Thursday, October 19, 2023
Introducing the Main Street Alliance
Sunday, September 3, 2023
The Educated Precariat: Why The Mismatch?
This post is a continuation of my series of posts on economic precarity. As I mentioned in recent posts in this series, we have been exploring the subject of the educated precariat - that is, those people in the early 21st century who have obtained either bachelors or more advanced graduate degrees from a college or university, yet who cannot find stable work in their chosen profession. The most recent previous post in this series discussed the university system as a machine that produces graduates for use within the larger machinery of modern late-stage capitalism, and what is happening to those graduates because of the fact that there are more graduates being produced than there are jobs into which to plug those graduates.
"Elite overproduction is a concept developed by Peter Turchin, which describes the condition of a society which is producing too many potential elite members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure. This, he hypothesizes, is a cause for social instability, as those left out of power feel aggrieved by their relatively low socioeconomic status." [Emphasis added.]
"The mismatch between the educational requirements for various occupations and the amount of education obtained by workers is large and growing significantly over time. The problem can be viewed two ways. In one sense, we have an “underemployment” problem; College graduates are underemployed, performing jobs which require vastly less educational tools than they possess. The flip side of that, though, is that we have an 'overinvestment' problem: We are churning out far more college graduates than required by labor-market imperatives. The supply of jobs requiring college degrees is growing moreslowly than the supply of those holding such degrees. Hence, more and more college graduates are crowding out high-school graduates in such blue-collar, low-skilled jobs as taxi driver, firefighter, and retail sales clerks..."
Sunday, July 23, 2023
The Educated Precariat: The Modern University - Birth, Growth, Late-Stage Diseases
- The creation of cadres of people who could either participate in politics and governance as ruling practitioners of statecraft, or as people who could serve as competent administrators/bureaucrats under these ruling elites.
- The teaching and research of basic scientific knowledge and skills in such arenas as medicine, mathematics, and astronomy.
- It received students from everywhere and not just its own local region.
- It engaged in higher learning, going beyond "the Seven Liberal Arts of antiquity and the early Middle Ages" to include the re-discovered teachings and writings of Greek philosophers such as Aristotle as well as Arabic learning.
- "A significant part of the teaching was done by Masters (teachers with a higher degree)." (Peters, cited above; Healey, cited above.)
- It was a self-governing, autonomous institution (a corporation run like the craft guilds) with a high degree of control over its budget and expenditures, and complete academic freedom over what degrees were awarded, and to whom. Indeed, those universities which depended entirely on student tuition had complete control over their own budgets and expenditures. (Axtell, cited above.) This self-governance was usually exercised entirely by the university faculty, that is, the collection of masters who taught university courses. However, sometimes, this self-governance was exercised by students, who could choose which masters to hire or fire in addition to their other administrative powers. (See the University of Bologna, for instance.) Note that there were no early cases of universities being run by "administrators" who were not directly involved in teaching or learning. This point will become important later.
- Its main function was to produce the European equivalent of mandarins and other "professionals to maintain and lead the established social order, secular as well as religious." (Axtell, cited above.) Research was not a major function of the medieval university, although the influence of Aristotelian thought on the university curriculum did produce a spirit of inquiry.
- The individual universities eventually became part of a European university system in which a degree issued by any one university was recognized as valid by any other university and anyone who achieved the degree of master was to be recognized as such by any university and to be allowed to teach at any university without having to undergo further examination.
Although the medieval university system did not deliberately focus on research, the fact is that a large number of scholars who were products (either graduates or professors) of medieval universities went on to do the work that laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution. These included such figures as Isaac Newton, Leonhard Euler, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. It can be argued that the contributions of such intellectuals were greatly amplified and expanded by the transformation of the German university system, even though the stated motivations for that transformation were not initially the pursuit of practical scientific knowledge. According to Lindsay and Neumann (cited above), the reforms of German universities triggered in the 18th and 19th centuries were "based on an acceptance of the view that the purpose of higher education was to advance as well as to preserve and transmit knowledge." However, another significant motivation for these reforms was the fact that Prussia had been badly humiliated by France during the wars of the early 19th century, and so the German university system was reformed in order to catch up with and pass up the French.
