Capitalism's Stunning Contradiction

A good discussion on how capitalism & capitalists keep exploiting the general public. Of course, politicians are in their pockets, too, which means that these capitalists also control the government, which is supposed to look after the general public in a democracy.

Capitalism is only going to concentrate the wealth in a few hands & make the general public poorer & poorer. After all, there's no limit to the human greed. Greedy capitalists will keep taking money from the public, & keep making it poorer & poorer, without any regard to general living standards to their workers. At the same time, I am not defending the communism because we have seen its problems in Russia & China; far too much inefficiency & control when everything is handed over to the government.

The root cause of world's modern problems with resource depletion, poverty, & mass unemployment is this continual & increasing greed of capitalism. It is an unstoppable train, which will continue on, until & unless, the world put back religion & ethics in its economic system.

This Earth can definitely support a lot more people compared to current population, but it cannot support people when the resources are being depleted to make a few people on the top of the pyramid richer & richer. This world cannot support more people when those rich people keep hoarding cash & splurging on expensive, but useless, items, like buying football clubs, billion-$$$ mansions, whole islands, etc. With religion (any religion for that matter) & ethics, instead of throwing away their money on these useless materialistic things, they could invest in improving people's lives by investing in medicine, food, agriculture, & alleviating poverty.

Essentially, the world has not changed in the past millennia or so. Brutal monarchs, then, used to forcibly take their public's money & spend on themselves. Monarchs of current times are these super-rich elites (the "one-percenters") who keep hoarding money by drip-feeding their workers & spending that money on themselves. Instead of spending the money on charities, it would be better to not cut costs so much that the general public suffers cuts in paycheques & unemployment, in the first place. Those monarchs were the government themselves & current "monarchs" control the government.

The world is only going to get worse & worse, unless & until, people start involving religion & ethics in their daily lives & businesses, instead of a weekly attendance in a place of worship. Religion & ethics will help putting the fear of death & answering to a higher authority in the people's hearts, & let them think hard before brutally cutting down jobs, & costs, to ultimately make themselves even more super richer, & spend money frivolously on completely unnecessary items in their lives.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xglK2rdPmg4

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: I think it's getting clear to a lot of people that capitalism is out of solutions within its own framework. I mean, first of all, in terms of financial reform, there's been nothing serious enough. It's pretty clear there are still enormous financial institutions that are still speculating wildly, and the same stuff that happened in '07 and '08 is likely to happen again. It's kind of a question of when rather than if.

RICHARD WOLFF, PROF. EMERITUS OF ECONOMICS, UMASS AMHERST: That's right.

JAY: The issue of demand in the economy, low wages and such, nothing's changed. And climate change, capitalism, so far, at least, does not consider it a threat to capitalism to have global warming, and they're not really getting serious about it. So, I mean, are you finding that there's this sense of that, that there aren't solutions here anymore?

WOLFF: I think two things are happening. The one that's most important is that as the crisis since 2007 lingers and lingers, this crisis that was not supposed to happen, that was not supposed to cut so deep, continues to do all of that and to last and last and resist government efforts to change it, that people are shifting and beginning to want to look beyond the crisis years since 2007 and ask the question whether maybe we're not in a bigger, longer-term dilemma for capitalism. And I think we are. And if I could sketch it for a moment, think it would help people to see this as a momentary downturn within a longer crisis.

And here's how I would summarize it. For the first 200, 250 years of capitalism, which begins in England, goes to Western Europe, and then to North America and Japan, the capitalist system, it concentrated in those countries, concentrated its factories, its offices, and stores there where it began. And it turned the rest of the world--Asia, Africa, Latin America--into a hinterland to provide the people, to provide the food, to provide the raw materials. And that was how the world was globally organized.

Then in the 1970s something radically changed. With a jet engine, you could get anywhere in the world in a matter of hours. With modern telecommunications and the computer, you could monitor a factory in Shanghai from Cincinnati as easily as you could manage a factory down the street in Cincinnati. And so capitalists--and I want this really to be driven home if I can--capitalists in the 1970s in Western Europe, North America, and Japan have basically said to the United States and Western Europe and Japan, goodbye, we're leaving, we are abandoning you. You are not where the profit is. The profit is in those places we can now go to where we pay a small fraction of those wages, where we can operate with impunity, where the poverty of these societies, itself a product of all of this, makes them desperate to have the jobs that we can provide. It's a perfect scenario. We made a lot of money for 200 years in the West, and now we're leaving.

And I think the emblematic city that kind of shows this is Detroit, a place that was the apogee, the peak of capitalist efficiency in the 1960s, sustaining 2 million people population, today 700,000, a city that has been literally ripped apart and destroyed because three corporations decided, for profit, to leave that place and say goodbye and leave behind the desolation, the unemployment, the collapsed housing, and all the rest of a city and now has to be the largest bankruptcy of any American urban area in our history.

I think the capitalists of the world are saying to Western Europe, North America, and Japan, we were willing to give you higher wages because we were able to reorganize the planet for 200 years. Now our future is in the areas that are cheap for us--the rest of the world--and we're abandoning you.
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... So basically they're saying to the West, we're leaving. Now, of course, if you make it worth our while not to leave by bringing the wages and the costs, well, we might reconsider. But then what they're saying to the American people is, you can have a choice of a slow decline as we leave or a rapid decline to slow our departure. This is an unbelievable proposition to present to Western Europe, Japan, and the United States and I think will shape the basic political struggles in all these places for years to come.

JAY: But it's so self-destructive even for capitalism, because now you've taken a market that was the consumer of last resort for the world and turning people into increasingly low-wage workers. You're going to sell your profits where? The places that are already low-wage workers? I mean, it's really completely--.

WOLFF: You know, it's wonderful, 'cause as you introduced me as a Marxist, Marx was fond of saying that capitalists are caught in a stunning contradiction. Every capitalist tries to lower the wage costs, reduce the workers, substitute a machine, cut the wages, never wanting to face the fact that if all capitalists are trapped in a system where they're systematically reducing the wages, then they won't be able to sell what those wage workers are producing. And if you don't face that, you're caught in the contradiction that what the system makes you do undoes you by the absence of anyone to buy this stuff. And there we are, back to the naked, basic contradiction of a system that doesn't want to face that it has these kinds of internal problems.

JAY: So in terms of long-term decline, why isn't this cyclical? We've seen these things over the last century. Why is this any different?

WOLFF: Well, I think that we have the cyclicals, but the one thing that I find so interesting is that this one has certain unique characteristics. It was really out of the blue in the sense that almost nobody saw this kind of thing coming. Everyone assured us, not just the president and the politicians, but the economists, that it wouldn't last long. That was wrong. That it wouldn't cut deep. That was wrong.

