The New Normal of chronic unemployment and declining opportunities has become a persistent theme of the national media, especially the business press. The coverage documents a trend and also the intent of the Masters of the Universe to accept and prolong that trend.
What is progressive action in response, given the certain inevitability of some of the predictions?
Before we can get to that, we need to shake off a little denial. We are not going to have a rerun of the New Deal. Most likely, we are not going to see a rebellion against corporations and politicians who are delaying economic recovery. And the November election bodes ill for changing that.
Item 1
Georgetown University Center for Education and the Workforce report Help Wanted: Projections of Jobs and Education through 2018
America is slowly coming out of the Recession of 2007–only to find itself on a collision course with the future: not enough Americans are completing college.1 The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce shows that by 2018, we will need 22 million new college degrees–but will fall short of that number by at least 3 million postsecondary degrees, Associate’s or better. In addition, we will need at least 4.7 million new workers with postsecondary certificates. At a time when every job is precious, this shortfall will mean lost economic opportunity for millions of American workers.
As the economy evolved, postsecondary education gradually became the threshold requirement for access to middle class status and earnings. In the 37-year time frame …, the share of people in the middle class with some college education and no degree or less, declined dramatically….
Given the transformation of workers by economic class, postsecondary education and training is no longer just the preferred pathway to middle and upper income classes–it is, increasingly, the only pathway.
The emphasis on postsecondary preparation for new hires means that workers will tend to be attached more to the occupations they will be filling than to the specialized industries in which they work.
The blog Inside Higher Ed in an interview with the author of the Georgtown study, Anthony P. Carnevale (A Jobs Mismatch) presents this:
The colleges that most students attend “need to streamline their programs, so they emphasize employability,” said Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Georgetown center.
Carnevale acknowledged that such a shift would accept “a dual system” in which a select few receive an “academic” college education and most students receive a college education that is career preparation. “We are all offended by tracking,” he said. But the reality, Carnevale said, is that the current system doesn’t do a good job with the career-oriented track, in part by letting many of the colleges on that track “aspire to be Harvard.” He said that educators have a choice: “to be loyal to the purity of your ideas and refuse to build a selective dual system, or make people better off…
And that does mean a clear priority at most colleges for career-oriented programs over all others, Carnevale said. He said that, without major changes in education policy, there is no way the country can meet President Obama’s goal of having the United States lead the world by 2020 in the proportion of adults who are college graduates. And that requires honesty, he said, about the fact that the current system is not working
He also said that a serious focus on these issues should lead to a shift in resources — one he said he wasn’t sure would take place — from the universities that educate the best prepared to those who educate most of America. That would mean less money for flagships and more for the community colleges and other public institutions. Carnevale said that the institutions that need more are also those that educate larger proportions of minority and low-income students, and that such patterns have led to many a court case when they involve elementary and secondary schools.
Not surprisingly, there is criticism of the conclusions of this study. Inside Higher Ed also reports:
But the new analysis from Carnevale’s research center may also receive criticism from the left. Amy E. Slaton, associate professor of history and politics at Drexel University, is a scholar of the history of education politics, and she argues that the push for a career orientation to higher education limits the potential for many students. “This approach accepts the notion that you need a tiered education system,” she said, “and that seems like a good way of making sure that the least number of people are given a chance to develop their potential to be innovators, to learn creative skill sets.”
Short version. Higher education is shifting from providing a common academic educatiion plus career education to exclusively providing career education — unless you attend a flagship university. Most of you will see this as a present reality, not a future trend.
Item 2
Andrew Gelman writes in Is it 1930? that Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute says:
Goldman Sachs’ latest forecast (and they’ve been pretty accurate so far) is that unemployment will rise to 9.9% by early 2011 and trend down to 9.7% for the last quarter of 2011. Obviously, this is a simply awful scenario but it seems one that is being accepted. That is, we seem to be in the process of accepting the unacceptable. Note that this scenario probably assumes the passage of the limited efforts now being considered in Congress.
Gelman concludes:
I can see the future debates already: was Obama a Hoover who dithered while the economy burned, too little and too late (the Krugman version) or a Hoover who hindered the ability of the economy to recover on his own by pushing every button he could find on the national console (the Chicago-school version)?
In either storyline, it’s 1930, not 1932: rather than being three years into a depression, we’re still just getting started and we’re still in the Hoover-era position of seeing things fall apart but not quite being ready to take the next step.
Some unpleasant realities
- Those with money are unwilling to pay taxes to see that the economy gets going again.
- Business interests are more interested in ending the New Deal than restarting the economy.
- The infrastructure, including education and even healthcare will continue to deteriorate and become barriers to competitiveness with more social democratic countries.
- Those seeking to regain the status of the US as a superpower see paying down the debt to China as an important strategy.
- Having bargained away the interests of the US in the pursuit of “free trade”, the US does not have the diplomatic clout to arrange a more level global playing field, nor are US-headquartered transnational corporations interested in doing this. Cross-border arbitrage is a profit-booster.
- Barring a huge (and unlikely) progressive victory in the 2010 elections, there will be no repeat of anything like the New Deal. Indeed, it will be a battle just to hold onto Social Security and Medicare.
