Push For Science Majors, But Lots Of Unemployed Ph.D's Already

[quaker bill]

6. Education is not the answer to globalization

The world has demand for only so many PhDs. The world has a limited demand for bricklayers too, it is just that the number is much larger.

If they focus on it, China and India can produce more people with any one particular job qualification than the world actually needs, all the while being fairly selective about who they train.

Pushing our kids to higher and higher levels of achievement will not solve the fundamental problem of globalization, but it will produce a better educated class of frycooks.

Globalization gets fixed when the cost of transportation for manufactured goods rises sufficiently to offset wage differentials, or when wage differentials decline due to unionization overseas. I expect transportation costs to come into play first.

The other factor is automation, our robots are increasingly cheaper than overseas labor. The problem with this is that automated factories have far fewer jobs, which is part of why they are cheaper. Go far enough on the automation end and the entire economy needs restructuring, the turn of last century to "Mad Men" vintage model of economic arragements dies as there are insufficient real jobs to sustain a middle class capable of purchasing the output.

"Fordism" was good stuff while it lasted, but the model required an industry that needed lots of people to produce Fords, each paid a decent wage for doing so. First automation, and then offshoring gutted this economic model, now even better automation is beginning to gut the offshoring model. Sooner or later (and I think sooner) the concept of a "job" and the need for one will need to be re-evaluated at a very basic social contract level. We just don't need the number of manhours available to produce the necessities of life anymore, and this difference will only grow with time.