But I think the thing that really strikes me is the kind of utter failure of anyone in this system to cope with this other than the 1 percent. The politicians can't figure out a solution. The bankers can't, as you rightly put it--for example, the banks that were too big to fail without exception are now bigger than they were then. Nobody is solving it. And even the mass of people are like deer caught in the headlights not knowing which way to go. In the '30s, after all, they joined unions, they joined socialist and communist parties, and that made a difference. At this point, there is the behavior of a system that kind of knows that this isn't just a temporary crisis, there's something fundamental shifting. And yet no one quite knows what to do.

JAY: ... I've always been struck that one of the things that Marx and Engels said that I think gets completely underestimated is that socialism isn't just some good idea. It's not a better policy that we could adopt. It's something that actually grows within capitalism. You get these massive enterprises, and they're fabulously well-planned. Like, you take Walmart, you get a toothpaste off of a shelf in Walmart, they know to get another toothpaste thing going somewhere in China. But the individual, as you say, the individual enterprises try to drive down wages, but they also get extremely efficient, and especially with computerization and digitization. Walmart is a planned economy.

But it's, like, the biggest private employer. I mean, Marx's whole point is this is actually--this is the seeds of socialism, except they're privately owned.

WOLFF: That's right. They're privately owned. They're driven by the maximization of profit for a tiny fraction of the population. And then you can't be surprised that the capacity, what they're capable of doing, which is a staggering saving of labor for the community, ends up not saving the labor for the community at all, because the whole point of it is to gather absurd wealth in the tiny number of hands. And Marx's point was this is an irrationality that even the best public relations cannot forever cover over.

And I think we're in a moment where, both in the short-run crisis and this longer-run decline, the irrationalities, the contradictions--. Look, basically capitalism is saying to particularly the American working class, for 200 years, we really exploited you on the job, but we gave you rising standard of living. Compensation of an awful day was that you could go someplace at the end of the day and have something called a happy hour to console you for the unhappy hours prior. Now capitalism is saying to you, we're going to exploit the hell out of you, but we're not giving you a rising standard of living. We're actually giving you a falling one. We're condemning your students to debt they can't handle. We're taking away the benefits. We're taking away all of the job prospects and hopes for the younger generation. We're going to work you on the job more hours than ever, and we're going to give you less for it. Whatever you think about the past, I'm not clear that the American working class will find that an acceptable offer.

“The Long Shadow”: Race, Class and Privilege in Baltimore (2/5)

A brief discussion on a social study looking at how racism holds back African-Americans in one city, Baltimore, in regards of education & employment, against their Caucasian / White counterparts. People all over the world think that there's no, or minimal, discrimination in Europe & North America in the areas of employment & education, & merit rules the day. But, this & several other studies will confirm that racism & discrimination very much exist & affects the minorities very much so.

Now, we have to keep in mind that this study is looking at the racism effect on African-Americans & Caucasians / Whites; people whose religious beliefs & social attitudes might not differ so much & the only difference between them will be the colour of their skin. Now, what if we factor in the religious beliefs? Those religious beliefs will show up in the subjects' names, familial & social connections, social attitudes, & perhaps, their outlook (facial hair, dressing style etc.). Per my own observations & experiences, these factors adversely affect the individual & make his / her climb up the social & corporate ladder that much harder.

That's why, 2nd-generation immigrants (children of immigrants) usually shun the habits of their immigrant parents & adopt their host countries' customs & cultures. This adoption helps them in gaining acceptance in the social & corporate arena & seemingly makes their life that much easier. Children who stick to their parental cultures keep suffering. Other people in their family & friend circle start pointing out that how people they know are getting ahead without acknowledging some simple facts that how those children who are getting ahead have forsaken the cultural & religious practices of their immigrant parents, & have adopted their host country's customs & cultures.

The simple reason the general public wants to believe that there's no racism is that it's much easier to lay the blame of a Muslim teenager rebelling against the society with a gun or an African-American man being homeless & broke on their own abilities & competencies, instead of how hard it is to succeed in life when the cards are stacked against you from the time of your birth, simply because of the colour of your skin, or your religious belief, or your family's networks.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8BPTpSQCYY

KARL ALEXANDER, JOHN DEWEY PROF. OF SOCIOLOGY, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIV.: 40%of high school dropout rate overall. We all would want better than that for our children, much better. One of the interesting things, because there's a lot of discussion of high school drop out is that that's the end of the story. But 60% of the study youngsters who left school without high school degrees eventually get some kind of high school certification, and most of them do the GED degree, which is an alternative certification, but by the standards of federal government accounting that's high school completion. 10% who dropped out return to high school and finish with regular diplomas.

So what started out as a 40% high school degree at age 28 is down to 25%, which is still really very high, but it's not 40%. So these kids who leave school, many of them realize that this wasn't a very good decision and they regret it and they try to do something about it. When we talked at age 28 to everyone, 80% of the total panel said that they intended to get additional education, 80% at age 28. It was 85% among high school dropouts. We call them permanent high school dropouts because by age 28 they didn't have a GED or a high school diploma. ... it really is quite impressive to see how the success ethos that school is the way to get ahead has permeated through even a very disadvantaged population of urban youth. So these kids want to succeed in life, they want to do well, and they understand, many of them, that school can be the path out, up and out. But there are just so many barriers that stand in the way that for many of them, they're not able to see it through.

JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: And there is a racial disparity in high school dropouts between white and black, who found work even though they were high school dropouts.

ALEXANDER: Yes, there ... is a racial disparity, but it's not the one that you might anticipate. So one of the interesting opportunities that we had here, because we did start out with a very diverse sample within the framework of the Baltimore City Public Schools system is that we have a large presence of low-income white children. And there's a vast literature on the problems of the urban poor and concentrated poverty in our big cities, but you very rarely see low-income whites as part of that picture, as part of that story. And that's regrettable, because there are low-income whites in Baltimore and there are low-income white neighborhoods in Baltimore. There have been all along, and there still are. But very rarely do you see them brought into the conversation about the challenges of the urban poor and whatnot.

So we were fortunate in being able to include a large group of these youngsters in our study, and we monitored their experiences over time as well. And what we find is that the lower-income whites, white children, white males specifically, of disadvantaged family background have the highest dropout rate, non-completion. At age 28, their average years of schooling is about 10.2. So the typical lower-income white male growing up is a permanent high school dropout in terms of the way--our coverage of it.

Now, the others--and the comparisons we make are lower income against higher income, or lower socioeconomic standing against higher socioeconomic standing growing up, African American and white, and male and female, men and women. And when I say that the white males of disadvantaged family background have the lowest high school completion rate, had the highest high school dropout rate, I'm not saying that the others are going gangbusters. In fact, for the other three groups, they're all eleven-point-something years. So for all four--lower-income white men, white women, African-American men, and African-American women--at age 28, the typical youngster out of that group, all four of those groups, has not finished high school. But white men, if you look at the numbers, are least successful of all. ... in terms of using the educational system as the vehicle for moving up in life, 'cause they've got the lowest levels of formal schooling on average. ... .

