Introducing the Main Street Alliance

I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce readers to the Main Street Alliance, an organization which seeks to foster the creation and growth of small businesses in the United States.  As I resume my series of posts on the problem of economic precarity, I will also discuss solutions.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I believe that the eradication of the monopoly power of the rich and the fostering of small business among the poor are two strategic efforts which can reduce or eliminate economic precarity in the United States.  This is what the Main Street Alliance is working to achieve.

Those who read about the activities of the Main Street Alliance will also learn about how the rich and the powerful in the United States are trying to destroy small businesses, especially those run by minorities, and how these bad actors are using Republican-appointed Federal court justices in their attacks against small business.  This should be of great concern to those of you who are small entrepreneurs.  The latest attack against small business consists of judicial challenges to the Federal tax code.  Readers of this blog can learn from the Main Street Alliance website how they can join in the fight to foster and protect small business.

The Distressing Mirror

Two men went up into the temple to pray, 

one a Pharisee, and the other a tax-gatherer.  

The Pharisee stood and was praying thus to himself, 

"God, I thank Thee that I am not like other people: 

swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax-gatherer. . ."

- Luke 18:10-11

Over the last week or so I downloaded an audio narration of another nonfiction book by Haruki Murakami.  (I already had his books Novelist as a Vocation and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.)  Murakami has achieved fame as a novelist due to his complex, dreamlike narratives and complex, multidimensional characters.  However, I personally am drawn more to some of his short stories and nonfiction.  Also, nowadays I like to consume my fiction and narrative nonfiction in the form of audiobooks, since I can listen to them while exercising or doing housework or yardwork.  

The book I downloaded last week was Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, and it deals with the March 1995 terrorist attack against Tokyo subway passengers which was perpetrated by members of Aum Shinrikyo (オウム真理教), a Japanese apocalyptic/doomsday cult founded by a certain Chizuo Matsumoto, known more widely as Shoko Asahara.  Over the years, Mr. Asahara had directed Aum followers to perpetrate a number of violent physical attacks against innocent Japanese citizens, including some who were critical of Aum activities and some who had been members of Aum but had since fled the cult.  (By the way, if you click on some of these links, you will be directed to webpages that are written in Japanese.  If you want to read them in English, simply copy the link address into Chrome or Chromium and right-click anywhere on the page.  An option will appear that says, "Translate to English."  Click on that option.)

The attack that occurred on March 20, 1995, used a liquid sarin solution that was stored in plastic bags.  The perpetrators boarded the Tokyo subway trains, dropped these plastic bags, then punctured them with the sharpened tips of umbrellas.  They then fled the trains at the next stop after the stop at which they boarded, while the liquid sarin solution spread over the floors of the subway cars and the sarin began to evaporate into the air.  As the sarin evaporated, it began to sicken and kill passengers.  It also sickened (and in some cases killed) Tokyo subway workers who were dispatched to clean up the liquid on the floors and who did not know that the liquid contained sarin.  This attack was entirely unprovoked.  None of the people riding those trains or working on those train platforms had done anything evil beforehand to Aum or to Shoko Asahara.

In writing Underground, Murakami sought to correct certain biases which he observed in Japanese media coverage of the gas incident.  In particular, there had been a tendency toward sensationalism which obscured the unavoidable grainy uniqueness of the individual stories of each of the victims and bystanders who had been riding the Tokyo subways on the day of the attack.  This is why there is a large number of interviews of victims in Murakami's account.  

But Murakami also attempted to challenge and correct certain biases in the Japanese societal and cultural perception of the meaning of the gas attack.  This attempt is captured in "Blind Nightmare: Where Are We Japanese Going?", a series of essays at the end of the original edition of the book.  In those essays, Murakami challenged the evolving narrative in which a "right," "sane," "good" Japanese society was juxtaposed against an "evil", "insane," "diseased" adversary.  As time passed, this narrative allowed the birth of a mindset in which "most Japanese [seemed] ready to pack up the whole incident in a trunk labeled things over and done with." (Murakami, ibid.)