"Universities should view knowledge as incomplete and so subject to discovery, although full or final knowledge could never be attained. Further, knowledge was pure and was tobe found deep within the self. It could not be gained merely by the extensive collection of facts. Only knowledge that came from, and could be developed within, the self formed one's character; and it was character and the manner of behaving that was important for the state and for humanity, not merely knowledge and eloquence ..."
"Over the last decade, university research has gradually changed its character under the influence of cost pressures, ambivalent public attitudes, and increasingly narrow notions of "utility." The natural sciences have received higher priority, and research has been increasingly concentrated in large teams and centers. The proportion of applied research has increased and closer links with industry developed. These trends have contributed to a weakening of the teaching-research nexus. Relationships with government have been marked by increasing bureaucratization and control. The business community and the government both stress the contribution of university research to national economic and social renewal, but the pattern of postwar development in higher education has brought utility into conflict with excellence, the traditional criterion for funding research. The challenge is to incorporate utility into research policy and funding without compromising the pursuit of excellence."
"... corporations of learning [which] set their affairs in order after the pattern of a well-conducted business concern. In this view the university is conceived as a business house dealing in merchantable knowledge, placed under the governing hand of a captain of erudition, whose office it is to turn the means in hand to account in the largest feasible output. It is a corporation with large funds, and for men biased by their workday training in business affairs it comes as a matter of course to rate the university in terms of investment and turnover. Hence the insistence on business capacity in the executive heads of theuniversities, and hence also the extensive range of businesslike duties and powers thatdevolve on them."
In other words, even as far back as 1918, American universities were viewed by their administrators as businesses. (For a look at this process in an Australian context, see "How we got here: The transformation of Australian public universities into for-profit corporations", James Guthrie and Adam Lucas, 2022.) (BTW, lemme break one thing down for ya: when Veblen uses the term "captain of erudition," what he means is "business executive as college administrator.")
What's more, even as far back as 1918, the function of governing these universities was being moved away from faculty and students, and was being transferred to administrators who had no direct role in either teaching or learning. Veblen was ruthless in his evaluation of these administrators: "They are needless..." (That's "needless" as in, "useless"!) Yet the ranks of college administrators have grown steadily over the decades, at first slowly, then meteorically during the period from the 1970's onward. I don't have time to write the statistics here (it's late in the day - gotta clean the bathroom and kitchen, and water the vegetables!), but I will leave a list of articles that interested readers can check out themselves if they are curious. Suffice it to say that the administrative function of modern universities has begun to displace all other functions, hogging resources like a cancerous tumor even as faculty tenure is eliminated, faculty input into university policy is marginalized, faculty pay stagnates or declines, the percentage of adjunct faculty relative to full-time faculty increases, and student tuition (along with student debt) skyrockets.
It may well be that the growth of the administrative and non-teaching professional sector of university staff has begun to threaten the long-term economic viability of American universities, both public and private. This would explain two phenomena which I have noticed over the last decade or so and which I identify as possible coping mechanisms: the increasing promotion of university athletic programs (particularly football) in universities which never used to care much about athletics, and the expansion of a bewildering offering of professional graduate degrees and certificates. I suggest that these professional graduate certificates and degrees are producing a glut of mandarins of the Global North at a time in which the job market for these mandarins is becoming saturated.
What is to be done about these new mandarins and their dwindling job prospects? One suggestion comes from Peter Turchin, a corpulent Russian academic who has proposed that elites should limit access to higher education lest their less fortunate yet educated underlings become a source of the kind of upheaval and social transformation that destroys the power of these elites. I can't say that I agree with his moral viewpoint. I argue that education should be made as widely available as possible precisely because of the power of educated people to transform situations of inequality dominated by entrenched elites. But for this to occur, ordinary people must regain a sense of the purpose of education in order that they might produce and revive grassroots expressions of that purpose. More on that in another post.
- "Globalization, Neoliberalism, and International Student Enrolments in Higher Education: Expanding Global Interconnectedness and Academic Commodification", pages 32-42
- "Degrees of Change: How New Kinds of Professional Doctorates are Changing Higher Education Institutions"
- Article by Michael Delucchi, Richard Dadzie, Eric Dean, and Xuan Pham in Review of Social Economy, June 2021 (Language warning!)