But then to turn the page, ... they are most successful in the world work--so least successful educationally and most successful in the world of work, and across a whole host of particulars when you look at it: they're more likely to have worked full-time; they find jobs fast, more quickly, and they're ready to move on to the next job; their earnings are higher; and they have a very distinctive pattern of successful vocational development--from adolescence on, their employment experience is much better than that of African-American men of like background, and much better also than women of like background, both African-American and white. So these white guys don't use schooling as the vehicle for doing well in life, but they do have employment opportunities that aren't as readily available to the others who grew up in the same kind of circumstances.
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... what we find, which is really tremendously striking is that at age 28, 45% of these guys are working in the high-skill, high-wage jobs in manufacturing and in the construction trades, 45% are working as either electricians, plumbers, welders, things of that sort. But the kinds of jobs that used to be the backbone of the old Baltimore industrial economy and everyone says that they're gone with deindustrialization ... , but if you look around, people are still building buildings, they're still doing a road repairs to the highways. If you need to upgrade your electricity at home, you call an electrician, or if you need a new hot water heater installed, you call a plumber. So there are people who are still doing this kind of work and working in these trades. And what we see is that it's white men of lower-income background who have the greatest access to these kinds of jobs, 45% of white men. 15% of African-American men are working in this same sector, the way we classify it. ... so the white advantage, just in terms of penetrating into this sector of employment, is threefold advantage. But on top of that, the white men who are working in the sector, their earnings are twice that of African-American men, roughly $44,000 against ... $22,000.

A little bit more than double. And that's at age 28 in terms of 2006, 2007 dollars. So these guys not only have better access to this high-skill, high-wage work in the blue-collar economy, but ... their positions that they find themselves in are much more--they pay a lot more than the positions African-Americans of like background find themselves in.

This is actually longstanding in Baltimore. We see it in the experiences of our study group, but there was a report that was published in the early '60s that looked at the earnings, using Social Security data, ... of the automobile mechanic graduates to Baltimore vocational and technical high schools back in the day. Actually, it was Mergenthaler and Carver. They were segregated at the time. And the white graduates, the white auto mechanics graduates four or five years afterwards were making twice what the African-American graduates were making in the same program, auto mechanics. So this is a longstanding pattern.

And so there is another--there's a second option for how to establish yourself in life and achieve a reasonably comfortable standard of living.
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... I say men because it is particularly men. There aren't many women, white or are African-American, who are working in these kinds of jobs. When you look at the sex composition of the employments of our study youngsters, there is a high-degree of sex segregation, and it's very traditional. The women are concentrated, African-American and white, in the traditional pink-collar sectors.
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That's service and clerical work--with some sales, but service and clerical. Service and clerical employment makes up 60-70% of lower-income women's--in terms of family background. ... And they pay less. ... So women and men substantially are finding themselves at different places in the labor market, and men are in more lucrative positions than women.

And that actually--it's interesting. We see the same thing for those who were from more favorable family backgrounds, and most of whom attended college, and many had completed college, but it's at the upper end of the employment hierarchy. So those women are concentrated in the professional fields. And you could name them as well as I, probably, 'cause they are gendered. It's teaching, nursing, social work, the helping professions. Men of like background are more likely to be in executive or managerial positions or to be in the high-level technical positions of today's postindustrial economy. And those jobs pay more than the helping-profession jobs that women access. So we see men being advantaged in terms of employment opportunities--.
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So what we describe in the book is this pattern where white men of modest background are advantaged in terms of their employment experience over everybody else. Why that happens is a larger question. And there's a historical backdrop to it. There are--in the long shadow, we think there really are two--it's a story about two kinds of family privilege. And the flipside of family privilege is family disadvantage. But there's middle-class family privilege in terms of helping children do well in school. And that's what we see. Children of parents who themselves were college-educated, who have middle-class jobs and whatnot, their children are doing just fine.
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... this pattern of differential success in school, it's not particular to what we see in Baltimore. It's we see it nationally as well that children from advantaged families are more successful in terms of family income, parental levels of education, and so forth. So that's one success narrative.

This other success narrative involves blue-collar attainment, and where--parents can be helpful there, too, but in a not quite as obvious way, 'cause we know about middle-class parents. Middle-class parents can do all kinds of things to help their children do well in school. They buy expensive educational toys, they do enrichment experiences, and so forth. Blue-colar parents, it's not so obvious, until you step back and think about it, how they can to help their children be successful. And the way it plays out in the experiences of our study group is that blue-collar parents can help open doors to good steady employment through social networks. When we asked at age 22 our study participants how they found the work, white men of modest background much more often said through family and friends, and African-Americans much more often said through themselves. And if you're on your own and you're not well connected, that makes it--that's not an easy thing to do, to find your way to a good opportunity. ... It is white privilege, working-class white privilege specifically.

Another facet of that is we have--the white high school dropouts at age 22, 80% of them were working. ... African-American male high school dropouts at age 22, 40% of them were working. So whites just have these employment advantages all along the way. And what we find is, if you look at those groups specifically, between age 22 at age 28, 5% of the whites acquire a criminal record along the way. I think it's 45% of the African-Americans acquire a criminal record along the way. So they have limited job opportunities, and they're trying to figure out a way to get by, and they get in trouble.

"Graduate Housing Tips" by Steve Breen



"Graduate Housing Tips" - Steve Breen, San Diego Union Tribune, San Diego, California, US

"Fast Food Jobs" by Steve Breen

Steve Breen, San Diego Union Tribune, San Diego, CA, US

Destroy Their Economic Livelihoods, and They Will Come

As we all heard Donald Trump's campaign rhetoric during the American election drama that "illegal" & "undocumented" immigrants are destroying US. Whether they are indeed "destroying" American economy & the country itself, that's up for debate, but what nobody ever talks about is why there are so many people pouring across the border from Latin & Central America.

I have explored this topic earlier, in my blogs, that one of the many reasons so-called "developing" countries of the world are stuck in "developing" mode for decades, & even centuries, is that the wealthy & developed Global North (i.e. US, Canada, Western Europe, Australia etc.) are actively destroying & deliberately keeping the "developing" countries in the "developing" mode. There are several ways of doing this through economic (subsidies on industries etc.), financial (aid with exorbitant interest rates & conditions), & military (sell weapons) means. Several times, all these are intertwined. For instance, financial aid is provided to a country, which then turns around & buy military equipment from the same countries that gave the aid in the first place. So, the aid is never got used to service the public or improve the country.

