jobs, that well-educated workers are clear winners, may dominate popular discussion, but it’s actually decades out of date.If you think about computers and how they work, says the Professor (and many of us do just that for a living), this trend makes perfect sense. Computers follow "explicit rules". Any mental worker whose activity can be performed by a rule-follower can be replaced by a rules-based thinking machine. In addition, any mental worker who can "work from home" can be replaced by a machine that works from a different home — say, Bangalore or Manila.
The fact is that since 1990 or so the U.S. job market has been characterized not by a general rise in the demand for skill, but by “hollowing out”: both high-wage and low-wage employment have grown rapidly, but medium-wage jobs — the kinds of jobs we count on to support a strong middle class — have lagged behind. And the hole in the middle has been getting wider: many of the high-wage occupations that grew rapidly in the 1990s have seen much slower growth recently, even as growth in low-wage employment has accelerated.
In other words, if all you do is sweep up, you're safe. You can have all the underpaid work you can use in a 24-hour day.
And at the other end, if you all you do is sweep up the profits, you're equally good to go — no machine can appreciate the greens of St. Andrews like a CEO with an expense account. You and your political retainers are irreplaceable.
The folks in the middle, on the other hand, had better start polishing those local-only service skills:
Once, only manufacturing workers needed to worry about competition from overseas, but the combination of computers and telecommunications has made it possible to provide many services at long range. And research [pdf] by my Princeton colleagues Alan Blinder and Alan Krueger suggests that high-wage jobs performed by highly educated workers are, if anything, more “offshorable” than jobs done by low-paid, less-educated workers. If they’re right, growing international trade in services will further hollow out the U.S. job market.The Professor's answer is not more education, but ... more unions:
So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen. [emphasis added]Talking about education is not going to cut it. Now if someone showed us real change, with real bargaining power for real workers, and then followed through — that person might actually acquire a following.
Wonder where we can find that person.
GP