- "A Bad Bargain: Administrative Bloat and Low Faculty Pay at UDC"
- "How Much is Too Much? Controlling Administrative Costs Through Effective Oversight"
- "Report: IU Athletics generated 13th most revenue nationally in 2022"
Sunday, July 9, 2023
The Educated Precariat: The Seedlings Of Early Trees
This post is a continuation of my series of posts on economic precarity. As I mentioned in recent posts in this series, we are now starting to delve the subject of the educated precariat - that is, those people who have obtained either bachelors or more advanced graduate degrees from a college or university, yet who cannot find stable work in their chosen profession. I suggest that the troubled lives of the educated precariat are a symptom of the troubled state of higher education generally - especially in the First World (also known as the Global North). Two troubled groups come immediately to mind, namely, academics (college professors or salaried researchers) and college or university graduates. We will explore the plight of new college professors and researchers later. But suffice it to say that the guaranteed career of a tenured professor is increasingly out of reach for this group. (See also, "Tenure Track for Professors In States Like Texas May Disappear," USA Today, 13 April 2023.) A third group that may not know it's in trouble consists of new and continuing college and university students whose necks will one day be broken by the mousetrap of student loan debt. A fourth group consists of the administrators and employees of the system itself. Their trouble arises from the fact that they are running out of a key resource, namely, new students! This is due to a number of factors, such as declining birth rates, as well as a sober realization on the part of young men and women that college education itself has begun to yield sharply diminished returns even as it has become unbearably expensive.
- Mali, African Continent (University of Timbuktu containing the Sankore Madrasah)
- Tunisia, African Continent (University of Ez-Zitouna)
- China
- Academy of the White Deer Cavern (白鹿洞書院);
- Songyang Academy (嵩陽書院) (This was a private rather than public institution.)
- Taixue (太學) ("National University" established by Emperor Wu)
- Greece, European Continent
- The school of Isocrates
- The school of Plato (Also known as the "Academy", which was the first historical use of this term in the West.) (See also Higher Education In Greece, Kyriazis and Asderaki, CEPES, 2008)
- The school of Pythagoras
- The Byzantine Empire
- The Pandidakterion (known today as the University of Constantinople)
Sunday, April 9, 2023
Precarity, American-Style: The American Enterprise Institute and Small Businesses
This post is a continuation of my series of posts on economic precarity and the precariat. Past posts explored the manifestation of precarity in Russia and China, two nations which returned to the capitalist fold at the end of the 20th century after abandoning free-market capitalism during the early and middle decades of the 20th century. More recent posts have explored the spread of precarity in the United States, a nation which has been characterized from its birth by a cultural emphasis on laissez-faire, free-market capitalism and the defense of the "property rights" of those who are wealthy. This post continues the exploration of precarity in the United States.
"It is a common belief among entrepreneurs and policymakers that small businesses arethe fountainhead of job creation and the engine of economic growth. However, it hasbecome increasingly apparent that the conventional wisdom obscures many importantissues. It is an important consideration because many government spending programs, taxincentives, and regulatory policies that favor the small business sector are justified by therole of small businesses in creating jobs and is the raison d’etre of an entire governmentagency: the Small Business Administration (SBA). This paper concludes that there is noreason to base our policies on the idea that small businesses are more deserving ofgovernment favor than big companies. And absent other inefficiencies that would hindersmall businesses performances, there is no legitimate argument for their preferentialtreatment. Hence the paper suggests ending all small businesses’ subsidies." [Emphasis added.]
The paper sought to make a case for eliminating all government agencies and programs that support or incubate small businesses, both at the Federal and State levels. It twisted a number of statistics in its attempt to make its case, attempting for instance to convince readers that the net gains in job creation should be ignored in favor of gross job creation when analyzing the impact of small businesses during any time period of analysis. This position, by the way, is proven false by the fact that reputable agencies such as the World Bank do count the impact of net job creation in evaluating economic performance. For an example of the paper's mishandling of statistics, consider the part where the author tries to use gross job gains and gross job losses to "prove" that employment in the small business sector was much less stable than in large companies during the year 2000. The author neglected to notice that during the time period in question, the net addition of jobs by small businesses was always positive, and for firms between 1 and 49 employees, exceeded 10 percent. Lastly, I would point out the laughably false claim made by the paper that "... larger employers offer greater job security. For both new jobs and the typical existing job, job durability increases with employer size." (That has definitely not been my experience as a working stiff and cubicle rat! I guess the author of the paper never heard of the words "downsizing" or "redundancy"!)