In this Real News analysis, Mr. Faux is essentially saying the same thing that the average person from Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, or El Salvador is running away from its country & trying to enter US because US made those countries a hell for that average person. The average American is hating that "illegal" Honduran or Guatemalan or El Salvadoran taking away his/her job or whatnot but the fact of the matter is that that average American racist person is the cause for that "illegal" to run away from his/her home in the first place.

If that average American would not have elected or at least protested against its own government's illegal intervention in the internal governmental matters of those Central American countries, then there would be far less, if not none, "illegals" in the US.

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                                https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTvjSam5yyE

JEFF FAUX, AUTHOR, THE SERVANT ECONOMY: For the last few months, the last 6, 8 months, ... tens of thousands of children have been pushing across the U.S. border between Mexico and Texas in a desperate effort to flee poverty and violence and hopelessness in their countries.

They're overwhelming facilities down there. The detention centers are overcrowded. The immigration service doesn't know what to do with these kids. Some of them get put on buses to be sent to families someplace. It's a mess.

And it's quickly deteriorated into politics, of course. The Democrats and Republicans blame the president. The president says it's a humanitarian crisis, so we have to act, and so we do. But lost in this debate is the question of U.S. responsibility for the basic causes of this tragic immigration to the United States. Immigration politics in the U.S. focuses on the U.S. But ... the question of what to do with people who are arriving here misses the point of how they arrived and why they arrived.
People come from somewhere, and in this case 95% of these children are coming from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Now, this just happens to be three countries, along with much of the rest of Central America, that the U.S. has dominated and controlled for the last hundred years.

ANTON WORONCZUK, TRNN PRODUCER: Well, exactly what role has U.S. foreign policy in Latin America and Central America played in driving this immigration?

FAUX: ... to answer that question, start with another question. If the United States is skilled in nation building, which it says it is, why are these economies such social and economic disasters? The answer is we have not run these economies for the people there. We have run them for U.S. investors who want cheap labor and their oligarch cronies who provide the cheap labor.

The enforcer of this system--and this is a system that goes back decades--... is the U.S. military. Whenever people there have challenged the rule of these oligarchs and these repressive governments, the United States has run to the rescue of the oligarchs.

In 1954, famously, Guatemala elected, finally, a left-leaning reformer. The first thing that happened was that the United States organized the Guatemalan military for a coup and an attack, and they drove the president out. It was followed by 40 years of savage repression, 150,000 people murdered in that little country over that period of time. Today, the same rich families and the same military control Guatemala.

I was in Guatemala recently, and people told me they were afraid to take a bus, because what happened is that every once in a while, ... armed thugs, would come aboard the bus, shoot the driver, and rob the passengers. A few days later, I was talking to a young man who said no one can get a real job in this country unless they're connected to one of the five or six ruling families, so everyone wants to immigrate to the United States. But it costs $10,000 to hire a coyote take him here. Where are you going to get the $10,000? They borrow it from the criminal gangs. Most of the time, people never make it and they find themselves back in Guatemala owing $10,000 to some pretty bad people. And those criminals, gangs, say, give us the money (this is in his words) or we'll kill your mother, or come work for us. And your first job is to put a mask on, take a gun, go board a bus, shoot the driver, and rob the passengers.

Guatemala is a basket case under the regimes that we have supported.

Same thing in Honduras. 1963, a reformer got elected. We supported a coup to get rid of him. 2009, another reformer gets elected. We support another coup. Now, 2009, the Obama administration publicly said, oh, that's terrible and ... they denounced it, but privately, they paved the way for the military-run government to stay, and the oligarchs once again triumphed.

In 2011--this is only the latest budget numbers that we've been able to uncover--we exported $1.3 billion in military electronic equipment to Honduras. Now ask yourself: what is Honduras--who is Honduras defending itself against? Who is invading Honduras? The answer, of course, is nobody. Now, their rationale is this great war on drugs. In the last 30, 40 years, billions of U.S. dollars have gone to the military in Central America, ostensibly because of the war on drugs. Now, after 30 or 40 years, it's quite clear that the war on drugs is a failure. And the reason it's a failure is because the military that gets all this aid is knee-deep in narcotrafficking. And what's happened now is the combination of drugs, weapons, and poverty is destroying this country to the point where the children are fleeing. The war on drugs in Central America is a failure, but the war of the elite oligarchs on their own people has been a success. And the result are these poor children being driven across the border.

Now, whatever comes of the immigration battle between the Democrats and Republicans, whatever happens to the president's bill, the waves of desperate immigrants from Central America, from other parts of the Caribbean that we have essentially dominated over the last hundred years will not diminish and is never going to diminish unless the United States government and the United States people face the reality that the basic cause of this immigration is rooted in the corrupt regimes that we have supported all these years.

Palestinians Can Learn From the African-American Struggle - Ali Abunimah on RAI

Another good interview. What I really liked in this interview is the piece where Abunimah says how US, which is usually held up as the role model of integration of diverse population, cannot actually be held as that kind of role model where there's so much systematic racial injustice there.

Continuing onwards, he says something, which really struck home that even if Palestinians do achieve the dream of one-state solution where Israelis & Palestinians live side by side, peacefully; Palestinians, in fact, be heavily discriminated & oppressed, similar to Muslims in India are still discriminated & Blacks in South Africa who are still trying to come out of discrimination & oppression they were suffering during apartheid.

Then, Abunimah says something which informed & blew my mind that how Israel & US do have "shared values"; the values all American Presidents have always talked about for the past 6 decades or so. That's the "shared values" of discriminating against & oppressing Palestinians, African-Americans, Latinos, & other "coloureds". Racism is very much entrenched in Israeli & American societies, alike. On top of that, & especially in light of what happened in Baltimore & other American cities, & even in Toronto, the American law enforcement agencies visit Israel on a regular basis, to receive training on how to be better at security. They watch & learn torture techniques in Israel where Palestinians, adults & children alike, are tortured in Israeli prisons.

So, it shows me the ignorance of general public in North America & pretty much all over the world when US, Canada & Europe are held up as paragons of human rights, when these countries are no different from Israel, & treat their coloured populations in no different way; by making harsher criminal laws, hypermilitarization of policing, making education unaffordable, & keeping good jobs away from them.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kODMTcMsb_E

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: So, in chapter one of the book--I'm going to read a quote--you talk about what Palestinians can learn from the African-American struggle:

While abolishing the racism and violence of Zionism practices against Palestinians is the key to justice and peace in historic Palestine, no less than the abolition of slavery and Jim Crow in the United States were absolutely necessary, recent American history demonstrates that systems of racial control and the ideologies underpinning them remain robust and adaptable. A formally liberal and rights-based order can allow a system just as oppressive as Jim Crow to hide and flourish in plain sight.

