The Great Education Myth

A couple of weeks ago, Paul Krugman laid out the numbers showing that the widening earnings gap in the last three decades was produced by the increased concentration of wealth and power in America--not by education, whose power to raise earnings has, contrary to popular myth, flatlined during that period.

David Sirota takes it to the next level, pointing out that those two hotbeds of class war and worker unrest--Fortune Magazine and the Federal Reserve--have demonstrated why college educated workers in the "knowledge business" are at greatest economic risk from so-called "free trade" policies: because their work, unlike, say, construction, is most easily outsourced to low-wage countries in Asia.

Sirota brings it home:

America's sell-out "free" trade policy is now not just a problem for manufacturing workers - its a problem for information-sector workers. This trade policy, in the name of larger and larger corporate profits going to smaller and smaller numbers of people, is now undermining the value of education. And now matter how many pundits, politicians or elites say the word "education" over and over again, the data shows they are pushing a myth.

In the American mythos, education has been the egalitarian ladder that will allow anyone to get ahead. "Free trade" fetishists are pulling that ladder up behind them, and don't really care about the consequences.