What Murakami wanted to do instead was to ask, What kind of society have we Japanese (that is, all of us) become that something like Aum Shinrikyo could have arisen and that something like the Tokyo gas attack could have occurred?  To quote him again,

"In other words, the shock dealt to Japanese society by Aum and the gas attack has still to be effectively analyzed, the lessons have yet to be learned. Even now, having finished interviewing the victims, I can't simply file away the gas attack, saying: “After all, this was 

merely an extreme and exceptional crime committed by an isolated lunatic fringe.” And what am I to think when our collective memory of the affair is looking more and more like a bizarre comic strip or an urban myth? 

"If we are to learn anything from this tragic event, we must look at what happened all over again, from different angles, in different ways. Something tells me things will only get worse if we don't wash it out of our metabolism. It’s all too easy to say, “Aum was evil.” Nor does saying, “This had nothing to do with evil' or 'insanity'" prove anything either. Yet the spell cast by these phrases is almost impossible to break, the whole emotionally charged “Us” versus “Them" vocabulary has been done to death."

In his closing essays, Murakami cites the abortive attempt by Aum Shinrikyo to win seats in the Japanese Diet during the 1990 elections, mentioning in particular an encounter he had with Aum rallies in the Shibuya ward of Tokyo.  He speaks of the discomfort behind the revulsion he felt toward Aum and how he asked himself why he felt that revulsion, that horror.  His answer was that he saw in Aum a mirror of Japanese society itself at the time, and of himself as a Japanese man.  True, the mirror had distortions, yet it accurately reflected elements of the shadow self, the indwelling corruption which each of us must deal with on a daily basis in order not to descend into nihilistic destructiveness. 

I don't know whether other Japanese voices spoke up in the same way as Haruki Murakami in the months and years after the Tokyo gas attack.  But I do see a parallel between the gratuitous, unprovoked destruction of innocent people perpetrated by Aum and the gratuitous, unprovoked destruction of innocent people (especially the poor and the nonwhite) perpetrated by the Global Far Right over the last decade especially.  In particular, I am thinking of the murders of unarmed African-Americans, the abortive wall at the southern border of the U.S., and the many, many deaths of poor and nonwhite people in the United States, Brazil, Britain, and similar places due to COVID-19 in 2020.  I think of how these deaths were aided and cheered by a cohort of largely religious people with an apocalyptic/millenarian/doomsday mindset that justified in their minds their active attempts to murder their fellow human beings.  I think of the cults of celebrity/personality worship that have been created or attempted by people such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Elon Musk.

I also think of how in the West (particularly the United States), while there have been so many revelations of the existence of destructive cults in our midst over the decades, there have been so distressingly few voices calling us to a time of collective self-examination.  This is particularly true of those who claim to study and write about malignant narcissism.  I think of how the description of malignant narcissism found in the DSM-IV was modified in the DSM-V over the last decade.  The DSM-IV could be summarized thus: "This is what a wolf looks like - and by telling you all what a wolf looks like, hopefully we can keep you from getting bitten!" But the message of the DSM-V seems to me to be more sympathetic to wolves: "A wolf is not really a wolf unless he experiences suffering as a result of being a wolf..."  This obfuscation has helped to distort the discussion of narcissistic pathology among rich and powerful people such as national politicians and heads of big business.  And those who claim to write as the victims of narcissists hid their eyes from the realization that many of these "victims" in 2016 and 2020 had pledged their allegiance to the very narcissistic types against whom they claimed to be angry.  They tried to hide from the fact that their own narcissism was reflected in the political candidates whom they chose for themselves and the collective aspirations they embraced.