One of your themes in the first chapter is what Palestinians can learn from African Americans. And we're in a city that's 65% African-American, and you've lived in Chicago for 20 years, a city with a very large African-American population. So what do you think Palestinians can learn from the African-American struggle?

ALI ABUNIMAH, COFOUNDER, ELECTRONIC INTIFADA: Well, if I can just give some context to that quote, which I think helps to answer that as more and more people have recognized that the so-called two-state solution is over, there's--more and more people are arguing, including myself, for a single democratic state encompassing what is today Israel and the occupied territories.

And often people say, well we ought to have equal rights as in the United States or as in some other countries, and what I felt that it was necessary to do is to really interrogate that and to say, well I don't think we can sincerely or honestly hold the United States up as a model when in fact there is so much systematic racial injustice.

And so what that quote leads into is a discussion of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, which was a very important book for me and for many other people, to explain how equality before the law officially in the United States can coexist with mass incarceration. And that serves as a warning for Palestinians that even if they achieve full liberal rights in a single state, they may not get out from under the yoke of racism and oppression and apartheid.

But it also requires us to examine the kind of so-called shared values. And that's from a chapter in the book called "Shared Values, Shared Struggle", that at every occasion, President Obama and all his predecessors will tell us that, oh, the United States and Israel have shared values. And so what are these shared values? And I argue that it includes things like a really racialized view of the world, where Palestinians, in the case of Israel, and African Americans, Latinos, and other people of color in the United States are viewed as some kind of demographic threat that needs to be policed and controlled and surveilled.

And these shared values take a very real form when you see ... that the top police brass from almost every major U.S. city and many smaller cities have been taken on junkets to Israel by groups including the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, groups sponsored by AIPAC, the Israel lobby group, and they take them to places like Megiddo Prison, where Palestinians are routinely tortured, including children, held in solitary confinement. And then they come out and they say, oh, the Israelis are so good at security and in living in a tough neighborhood. And even that language of the tough neighborhood, it comes out of a racialized American discourse. And they say, you see all these quotes from American police chiefs saying, oh, the Israelis are such experts, we're going to take what we learned back to Chicago, back to L.A., back to Baltimore.

And, in fact, Israel is--its niche now is the so-called homeland security industry, where they're exporting billions of dollars of goods, weapons, and services to federal, state, and local police and judicial authorities. So there's a real kind of convergence of ideology and business interest, where, in a sense, if you're fighting mass incarceration in the United States or if you're fighting what Israel is doing to Palestinians, you really need to be part of the same fight, because it's the same corporations profiting from them and it's the same politicians who are talking about Israel as a paragon of human rights and a model for the United States while backing the hypermilitarization of policing, the rail to jail for schoolchildren in the cities, particularly African-American schoolchildren, where we see public education being gutted and privatized and at the same time we see prisons flourishing.
...

JAY: I think it was the 1940s where it was made illegal. But if you had a subdivision, a new subdivision just outside the city or a suburb in Baltimore, you actually had to sign an agreement in your deed which said that you could not sell your house to blacks--or Jews, for that matter, but particularly targeted with African Americans. Later, it was formally made illegal and then informally was still in force: if you actually tried to sell your house, you could be--there would be repercussions in terms of the people that own the subdivision; and later they used blockbusting to play this. But as late as 1969 in Baltimore, there was ... in The Baltimore Sun, there was a section of real estate classifieds for whites, a section for Jews (a separate section), and no section for blacks.

ABUNIMAH: Well, and that was true in Chicago and that was true all over the country. And it's important to--and that was true in Canada, by the way. And it's important not to lay all this history on the South and to forget how entrenched and systematic and formal this segregation and racism was throughout the United States. And the legacy of that is that cities like Chicago are still the most segregated in the world in terms of the ongoing effects of that.

But that kind of segregation, which we view today as a negative result of racism that we now repudiate, is actually the goal that Israeli policymakers are working towards with many of the laws. There's a statement from the Israeli Housing minister a few years ago, Ariel Atias, who says that we have populations mixing who shouldn't be mixing and we have to keep them apart, and so Israel actually pushing policies designed at promoting ethnoracial, ethnoreligious segregation.

But this doesn't stop President Obama from these heartfelt declarations of the values he shares with Israel. And I find that to be a particularly tragic and cruel irony, given that his own election victory is seen as being one of the fruits of the sacrifices so many people made in the civil rights struggle, that, someone like him, whose election was unimaginable, even a decade ago, is today promoting a country like Israel, whose racism against Palestinians, against Africans, against others is so systematic.

JAY: What are some other examples on the housing side in Israel of where there isn't this equal citizenship?

ABUNIMAH: Well, it's on so many levels. It's on the micro level, where you have Jewish and non-Jewish citizens in present-day Israel, where Palestinian citizens of Israel have actually had to go to court for the right to live in Jewish neighborhoods. But it's also on the macro level. I mean, what is Gaza? Gaza is really an open-air prison where 1.7 million people live. 80% of them are refugees from areas that are now part of Israel. And the only reason they have to live in a fenced open-air prison in Gaza and can't go back to their lands--most of which are empty, by the way, in what's now southern Israel--the only reason they can't go back is because they're not Jewish. If they were Jewish, Israel would tear down the fences and say, come on home. So it's the micro level, where you have hundreds of Israeli rabbis, municipal rabbis whose salaries are paid for by the state, who've issued these public calls saying it's forbidden to rent to Arabs--you know, if you own an apartment, don't rent it to an Arab--and at the same time this macro level segregation. It's almost like, to use a South Africa analogy, the petty apartheid and the grand apartheid.

And, by the way, the reason these rabbis have been issuing these calls in recent years is because Israel has not allowed even the Palestinian population who are citizens of Israel to build a single new town in 65 years, has taken most of their land. So what are they trying to do? They're trying to get houses in areas where the houses are being built, which is in Jewish areas, and then they're being met with these kinds of decrees.

What's the point of college?

This whole piece from New Yorker is a fantastic one. It's quite a long one, so I will keep my blog post on it rather short.

What I like to say here is that I've been saying what this article is saying for, at least, a year or so. Education nowadays doesn't have the same respect or weight as it used to carry about 5 decades ago. For instance, I met an 18-year-old about 6 months ago who said to me that he is learning to be a salesperson, right after graduating from high school, & have no intention to go to post-secondary school, because business education is learned best out in the field than in a class. So, in essence, he will save thousands upon thousands of dollars in education & will ultimately come out ahead because he will have hands-on work experience coupled with a valuable network. (I couldn't reply since my own experiences are not so great).

Everyone, from Canada to Chile to Egypt to South Africa to Spain to Russia to Australia to Saudi Arabia, loves to talk about how education is essential for everyone, regardless to gender, skin colour, language, religion etc. And, in an ideal & utopian world, it definitely will be ... but, we are not living in an ideal & utopian world. Education has become a business in itself. It has become so expensive to even get a 4-year bachelor's degree that families & students take out thousands of student loans to earn that degree.

