Probing the connection between American education and a skilled workforce
May 17, 2008 2 Comments
I have found a great article by Richard Rothstein that picks apart the popular wisdom that American schools are the prime culprit for the nation losing skilled jobs to other parts of the world, like India and China. This is a good excerpt:
Workforce skills continue to generate rising productivity. In the last five years, wages of both high school- and college-educated workers have been stagnant, while productivity grew by a quite healthy 10.4 percent.
Rising workforce skills can indeed make American firms more competitive. But better skills, while essential, are not the only source of productivity growth. The honesty of our capital markets, the accountability of our corporations, our fiscal policy and currency management, our national investment in R&D and infrastructure, and the fair-play of the trading system (or its absence), also influence whether the U.S. economy reaps the gains of Americans’ diligence and ingenuity. The singular obsession with schools deflects political attention from policy failures in those other realms.
very interesting…and a very good point.
In recent years, the American economy’s gains have been accruing almost exclusively to capital – not labor. Yet we are exhaorted at every turn to learn more, work harder, improve our efficiency. For what? So that our capitalist overlords can use the wealth to enrich themselves and wage pointless war, while threatening to outsource everything? It needs to be a two-way street: The American worker needs to start sharing in the productivity gains he or she makes possible.
Michael Blaine
http://www.rudelystamped.blogspot.com