Education & Inequality

Thanks to Mother Jones and Free Democracy, I was able to re-visit my long lost favorite columnist Paul Krugman. Krugman harps on a very serious problem both with conservative and liberal economic policy. Conservatives don't seem to care that there is a massive problem of inequality in this country - that only the top 10% seem to be receiving any income gains whatsoever. The smarter (and more honest) sort of right-winger points to a the rising importance of education in determining income. Liberals take this idea and run with it, suggesting that expanding access to education will level the economic playing field.

If only it were that easy. It turns out that having a college degree isn't leading to income gains either. The sad reality is that over the last generation the primary benefit of having a degree is that it permits one to tread water - real income gains for college graduates is only about 1% a year. Hey, at least their incomes aren't falling like those without a college degree, right?

No, the truth is that income gains in America are almost exclusively concentrated on those who have very high incomes - who are in the top 1% of the income scale. And since there is so little social mobility in America, those in the top 1% are usually the children of those in the top 1%. Hello oligarchy!

Matt Yglesias takes the poor relationship between income and education to minimize the importance of universal college education. While I agree with Matt that inequality won't be reduced by getting everyone to go to college, there are other reasons to do so. I for one would much rather have an educated citizenry than an uneducated one. They tend to be much better at democracy. Yes this would likely come at a very high cost, but how much is democracy worth to you?