But after graduation a serious question needs to be asked is that degree, for which I just paid thousands of dollars (or whatever other currency), worth anything? Personally, my 2 degrees, a Bachelor's in Accounting & an MBA, for which I paid about 100,000 Canadian dollars (excluding my time & effort) in total, & 2 certificates (Six Sigma & Project Management) have earned me a job as a cashier in a local superstore. So, for me, my education was definitely not worth it. I would have been better off by not getting an education & spent my time working in retail, for instance. That decade in education would've saved me some hard cold cash & I would've been a supervisor, or even a manager, of a store by now. The article does point out this fact that how highly educated graduates, even STEM graduates (science, tech, engineering, & mathematics), are working in measly jobs, perhaps, due to technological advancements.

So, education is important but we need to look at its worth. The article states examples of colleges & universities, & a lot of statistics & studies, in trying to answer the primary question of the worth of education. Eventually, it asks what is the purpose of colleges & universities, since their graduates, which are constantly increasing in number, are not really earning that much, & their wages are actually falling. This seems counterintuitive since education is supposed to increase your worth, & not decrease it in the labour market.

A theory the article puts forward is that degrees & certificates perhaps try to signal to potential employers the competency of the candidate. Potential employers are thus merely using the degrees as a filter in the hiring process. Perhaps, that is why, "branding" of a university comes into play. Since, everyone around you is getting a degree, if you want to stand out from the crowd, you need to "buy" a degree from a so-called "prestigious" school. Then, it becomes an arms race, & it is only helping educational institutes & financial services companies (i.e. banks) in making huge profits.

Unfortunately, the article stops short of giving a definite reason why this is happening that education is not paying off for many, nowadays. One reason it gives, with which I do agree, is that this blind corporate race of cost-cutting is increasing more tech solutions implementation with fewer graduates being hired to train for future management positions.

One other reason I would give for education not paying off in modern times is the absence of meritocracy. We all like to think that education improves the personal financial bottom line, but we forget, that it will happen only when the labour market is merit based, which it is not. We all have heard of that accursed word, "networking," which merely implies that your education & qualifications matter less if you know the right people in the right places. Nowadays, employers get so many resumes / CVs / bio-datas, which are all essentially similar, too, that instead of sifting through all of them to find that perfect candidate, employers simply ask the people around them to recommend them a candidate.

This disease of "networking" is very common in developing countries because, due to their large population, & in their push for more education, everyone has a similar educational base. But networking is relatively new in Western countries because up until a few years ago, your education still played a major part what job & earning potential you ended up with in your life. It was somewhat of a meritocracy. But not anymore. Networking disrupts a level playing field, since, your education & qualifications are useless in the face of "how many influential people are your / family's friends".

Anyway, my blog post has become a long one & I would prefer it that you read the article, which is still quite informative & thought-provoking. We all like to think that education is essential to succeed in life but we forget that the world is an unfair place, & in the near future, your education will matter less & your connections will matter more.

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http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/07/college-calculus

If there is one thing most Americans have been able to agree on over the years, it is that getting an education, particularly a college education, is a key to human betterment & prosperity. ... Already, the cost of higher education has become a big issue in the 2016 Presidential campaign. ...

Promoters of higher education have long emphasized its role in meeting civic needs. The Puritans who established Harvard were concerned about a shortage of clergy; during the Progressive Era, John Dewey insisted that a proper education would make people better citizens, with enlarged moral imaginations. Recently, as wage stagnation & rising inequality have emerged as serious problems, the economic arguments for higher education have come to the fore. “Earning a post-secondary degree or credential is no longer just a pathway to opportunity for a talented few,” the White House Web site states. “Rather, it is a prerequisite for the growing jobs of the new economy.” Commentators & academic economists have claimed that college doesn’t merely help individuals get higher-paying jobs; it raises wages throughout the economy & helps ameliorate rising inequality. In an influential 2008 book, “The Race Between Education and Technology,” the Harvard economists Claudia Goldin & Lawrence F. Katz argued that technological progress has dramatically increased the demand for skilled workers, & that, in recent decades, the American educational system has failed to meet the challenge by supplying enough graduates who can carry out the tasks that a high-tech economy requires. “Not so long ago, the American economy grew rapidly and wages grew in tandem, with education playing a large, positive role in both,” they wrote in a subsequent paper. “The challenge now is to revitalize education-based mobility.”

The “message from the media, from the business community, and even from many parts of the government has been that a college degree is more important than ever in order to have a good career,” Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at Wharton, notes in his informative & refreshingly skeptical new book, “Will College Pay Off?” (PublicAffairs). “As a result, families feel even more pressure to send their kids to college. This is at a time when more families find those costs to be a serious burden.” During recent decades, tuition & other charges have risen sharply—many colleges charge more than 50,000 dollars a year in tuition & fees. Even if you factor in the expansion of financial aid, Cappelli reports, “students in the United States pay about four times more than their peers in countries elsewhere.”

Despite the increasing costs — & the claims about a shortage of college graduates — the number of people attending & graduating from four-year educational institutions keeps going up. In the 2000-01 academic year, American colleges awarded almost 1.3 million bachelor’s degrees. A decade later, the figure had jumped nearly 40%, to more than 1.7 million. About 70% of all high-school graduates now go on to college, & half of all Americans between the ages of 25 & 34 have a college degree. That’s a big change. In 1980, only 1 in 6 Americans 25 & older were college graduates. 50 years ago, it was fewer than 1 in 10. To cater to all the new students, colleges keep expanding & adding courses, many of them vocationally inclined. At Kansas State, undergraduates can major in Bakery Science & Management or Wildlife & Outdoor Enterprise Management. They can minor in Unmanned Aircraft Systems or Pet Food Science. Oklahoma State offers a degree in Fire Protection & Safety Engineering & Technology. At Utica College, you can major in Economic Crime Detection.

In the fast-growing for-profit college sector, which now accounts for more than 10% of all students, vocational degrees are the norm. DeVry University — which last year taught more than 60,000 students, at more than 75 campuses — offers majors in everything from multimedia design & development to health-care administration. On its Web site, DeVry boasts, “In 2013, 90% of DeVry University associate and bachelor’s degree grads actively seeking employment had careers in their field within six months of graduation.” That sounds impressive — until you notice that the figure includes those graduates who had jobs in their field before graduation. (Many DeVry students are working adults who attend college part-time to further their careers.) Nor is the phrase “in their field” clearly defined. “Would you be okay rolling the dice on a degree in communications based on information like that?” Cappelli writes. He notes that research by the nonprofit National Association of Colleges & Employers found that, in the same year, just 6.5% of graduates with communications degrees were offered jobs in the field. It may be unfair to single out DeVry, which is one of the more reputable for-profit education providers. But the example illustrates Cappelli’s larger point: many of the claims that are made about higher education don’t stand up to scrutiny.