"... the real job growth comes not from people dreaming of being small business owners but from people committed to building big companies." [Emphasis added.]
"The paper will examine whether the pervasiveness of the belief that small businesses are the economy’s main source of job creation is warranted. Section 2 will show how this belief is the foundation for many government policies. Section 3 will expose the statistical fallacies that lead people to see job creation patterns where none exist. Besides it shouldn’t matter. Although job creation receives enormous attention in policy discussions, it is rather misplaced. The mere creation of jobs is not by itself an appropriate economic policy objective. Economic growth whether it takes the form of additional jobs or increase of productivity in existing jobs is all that matters. The paper concludes that there is no reason to base policies on the idea that small businesses are more deserving of government favor than big companies." [Emphasis added.]
In other words, the AEI has backed a policy which favors the continued growth of large companies, and the continued growth of American economic productivity even when that growth is not accompanied by the growth of jobs. We have already seen the results of such a policy in action, namely, in the jobless "recoveries" from economic crises which occurred during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and both Bushes. Such "recoveries" left a lot of people out of work for a long time, while those who still had jobs were subjected to ever-increasing demands on their time from their employers in the name of increasing productivity. To put it another way, these "jobless recoveries" resulted in ever-increasing concentrations of wealth among the richest members of society while drastically increasing economic precarity among everyone else. It is quite telling that the AEI has pushed so hard for the elimination of all government help for small businesses even though large corporations are the biggest recipients of corporate welfare from both Federal, State and local governments.
- How many really big companies can exist in a society whose economy is of finite size?
- Why should most people rally behind continued economic growth if the fruits of that growth are not fairly and equitably distributed?
- Who wants to volunteer to be one of the many poor, disenfranchised, and unemployed who are produced by a system in which the fruits of increased productivity are not fairly distributed?
- Who wants to volunteer to be a member of the salariat in such an economy if the only way to be a member of the salariat class is to work 80-hour weeks?
Sunday, March 26, 2023
Precarity, American-Style: Causative Factors
- The decline of small businesses in the U.S. This has been due to "the tilting of the playing field to favor massive companies over small businesses," as reported in a 2020 article by Business Insider. (See also "Monopoly Power And The Decline of Small Business" for a 2016 snapshot of the problem.) Note that the laws passed by the U.S. Congress and the executive orders issued under the Trump administration only made this worse. However, the Biden administration has begun taking steps to reverse small business decline by helping small businesses compete for Federal work, as reported by the Federal News Network in a 2023 article.
- The shifting of tax burdens from the rich to the poor. A striking case in point is the number of states (red states, particularly) whose legislatures and governors have turned them into tax havens for the rich. (See also, "How the Ultrawealthy Devise Ways to Not Pay Their Share of Taxes," NPR, August 2022.) Thus these states have come to resemble enclaves of dirty money that are found in the Cayman Islands. Note that the U.S has recently surpassed the Caymans to become the "world's biggest enabler of financial secrecy" as reported by the international Consortium of Investigative Journalists in May 2022. But these are merely one part of the overall shift of tax burdens away from the rich which began in the 1980's under Ronald Reagan.
- The use of monopoly and oligopoly power to create monopsony and oligopsony labor markets. We all know that a monopoly is a state in which there is only one supplier of a particular good or service which is needed by many buyers. The monopolist can therefore charge whatever price he wants, even if the price is horribly unfair. Oligopoly is the condition in which there is more than one supplier, yet the total number of suppliers is very small. Examples of oligopoly include Airbus and Boeing among aircraft manufacturers, or Microsoft and Brave and Alphabet (owner of Google) among Internet search providers, or CVS and Walgreens and Rite-Aid among drugstores and pharmacies. A monopsony, by contrast, is a situation in which there is only one buyer of a good or service which is offered by many suppliers. An example of this is a situation in which there is only one employer who can offer jobs to people in a large geographical area. Thus the many people in this area become horribly dependent on the one large employer, and if that employer uses his power maliciously or suddenly goes out of business or decides suddenly to cut costs, many people will be devastated. Oligopsony works the same way. Monopsony and oligopsony are the natural outcome of monopoly and oligopoly.
