False Hope

What makes for a contrarian? It seems that there are two species: those that disagree for the sheer shits and grins of it, and those that disagree based on logic and/or data. I fall into the latter group. One of my current pet peeves is that drumbeat of increased education as the cure for the hollowing of the middle class. "If only we educated ourselves, more of us would be in the middle class".

Poppycock. Of course, that response is pure logic, which goes like this. In the 1950s and 1960s the education level of Americans was substantially lower than now, yet, it is believed, the middle class was larger and more prosperous (in a relative sense; everybody had pretty much the same sort of phone then, and so forth) 60 years ago. It would be nice if there were income by education data, from a unified source, from 1950 to 2010, but I haven't found it.

What I did find is an article which references some data on education from 1950 to 2010 here, but there's nothing at the link.

But I did find a a census report, which does have an interesting graph (figure 1). I think that says it all.

Creation, and preservation, of a dominating middle class (in opposition to the 1% domination) is a product of policy, not data. In the aftermath of WWII, with a residual collectivist ethos (anti-Communism and McCarthyism notwithstanding) supporting unionism and domestic economics, (re-)distributional decisions made the blue collar middle class possible. Educating all of us to an undergraduate degree can't do anything but devalue the B.A., due to over-supply. One might well argue that is exactly what is happening. A robust middle class can only be attained through express policy decisions.