“It is certainly true that college has been life changing for most people and a tremendous financial investment for many of them,” Cappelli writes. “It is also true that for some people, it has been financially crippling. . . .The world of college education is different now than it was a generation ago, when many of the people driving policy decisions on education went to college, and the theoretical ideas about why college should pay off do not comport well with the reality.”

No idea has had more influence on education policy than the notion that colleges teach their students specific, marketable skills, which they can use to get a good job. Economists refer to this as the “human capital” theory of education, & for the past 20 or 30 years it has gone largely unchallenged. If you’ve completed a two-year associate’s degree, you’ve got more “human capital” than a high-school graduate. And if you’ve completed a four-year bachelor’s degree you’ve got more “human capital” than someone who attended a community college. Once you enter the labor market, the theory says, you will be rewarded with a better job, brighter career prospects, & higher wages.

There’s no doubt that college graduates earn more money, on average, than people who don’t have a degree. And for many years the so-called “college wage premium” grew. In 1970, according to a recent study by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, people with a bachelor’s degree earned about 60,000 dollars a year, on average, & people with a high-school diploma earned about 45,000 dollars. 35 years later, in 2005, the average earnings of college graduates had risen to more than 70,000 dollars, while high-school graduates had seen their earnings fall slightly. (All these figures are inflation-adjusted.) The fact that the college wage premium went up at a time when the supply of graduates was expanding significantly seemed to confirm the Goldin-Katz theory that technological change was creating an ever-increasing demand for workers with a lot of human capital.

During the past decade or so, however, a number of things have happened that don’t easily mesh with that theory. If college graduates remain in short supply, their wages should still be rising. But they aren’t. In 2001, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington, workers with undergraduate degrees (but not graduate degrees) earned, on average, $30.05 an hour; last year, they earned $29.55 an hour. Other sources show even more dramatic falls. “Between 2001 and 2013, the average wage of workers with a bachelor’s degree declined 10.3 percent, and the average wage of those with an associate’s degree declined 11.1 percent,” the New York Fed reported in its study. Wages have been falling most steeply of all among newly minted college graduates. And jobless rates have been rising. In 2007, 5.5% of college graduates under the age of 25 were out of work. Today, the figure is close to 9%. If getting a bachelor’s degree is meant to guarantee entry to an arena in which jobs are plentiful & wages rise steadily, the education system has been failing for some time.

And, while college graduates are still doing a lot better than nongraduates, some studies show that the earnings gap has stopped growing. The figures need careful parsing. If you lump college graduates in with people with advanced degrees, the picture looks brighter. But almost all the recent gains have gone to folks with graduate degrees. “The four-year-degree premium has remained flat over the past decade,” the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland reported. And one of the main reasons it went up in the first place wasn’t that college graduates were enjoying significantly higher wages. It was that the earnings of nongraduates were falling.

Many students & their families extend themselves to pay for a college education out of fear of falling into the low-wage economy. That’s perfectly understandable. But how sound an investment is it? One way to figure this out is to treat a college degree like a stock or a bond & compare the cost of obtaining one with the accumulated returns that it generates over the years. (In this case, the returns come in the form of wages over & above those earned by people who don’t hold degrees.) When the research firm PayScale did this a few years ago, it found that the average inflation-adjusted return on a college education is about 7%, which is a bit lower than the historical rate of return on the stock market. Cappelli cites this study along with one from the Hamilton Project, a Washington-based research group that came up with a much higher figure — about 15% — but by assuming, for example, that all college students graduate in 4 years. (In fact, the four-year graduation rate for full-time, first-degree students is less than 40%, & the six-year graduation rate is less than 60%.)

These types of studies, & there are lots of them, usually find that the financial benefits of getting a college degree are much larger than the financial costs. But Cappelli points out that for parents & students the average figures may not mean much, because they disguise enormous differences in outcomes from school to school. He cites a survey, carried out by PayScale for Businessweek in 2012, that showed that students who attend M.I.T., Caltech, & Harvey Mudd College enjoy an annual return of more than 10% on their “investment.” But the survey also found almost 200 colleges where students, on average, never fully recouped the costs of their education. “The big news about the payoff from college should be the incredible variation in it across colleges,” Cappelli writes. “Looking at the actual return on the costs of attending college, careful analyses suggest that the payoff from many college programs—as much as 1 in 4—is actually negative. Incredibly, the schools seem to add nothing to the market value of the students.”

So what purpose does college really serve for students & employers? Before the human-capital theory became so popular, there was another view of higher education—as, in part, a filter, or screening device, that sorted individuals according to their aptitudes & conveyed this information to businesses & other hiring institutions. By completing a four-year degree, students could signal to potential employers that they had a certain level of cognitive competence & could carry out assigned tasks & work in a group setting. But a college education didn’t necessarily imbue students with specific work skills that employers needed, or make them more productive.

Kenneth Arrow, one of the giants of twentieth-century economics, came up with this account, & if you take it seriously you can’t assume that it’s always a good thing to persuade more people to go to college. If almost everybody has a college degree, getting one doesn’t differentiate you from the pack. To get the job you want, you might have to go to a fancy (& expensive) college, or get a higher degree. Education turns into an arms race, which primarily benefits the arms manufacturers—in this case, colleges & universities.

The screening model isn’t very fashionable these days, partly because it seems perverse to suggest that education doesn’t boost productivity. But there’s quite a bit of evidence that seems to support Arrow’s theory. In recent years, more jobs have come to demand a college degree as an entry requirement, even though the demands of the jobs haven’t changed much. Some nursing positions are on the list, along with jobs for executive secretaries, salespeople, & distribution managers. According to one study, just 20% of executive assistants & insurance-claims clerks have college degrees but more than 45% of the job openings in the field require one. “This suggests that employers may be relying on a B.A. as a broad recruitment filter that may or may not correspond to specific capabilities needed to do the job,” the study concluded.

It is well established that students who go to elite colleges tend to earn more than graduates of less selective institutions. But is this because Harvard & Princeton do a better job of teaching valuable skills than other places, or because employers believe that they get more talented students to begin with? An exercise carried out by Lauren Rivera, of the Kellogg School of Management, at Northwestern, strongly suggests that it’s the latter. Rivera interviewed more than a hundred recruiters from investment banks, law firms, & management consulting firms, & she found that they recruited almost exclusively from the very top-ranked schools, & simply ignored most other applicants. The recruiters didn’t pay much attention to things like grades & majors. “It was not the content of education that elite employers valued but rather its prestige,” Rivera concluded.