- The shifting of regulatory burdens from large businesses to small businesses. A prime example of this is the case of trying to use your own personal car to earn money by giving people rides. Most cities and states have laws that prevent you from doing this as a private individual. In this case, there are only two legal ways you can earn money by giving people rides: go to work for a taxi company, or become an "independent contractor" for a multibillion-dollar ride-hailing service such as Uber or Lyft. The regulatory burden on these ride-hailing services is very small, as seen in the cases of ride-hailing drivers who are injured on the job, or passengers who are sometimes assaulted by the ride-hailing drivers. Regulatory burdens are now crafted by state and local legislators for the purpose of expanding opportunities for big businesses by smothering small businesses who can't afford the costs of regulatory compliance.
- The innovation-depressing strategies of big businesses. It can be argued that once a monopoly or oligopoly economy is established, the big players in such an economy will tend to fear innovation, since innovations can be disruptive and can even destroy the pre-existing monopoly or oligopoly arrangement. Thus it is no surprise that large businesses (and wanna-be large business owners) have evolved egregious strategies to stifle any potential innovations that might threaten their interests. One such strategy is the misuse of the "non-compete agreement." These are agreements which employees force new hires to sign, in which the new hire typically agrees not to work for any other business or start their own business within a certain time frame and within a certain geographical area. Certain versions of these non-compete agreements also force the employee to give up all rights to any invention or intellectual product which the employee may devise while employed by his employer and for a certain time period after the employee stops working for the employer. (If you work for such an employer, I can understand why you would not be motivated to think very much while on the job!) The abuse of non-compete clauses in employment contracts has moved the Biden administration to start taking steps to ban them (see this also), which should provide immediate relief from employers who want to try to turn their employees into personal property.
Sunday, March 19, 2023
Precarity, American-Style: Introduction
The Journal of Cultural Anthropology describes precarity as ". . . an emerging abandonment that pushes us away from a livable life . . . [It is] the politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks . . . becoming differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death." The University of Georgia has an article on its "Neoliberalism Guide for Educators" webpage which describes precarity in concrete human terms, starting with the questions "Have you ever or do you currently live paycheck to paycheck? Do you work 40 hours a week or more and still can't afford rent?"
The University of Georgia webpage cited above describes how precarity was not always a feature of modern American life. That page describes how under President Lyndon Johnson, the United States began to construct a social safety net that actually worked to bring economic advancement to all Americans and not just the rich. The page also describes how wealthy business interests organized from the 1970's onward to begin to unravel that safety net in order to protect and expand their dominance over the American economy. Today's post will explore how the resulting increase in precarity spread throughout the United States. We will see that, to use a word picture, many of those who thought that they would make out all right by being friends of wolves wound up becoming lamb chops themselves.
- Material rewards - that is, the relative adequacy or inadequacy of wages
- Work time arrangements - that is, how long a person has to work as well as how much control the worker has over his or her own schedule
- Stability - that is, whether the job has a stable employment contract or whether it is unstable (as in temporary, seasonal, contracted limited-time, etc.)
- Workers' rights - that is, whether the employer offers benefits such as health insurance or retirement, as well as protection of workers from exploitation
- Collective organization or empowerment - that is, whether employees are helped or hindered in their attempts to organize themselves for collective bargaining power
- Interpersonal relations - that is, whether workers have to deal with toxic bosses or bosses who don't allow the workers to control how they do their jobs
- Training and employability opportunities - that is, whether there is room for growth and advancement in the job
"The guilt of falling into . . . predatory hands . . . [lies] in the oppressed society and, thus, the solution and liberation need to come from that society transformed through its work, education, and civility. Victims and the seemingly disempowered are thus their own liberators as long as they pursue self-organization, self-attainment, and development of their communities."
Or, to quote from Alex Soojung Kim-Pang,
"Collective action is the most powerful form of self-care." (Emphasis added.)
Saturday, March 4, 2023
Precarity in the United States: A Preview of Coming Attractions
- The Educated Underclass: Students and the Promise of Social Mobility, Gary Roth, Pluto Press, 2019.
- Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat, Ruth Milkman, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020. (Note: Try not to order an e-book copy of this through the John Wiley website. Wiley has e-book download policies that will make you want to kick furniture and punch walls...)
- "Not 'Just' a Barista: The Story of Portland's College-Educated Baristas, Ned William Tilbrook, Portland State University, 2020. (Now this sounds interesting!)