I too am a victim of cultic activity - as a person of color victimized by a society which claimed a religious mandate to Make Itself Great by trashing me and my ancestors - and as a former cult member myself - yet I too find that I must engage in a time of self-examination in light of the fact that I live in a society (namely, American society) which tends to form cults as prolifically as mangy dogs produce fleas.  For I must admit that during my days as a member of a particular cult I did damage to other people, because the cult appealed to a latent desire in me to dominate other people, to have power over other people.  To fulfill a latent desire within myself to be A Big Part of Something Great, I surrendered myself to someone else's prefabricated narrative.  My story became similar to that of the Aum devotees described by Murakami:

In order to take on the “self-determination” that Asahara provided, most of those who took refuge in the Aum cult appear to have deposited all their precious personal holdings of selfhood — lock and key — in that “spiritual bank" called Shoko Asahara. The faithful 

relinquished their freedom, renounced their possessions, disowned their families, discarded all secular judgment (common sense). "Normal" Japanese were aghast: How could anyone do such an insane thing? But conversely, to the cultists it was probably quite comforting. At last they had someone to watch over them, sparing them the anxiety of confronting each new situation on their own, and delivering them from any need to think for themselves.

A time of self-examination - both individual and collective - is urgently needed, both in the United States and throughout the West, particularly in those countries that have become "Murdochified."  This is because the 21st Century has already begun to bring urgent societal challenges that will require intelligent responses on both an individual and a collective level.  But if we are going to combine safely and equitably in order to craft collective responses, we need to be mentally healthy.  We must, as much as possible, eliminate our susceptibility to the voices of cult leaders who appeal to the darkness within each of us in an attempt to turn us into an embodiment of the darkness that exists in these cult leaders.  My concern is that achieving this may be a challenge in the United States.

Trouble, As Sparks Fly Upward

It's looking like my blogging may be on hold for a while.  Last week I was informed that one of my siblings has been diagnosed with a severe health issue.  I am obliged therefore to drop a number of things so that I can fulfill my duty to my family.  I don't exactly know yet what will be needed.  I am flying to So. Cal. next week to find out.

Precarity, Late Capitalism, And Artificial Intelligence: Pinocchio's Mischief

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 two most recent previous posts in this series discussed the fact that there are now more college graduates being produced in our society than there are jobs into which to plug those graduates.  The most recent post discussed why this is the case.  As I wrote last week, 

"...the decline in opportunities for college graduates (along with everyone else) is correlated with the rise in the concentration of economic power in the hands of an ever-shrinking elite.  In fact, I will go even farther and assert that the decline in stable employment for college graduates (even those with technical professional degrees) is a direct outcome of the concentration of economic power at the top of society.

Consider the fact that as of 2015, "America's 20 wealthiest people - a group that could fit comfortably in one single Gulfstream G650 luxury jet - now own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population combined..."  These people therefore have an enormous amount of economic and political clout.  And they have used (and continue to use) that clout in order to turn the American economy into a machine whose sole function is to make them as rich as possible.  The increase in precarity, the casualization of increasing types of employment, and the increasing use of task automation and artificial intelligence are typical of the strategies which these wealthy and powerful people have deployed in order to maximize the wealth they can extract from the American economy while minimizing the amount of wealth they give to the rest of us.  The aggressive expansion of the "gig" economy is another such strategy..."

A basic strategic aim in capitalism is that business owners should maximize profit.  A basic tactic for the achievement of this aim is to maximize profit per unit of goods sold by lowering the cost of production for each unit of goods sold.  Lowering costs can be achieved by attacking the cost of materials, capital machinery, energy, and labor.  In the limit, at the extreme of optimization, this leads to extremely flimsy goods sold for extremely high prices, goods that are produced by extremely poor laborers.

The labor part of this tactic is what we have been discussing in our consideration of precarity.  By making employment casual and temporary, with no fixed covenant between businesses and laborers and no benefits (other than a wage) granted to laborers, businesses have succeeded in driving down the cost of labor.  As mentioned in last week's post, that pressure on labor costs has reached even technical professions requiring a baccalaureate degree or above.  This is leading to an increasingly unsustainable situation in which, for instance, you might spend more than $40,000 to earn a four-year engineering degree - only to find yourself working for an engineering temp agency after graduation!