If higher education serves primarily as a sorting mechanism, that might help explain another disturbing development: the tendency of many college graduates to take jobs that don’t require college degrees. Practically everyone seems to know a well-educated young person who is working in a bar or a mundane clerical job, because he or she can’t find anything better. Doubtless, the Great Recession & its aftermath are partly to blame. But something deeper, & more lasting, also seems to be happening.

In the Goldin-Katz view of things, technological progress generates an ever-increasing need for highly educated, highly skilled workers. But, beginning in about 2000, for reasons that are still not fully understood, the pace of job creation in high-paying, highly skilled fields slowed significantly. To demonstrate this, 3 Canadian economists, Paul Beaudry, David A. Green, & Benjamin M. Sand, divided the US workforce into a hundred occupations, ranked by their average wages, & looked at how employment has changed in each category. Since 2000, the economists showed, the demand for highly educated workers declined, while job growth in low-paying occupations increased strongly. “High-skilled workers have moved down the occupational ladder and have begun to perform jobs traditionally performed by lower-skilled workers,” they concluded, thus “pushing low-skilled workers even further down the occupational ladder.”

Increasingly, the competition for jobs is taking place in areas of the labor market where college graduates didn’t previously tend to compete. As Beaudry, Green, & Sand put it, “having a B.A. is less about obtaining access to high paying managerial and technology jobs and more about beating out less educated workers for the Barista or clerical job.” Even many graduates in science, technology, engineering, & mathematics—the so-called STEM subjects, which receive so much official encouragement—are having a tough time getting the jobs they’d like. Cappelli reports that only about a fifth of recent graduates with STEM degrees got jobs that made use of that training. “The evidence for recent grads suggests clearly that there is no overall shortage of STEM grads,” he writes.

Why is this happening? The short answer is that nobody knows for sure. One theory is that corporate cost-cutting, having thinned the ranks of workers on the factory floor & in routine office jobs, is now targeting supervisors, managers, & other highly educated people. Another theory is that technological progress, after favoring highly educated workers for a long time, is now turning on them. With rapid advances in processing power, data analysis, voice recognition, & other forms of artificial intelligence, computers can perform tasks that were previously carried out by college graduates, such as analyzing trends, translating foreign-language documents, & filing tax returns. In “The Second Machine Age” (Norton), the M.I.T. professors Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee sketch a future where computers will start replacing doctors, lawyers, & many other highly educated professionals. “As digital labor becomes more pervasive, capable, and powerful,” they write, “companies will be increasingly unwilling to pay people wages that they’ll accept, and that will allow them to maintain the standard of living to which they’ve been accustomed.”

Cappelli stresses the change in corporate hiring patterns. In the old days, Fortune 500 companies such as General Motors, Citigroup, & I.B.M. took on large numbers of college graduates & trained them for a lifetime at the company. But corporations now invest less in education & training, &, instead of promoting someone, or finding someone in the company to fill a specialized role, they tend to hire from outside. Grooming the next generation of leadership is much less of a concern. “What employers want from college graduates now is the same thing they want from applicants who have been out of school for years, and that is job skills and the ability to contribute now,” Cappelli writes. “That change is fundamental, and it is the reason that getting a good job out of college is now such a challenge.”

Obtaining a vocational degree or certificate is one strategy that many students employ to make themselves attractive to employers, &, on the face of it, this seems sensible. If you’d like to be a radiology technician, shouldn’t you get a B.A. in radiology? If you want to run a bakery, why not apply to Kansas State & sign up for that major in Bakery Science? But narrowly focussed degrees are risky. “If you graduate in a year when gambling is up and the casinos like your casino management degree, you probably have hit it big,” Cappelli writes. “If they aren’t hiring when you graduate, you may be even worse off getting a first job with that degree anywhere else precisely because it was so tuned to that group of employers.” During the dot-com era, enrollment in computer-science & information-technology programs rose sharply. After the bursting of the stock-market bubble, many of these graduates couldn’t find work. “Employers who say that we need more engineers or IT grads are not promising to hire them when they graduate in four years,” Cappelli notes. “Pushing kids into a field like health care because someone believes there is a need there now will not guarantee that they all get jobs &, if they do, that those jobs will be as good as workers in that field have now.”

So what’s the solution? Some people believe that online learning will provide a viable low-cost alternative to a live-in college education. ... Another approach is to direct more students & resources to two-year community colleges & other educational institutions that cost less than four-year colleges. President Obama recently called for all qualified high-school students to be guaranteed a place in community college, & for tuition fees to be eliminated. Such policies would reverse recent history. In a new book, “Learning by Doing: The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth” (Yale), James Bessen, a technology entrepreneur who also teaches at Boston University School of Law, points out that “the policy trend over the last decade has been to starve community colleges in order to feed four-year colleges, especially private research universities.” Some of the discrepancies are glaring. Richard Vedder, who teaches economics at Ohio University, calculated that in 2010 Princeton, which had an endowment of close to fifteen billion dollars, received state & federal benefits equivalent to roughly 50,000 dollars per student, whereas the nearby College of New Jersey got benefits of just 2,000 dollars per student. There are sound reasons for rewarding excellence & sponsoring institutions that do important scientific research. But is a twenty-five-to-one difference in government support really justified?

Perhaps the strongest argument for caring about higher education is that it can increase social mobility, regardless of whether the human-capital theory or the signalling theory is correct. A recent study by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco showed that children who are born into households in the poorest fifth of the income distribution are 6 times as likely to reach the top fifth if they graduate from college. Providing access to college for more kids from deprived backgrounds helps nurture talents that might otherwise go to waste, & it’s the right thing to do. (Of course, if college attendance were practically universal, having a degree would send a weaker signal to employers.) But increasing the number of graduates seems unlikely to reverse the over-all decline of high-paying jobs, & it won’t resolve the income-inequality problem, either. As the economist Lawrence Summers & two colleagues showed in a recent simulation, even if we magically summoned up college degrees for a tenth of all the working-age American men who don’t have them—by historical standards, a big boost in college-graduation rates—we’d scarcely change the existing concentration of income at the very top of the earnings distribution, where C.E.O.s & hedge-fund managers live.

Being more realistic about the role that college degrees play would help families & politicians make better choices. It could also help us appreciate the actual merits of a traditional broad-based education, often called a liberal-arts education, rather than trying to reduce everything to an economic cost-benefit analysis. “To be clear, the idea is not that there will be a big financial payoff to a liberal arts degree,” Cappelli writes. “It is that there is no guarantee of a payoff from very practical, work-based degrees either, yet that is all those degrees promise. For liberal arts, the claim is different and seems more accurate, that it will enrich your life and provide lessons that extend beyond any individual job. There are centuries of experience providing support for that notion.”