Re: Are you worth $400 a day?
Posted by:
willful ignorance
()
Date: March 08, 2013 02:17PM
Inequality And The Decline Of Labor
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,
As for education, I have often pointed out the fallacy in this assumption: training 100,000 people to become PhDs does not automatically create 100,000 jobs for them. Granting 100,000 advanced degrees in chemistry does not create jobs for these 100,000 newly minted chemists. The demand must be organic, i.e. employers see some way to generate $200,000 of value in the marketplace from paying one of these graduates $100,000. (Recall that the pay scales for advanced degrees are high, so the bar of value creation is also higher.)
There are saturation points to all high-skill labor categories. At some point, there is no need for more physicists, attorneys, etc. because there simply isn't enough demand for their skills.
So education is not some sort of blanket panacea to a systemic surplus of labor.