Labor casualization has been part of a larger tactical aim to reduce labor costs by reducing the number of laborers.  If you're the CEO of a large company, the progression of this tactic can be sketched as follows: First, destroy any expectation of stable employment or decent wages among your labor pool.  Then, reduce the actual number of laborers you use.  This reduction of the total number of laborers can occur by a number of means (including working employees to death by giving each employee the amount of work that should normally be handled by two or three such employees).  It can of course also be achieved by replacing employees with machines.  That replacement has been occurring from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution onward, but in the last two or three decades it has accelerated greatly due to advances in artificial intelligence (AI).  A long-standing motive behind the recent massive investments in research in artificial intelligence is the desire by many of the world's richest people to eliminate the costs of relying on humans by replacing human laborers with automation.

So it is natural to ask what sort of world is emerging as the result of the use of increasingly sophisticated AI in our present economy.  Here we need to be careful, due to the number of shrill voices shouting either wildly positive or frighteningly negative predictions about the likely impacts of AI.  I think we need to ask the following questions:

• First, what exactly is artificial machine intelligence?  What is the theoretical basis of AI?  How does it work?
• What can AI do and not do?
• What countries are at the forefront of AI deployment in their societies?
• How will AI capabilities likely evolve over the next few decades?
• What effects might AI have on human life and human societies over the next few decades?
• How will AI affect the world of work over the next few decades?

The next few posts in this series will attempt to tackle these questions.  I must warn you that what you'll get in those posts are merely my guesses at an answer.  However, because I want the guesses to be educated guesses, I'm going to need to do some research.  So these guesses might be slow in coming.

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.

That previous post highlighted the fact that from at least the 1990's onward (and possibly starting from the 1970's onward), there has been a growing number of college graduates who have found themselves underemployed after graduation.  Moreover, as time has passed, the number of college graduates who have entered long-term underemployment after graduation has increased as a percentage of total college graduates.  Note that to be underemployed as a college graduate means to hold a job that does not require the knowledge, skills, and abilities that a person would acquire as part of a college education.  As a hypothetical example, think of a gas station cashier with a recent baccalaureate degree in organizational psychology.  Moreover, the sources cited in that post listed the types of college major most likely to lead to underemployment and precarious work.  From those sources it would seem that baccalaureate degrees in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) offer the greatest likelihood of full employment and decent wages.  However, note that a 2018 Canadian study titled, "No Safe Harbour: Precarious Work and Economic Insecurity Among Skilled Professionals in Canada" cited the fact that a technical professional degree is no longer an ironclad guarantee against precarious employment.  

Why then is there such a huge mismatch between the number of people obtaining degrees and the number of available jobs which would utilize the skills implied by these degrees while paying the degree holders a decent living wage?  That is the question which today's post will try to answer.  

First, let's consider the answer offered by people like Peter Turchin, the well-fed Russian emigre to the United States whom I mentioned in another post in this series on precarity.  Turchin asserts that the supposed "excess" of college graduates, the supposed "mismatch" between the number of college graduates and the number of appropriate jobs for these graduates, is the result of an imbalance between the higher education sector and the rest of the economy.  He also asserts that the "excess" of college graduates is increasing the likelihood of instability in society caused by the radicalization of these "excess" graduates.  To put it in the language of Wikipedia, 

"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.]

Note the first sentence and its mention of the capacity of a society to absorb newly educated citizens into an existing power structure.  I will return to the notion of existing power structures later in this post.  Note also that Turchin's "solution" to this problem of "overproduction" is to limit access to higher education.  This "solution" is remarkably similar to the "solution" proposed by Richard Vedder, Christopher Denhart, and Jonathan Robe in their 2013 report titled, "Why Are Recent College Graduates Underemployed? University Enrollments and Labor-Market Realities" which I cited in the previous post in this series.  To quote their report,

"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 more

slowly 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..."

In evaluating whether these assertions are valid, it is helpful to consider the present-day structure of the American economy as a representative of the typical economies of the Global North.  It is also helpful to consider the background of the people who have made these assertions in order to glimpse something of their possible motives.  As I mentioned previously, Peter Turchin is an academic who is already both tenured and well-established (thus well-fed, with multiple income streams), and his assertions of the need to limit access to higher education are not likely to hurt him in any way.  As for Vedder, Denhart, and Robe, Vedder is an adjunct member of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).  Denhart is one of Vedder's former students.  I don't know how much of Vedder's ideology was passed on to Denhart and Robe, but I do know that Vedder is a strong supporter of big business even when it pays exploitative wages to workers, as seen in his support of Wal-Mart and of the 2008 taxpayer bailout of American businesses deemed to be "too big to fail".  (Note that that 2008 taxpayer-funded bailout is one of the biggest reasons why the richest Americans are now so rich!) Moreover, the AEI itself has the policy goal of supporting big business at the expense of small businesses, going as far as advocating that the role of the American government should be to help big businesses grow bigger.  The AEI wants further to eliminate all government support for small business, especially small business incubation, as I pointed out in a previous post.

From such observations, it is possible to move to a consideration of the structural reasons for the mismatch between jobs requiring a college education and the supposed "excess" of college graduates.  I will once again state my belief that high-quality, advanced education should be made available to as many people as want it - regardless of race, creed, national origin, or economic status.  Moreover, I once again assert that education is one of the great equalizing factors in a society, as it is a key component in the struggle of historically oppressed peoples to liberate themselves from historical and ongoing oppression.  This, for instance, was the motivation for the Polish underground "flying universities" which were organized in the 1800's when Poland had been partitioned by Germany, Austria, and Russia, and these nations had forbidden Poles from having access to higher education.  This was also the motivation for the underground "freedom schools" which sprang up in the American South during the antebellum days when white Southern power made it illegal to teach Black people (my people) to read.

But education alone is rather impotent without an opportunity to use it.  And the opportunities for the use of education are constrained by the structure of the society in which that education must operate.  Too often, the structure of a society is dictated and constrained by the dominant power-holders in that society.  I will therefore suggest that the decline in opportunities for college graduates (along with everyone else) is correlated with the rise in the concentration of economic power in the hands of an ever-shrinking elite.  In fact, I will go even farther and assert that the decline in stable employment for college graduates (even those with technical professional degrees) is a direct outcome of the concentration of economic power at the top of society.

Consider the fact that as of 2015, "America's 20 wealthiest people - a group that could fit comfortably in one single Gulfstream G650 luxury jet - now own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population combined..."  These people therefore have an enormous amount of economic and political clout.  And they have used (and continue to use) that clout in order to turn the American economy into a machine whose sole function is to make them as rich as possible.  The increase in precarity, the casualization of increasing types of employment, and the increasing use of task automation and artificial intelligence are typical of the strategies which these wealthy and powerful people have deployed in order to maximize the wealth they can extract from the American economy while minimizing the amount of wealth they give to the rest of us.  The aggressive expansion of the "gig" economy is another such strategy, as is the crafting of laws and regulations (especially by Republicans) which disadvantage small businesses (and all the rest of us, especially those of us who are not of their "tribe") while giving breaks to big business.  

What would a society look like if it provided citizens with the maximum optimal education and the maximum optimal opportunity to use that education in the pursuit of meaningful work?  I'd like to suggest that first, such a society would have a mechanism in place to prevent any one person or entity from concentrating more than a very small fraction of economic output into one set of hands.  Second, I suggest that such a society would be composed largely of artisans, artists, and small businesses owners who exercised their knowledge, education, and creativity to a maximal extent.  In other words, this society would be largely composed of "yeoman entrepreneurs" similar to the "yeoman farmers" idealized by Thomas Jefferson.   Some might say that such a society would be impossible in the 21st century, but I'd like to suggest that some positive aspects of what such a society might look like can be found in the depiction of the fictional Mars City in Hao Jingfang's novel Vagabonds.  I will mention that novel again in a future post. (Note also that although there was much to like about Mars City, it was not exactly a perfect utopia - there were indeed a few flies in that ointment, so to speak.)

Lastly, I suggest that such a society would be resilient - much more so than a more stratified, unequal society would be.  This is because such a society would have a much higher degree of decentralized group intelligence than would exist in a society of stratification and inequality.  This would make the more egalitarian society much more able to respond to emergent threats and opportunities than the more stratified society.  Consider the late 19th century and early-to-middle 20th-century history of Britain as a stratified society of the Global North.  Consider how its rigid class hierarchy and caste system prevented some of its principal actors from seeing the big picture and acting appropriately in the face of challenges.  Cases in point include the failure of Robert Scott's Antarctic expedition in comparison to the successful expedition of Roald Amundsen, as well as failures in World Wars 1 and 2 that resulted from a hidebound British system of honor, privilege and caste which blindsided British leadership.  The strident attempt by the Republican Party and other right-wing elements in the United States to re-establish an American system of caste and privilege constitutes the real threat to the "existing power structures" cited by Turchin, because it is leading to the "fragilization" of these structures.

The Educated Precariat: Mandarin Spoilage

This post is a continuation of my series of posts on economic precarity.  As I mentioned in recent posts in this series, we have begun to delve 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 origins and evolution of the modern university as a European institution and its spread as a model of higher education throughout the world.  That post also discussed the late-stage signs of dysfunction which have begun to appear in the modern university system during the last 40 years, particularly in English-speaking countries such as the United States and Australia.

Today's post will consider the university system as a machine that produces components for use within the larger machinery of modern late-stage capitalism, and what is happening to those components because of the fact that there are more components being produced than there are slots into which to plug those components.  The "components" in this case are recent college graduates.  Historically, an American guy or gal who managed to earn a mortarboard perched on his or her head, an academic robe on his or her body, and a sheepskin in his or her hand could expect to pursue one of two possible vocational paths after graduation:

• He or she could become a career scholar, otherwise known as an academic.  This academic career could be focused on teaching or on research, or on a mixture of both.
• He or she could become a member of the professional class, the "managers, officials, and professionals" described by Gary Roth in his book The Educated Underclass.

The next three paragraphs will cite extensively from Gary Roth's book.  

The prospects for those college graduates pursuing either path were very bright from the late 1800's until around 1970.  This was true because the rapid expansion of the American economy and the growth of urban populations produced a need for professionals with the requisite training to serve the resulting societal needs.  The pre-existing system of private higher education was inadequate to produce these professionals, as noted by Roth: "Tuition-driven institutions have never been a viable model at any level of the income spectrum ..."  Thus the government (at both the Federal and State level) intervened to fund public universities that could fill the demand for degreed professionals and managers.  These universities became important research centers which boosted commercial development as they published their research findings, particularly in agricultural science.  These public universities also helped to rapidly expand education in law, medicine, and engineering.

Although the absolute number of degreed professionals thus steadily increased, the number of these professionals as a percentage of the total American population remained small until World War Two.  On the eve of the war, less than 5 percent had a four-year college or university degree.  However, the war drastically increased the need for degreed professionals, and the G.I. Bill of 1944 stimulated the supply of these professionals and the expansion of the American public university system.  This stimulation was amplified by other non veteran-related Federal and State funding for higher education.

The demand for the graduates of this expanded higher education system was fueled by the drastic expansion of the managerial class of the American business sector.  For instance, between 1950 and 1970, the number of American white-collar workers grew by 75 percent.  Many of these workers could be considered to be "private-sector mandarins" involved in management and the administration of big business bureaucracy.  The growth in the numbers of these private-sector mandarins was paralleled by the growth in public-sector mandarins as Federal and State governments expanded.  Indeed, the number of State and local government employees increased much more drastically than the number of Federal employees.  The demand for graduates was also fueled by the growth of the public university system itself, which saw the addition of 200,000 faculty positions between 1950 and 1970.  Thus in 1970, higher education had come to be seen as a guaranteed means of upward social mobility.  By 1970, 32.1 percent of all Americans between 18 and 24 years of age were enrolled in some sort of college.  

But 1970 was the beginning of a tangible slowdown in American fortunes, a tangible curbing of American power and prestige.  Some of the causes were obvious, including the rejection of American values by many nations of the Third World, and the loss of prestige of the American military in Vietnam.  One of the causes was hidden to most observers, namely, the peak in American conventional oil production which occurred in 1970 and the beginning of the outsourcing of American manufacturing to other countries with cheaper labor.  These changes wrought changes in the American economy which began to curtail the opportunities open to people holding college degrees.  Although the conventional wisdom held that a college education remained a key to upward mobility, reality began to look different.  A growing number of college graduates began to experience the phenomenon of underemployment, that is, working in jobs which require less education than the job-holder possesses, or, working in jobs which offer less than stable full-time employment even though the job-holder would like to be fully employed.  Let's close this post with a discussion of both types of underemployment.

First, although underemployment has gained recent attention as part of the phenomenon of precarity, there are sources who indicate that underemployment has existed for the last several decades.  For instance, a 1963 U.S. Government publication titled, Two Years After The College Degree states that "Two years post-graduation, 18 percent of the class of 1958 reported that a four-year degree was not necessary for the jobs they held." (Roth, Chapter 4.)  However, Gary Roth points out that those graduates were living in an environment in which there was a surplus of available job positions and a relative shortage of workers with college degrees.  

That has not been the case for at least the last two decades (and perhaps longer).  For instance, in the 2013 paper "Why Are Recent College Graduates Underemployed?" by Vedder, Denhart and Robe, Figure 10 shows the number of degree holders who occupy certain occupations which do not require a college degree, and shows how the percentage of these jobs occupied by degree-holders has increased between 1970 and 2010.  Note, for instance, the steep increase in the number of college-educated taxi drivers, salespersons, and retail clerks.  Also, in the 2014 New York Fed paper "Are Recent College Graduates Finding Good Jobs?" by Abel, Deitz, and Su, we can see that already by 1990, the underemployment rate for recent college graduates was over 40 percent.  Younger college graduates had underemployment rates that were nearly 50 percent.  Recent college graduates who were working part-time after graduation were also above 15 percent in 1990.  Those recent college graduates who occupied low-wage jobs was around 15 percent in 1990.  These numbers did not show any consistent long-term improvement from 1990 to 2014.

According to Vedder, Denhart and Robe, the number of Americans with a bachelors degree or higher was expected to grow by 31 percent between 2010 and 2020, whereas the number of actual jobs requiring such degrees was expected to grow by only 14.3 percent.  This would translate to 19 million additional Americans with bachelors degrees or higher compared to only 7 million additional jobs requiring such degrees.  This would also mean that the number of underemployed graduates would increase to 30 million.  

What's more, those who start their post-graduation careers underemployed are at great risk for remaining underemployed five and ten years after graduation, as noted in "The Permanent Detour: Underemployment’s Long-Term Effects on the Careers of College Grads," a 2018 paper by the Strada Institute for the Future of Work and Burning Glass International, Inc.  According to this paper, 43 percent of college graduates are now starting their post-graduate careers underemployed.  Of these, 29 percent will continue to be underemployed after five years and 23 percent will be underemployed after ten years.  The figures are worse for women: 47 percent will start out underemployed and 31 percent will be underemployed after five years.

Why is there such a mismatch between present-day numbers of college graduates and the present-day number of education-appropriate job positions for these graduates?  What coping mechanisms are the college educated precariat using to cope with underemployment?  And how are these coping mechanisms affecting those members of the precariat who do not have a college education?  We'll start tackling those questions in the next post in this series.

The Flight Of The Tarnished Superheroes

I've been following Cosmic Connie's blog Whirled Musings lately, and I came across a series of posts about a movie titled Sound of Freedom which was released by Angel Studios this summer.  Angel Studios is an arm of the American evangelical media industry, an industry about which I made a few comments in a recent post.  

The movie purports to document the efforts of Tim Ballard, a Mormon and former employee of the Department of Homeland Security who supposedly formed his own special private organization in order to rescue children from child-trafficking rings.  Both Ballard and the organization he founded are unabashed supporters of the Rethuglican (er, I mean, "Republican") Party and Donald Trump (who "protected" Mexican migrant children at the southern border by violently ripping them from the arms of their parents and throwing them into detention centers where some of them died).  The lead actor in Sound of Freedom is also a rabid Trump supporter and QAnon spokesperson.

The movie is an example of the longstanding strategy of the American right wing, in finding a group of people whom they can brand as monsters while claiming that the champions of the Right (and only they) can and will effectually deal with the monster they have identified.  Now I fully agree with those who say that the present operators of human trafficking rings (especially those which sexually exploit children) are monsters.  But for the Right to claim nowadays that its members are the pure and holy fighters of these monsters is laughable, especially when we see how the recent exposures of the sins of the Right (especially those of the evangelical/Protestant/religious members of the Right) have so severely damaged its credibility.  

This definitely applies to the makers and financial backers of the movie Sound of Freedom.  Let me summarize some of the points made in Connie's posts:

1. Both Tim Ballard and the organization he founded are guilty of factual distortions in their presentation of the problem of child trafficking and of the efforts of their organization in fighting it.
2. These factual distortions have actually made it harder for legitimate governmental organizations to fight child trafficking.
3. Some of the financial backers of Sound of Freedom are themselves involved in child trafficking or have groomed underage minors for sex or have trafficked in illicit drugs.
4. Some of these backers have also committed fraud against government programs.  Among these is Andrew McCubbins, the executive producer for Sound of Freedom, who pleaded guilty to Medicare fraud in the amount of at least $89 million (one source says $100 million) in September 2020, and who was indicted later in 2020 along with other defendants for defrauding the U.S. Government of an additional $4.5 billion in medical billing.  McCubbins has not yet been sentenced and has not yet gone to jail.

If you want all the details concerning these points, please read Connie's posts.  

I guess moviemaking is politics by other means.  (Didn't Clausewitz say that? ... Oh, ... he said it about something other than movies.  My bad!)  But here we are, not even out of the dog days of Summer 2023 and election year campaigning has already begun, courtesy of a movie made by the American religious Right.  As I have frequently already said, the American religious Right is interested in religion solely as a means for advancing white supremacy.  They themselves have no intention of obeying the New Testament.  This is obvious when we see how the white male defenders of "traditional morality" who come from the American Right keep getting caught engaging in pedophilia, fornication, adultery and homosexual behavior themselves.

And this is but one reason why I haven't been to church since March 2020.  Let me be clear about this.  I know that everyone has issues, and that anyone who wants to become a decent person will find himself struggling with his own besetting sins.  That is a tragic consequence of our fallen condition.  I also know that I can't point to others and say that I'm any better than them.  All I can say is that whatever our personal demons, we can band together to support each other in leaving those demons behind.  But when you willfully and deliberately use religion - especially the Bible and the name of Christ - as a political tool for promoting the supremacy of your own people and as a justification to enslave or trash or oppress me - simply because I am not a member of your tribe or skin color or ethnicity - then I say God damn you.  When you portray yourselves as perfect and the perfect upholders of God's holy Law in order to justify your continued oppression of people who haven't done anything to you, I say, to hell with you.  May God punish you not only for not leaving your personal demons behind but also for your hypocrisy in claiming that you and you only are the sole defenders (and thus the sole beneficiaries) of all that is good in the world.  God damn you to hell.