- Sustained unemployment at high levels in the cash economy is going to persist because of the lack of political will (even among the unemployed) to do anything about it.
- Immigration and H1-B visas will keep US wages and salaries low until wages and salaries in other nations reach parity (going upward) with the US (going downward).
- Pressure for change will be diverted into a more intense nativism, creating political disorder. And this will reduce the attractiveness of investment even further.
- Structural unemployment is the reason that the unemployment rate will remain high, but the structures in question will not just be the industrial distribution of labor but the geographical distribution of labor across the global economy.
- The environment will be one of deflation, not inflation, except where contracts (such as mortgages) resist deflationary pressure; this will result in more broken contracts, foreclosures, and bankruptcies, both personal and commercial.
- The Great Recession is heading into its second dip. State and local layoff will kick it over the edge.
- Most importantly, if the economic situation has not affected you yet, it is likely to, and it will be chronic rather than just a brief down.
It is Congress, not Obama, that is dithering. And mostly because Republicans are still fighting the Cold War against “godless communism”. However else they may frame it to look relevant.
The question is what can progressives do individually and socially to cope with the serious hardships that will persist.
Principle 1: The cash economy is not the only economy capable of delivering goods, services, and information.
The Bush Ownership Society was satirized as the You’re on Your On Society and rightly so. Well here we are. Bush was a transformational President. Through government paralysis, most of us are on our own in dealing with the consequences of other people’s folly.
The Household Economy: Economies originated in the management of households. Households still raise vegetable gardens, have small orchards, raise chickens or rabbits for their own use. The old pattern was to raise for the household and sell the surplus to the cash economy. Today the cash economy often takes production first and any surplus is left for the household. In a time of unemployment and uncertainty, household production compares well (even in an return-on-investment sense) to wasting time trying to participate in the cash economy. People who make the decisions for households need to start considering the household economy explicitly. Households with extended families combine fixed costs of operating a household, for example. As do co-housing situations. The household politics becomes more complicated, and sometimes time-consuming, but no more so than office or factory politics.
The Local Economy: The financial industry has chosen to continue to “invest” in paper instruments instead of communities. Some communities have improved their local economy through issuing local bartering script, the equivalent of a local currency pegged to US dollars but available for transactions only within the community. This allows for barter to have a system of third- and multi-party exchanges and some of the characteristics of saving. It separates some transactions from the effects of the national economy, restricts circulation of exchage to the local community, tends to circulate exchanges faster, and provides a buffer to national disruptions. It is only as good as the production of goods and services available locally, but stimulates the creation of additional goods and services.
The Volunteer Economy: Rural communities still have volunteer fire departments and volunteer rescue squads. Their dependence on the cash economy is driven by the cost and availability of their tools. Most support their acquistion of equipment and building through fundraising, often in the form of barbecues. State cuts in education, social services, and healthcare make necessary the susbstition of paid staff by volunteer staff. Volunteer work might not show out in the national accounts of gross domestic product, but it is a real economy contribution to gross national product. And it mitigates the failures of the cash economy. But there are other volunteer opportunities that contribute to the economy. The Open Source movement in the information technology industry is a good example. Most open source projects (Firefox, WordPress, Ubuntu, and so on) are free to individuals and charge commercial applications of the technology for support and training. No one is really clear which economic ventures can be done as open source projects and which can’t. Most have some sort of symbiotic relationship with a corporation that has provided back-level source code to seed the open source project. OpenOffice, for example, starting with the source code of an old version of Sun’s WordStar software. Creative Commons and Gnu Public License agreements are ways of protecting open source and creative projects from commercial highjacking. Can these methods be applied to alternative energy do-it-yourself tools and equipment? Someone is probably working on the idea.
The Non-Governmental Organization Economy: The non-governmental organization economy is made up of large established non-governmental organizations, social entrepreneurs like Mohammed Yunus of Grameen Bank, and venture philanthropists seeking social impact instead of financial return on investment. This economy partially lies within the cash economy and partially lies within other economies, such as the volunteer economy or local economy. Social Edge and Change.org provide two good gateways for folks interested in social entrepreneurship. Most foundations are re-jiggering themselves as venture philanthropists in response.
The Public Economy: At the moment this is a failing sector of the cash economy. The public economy has the power to command cash through taxation and to make large investments in social and economic infrastructure.
The Market Economy This sector of the cash economy has run off the rails in terms of social purpose. It’s collapse and the descent of its major actors into a “war of all against all” mode is the core issue in the global economy and the one that has produced, justified, and touted the New Normal.
Principle 2. A fundamental restructuring of education is necessary to coping with the New Normal
The Georgetown Study of higher education points out the economic fact that established university curriculums are neither delivering academically educated (in the sense of wide understanding of the world, issues, questions of values, and critical thinking) nor career-trained individuals (those who will garner wages and salaries associated with the middle class). And recommends exclusivity in admission to academic education and reorienting all other university curricula to career preparation based on the needs of employers. Following these recommendations will make the tyranny of the economic over the cultural complete. Only the high-performing (in economic terms) lucky duckies will get what was once intended to be a liberal (freeing the mind) and common (providing a consensus viewpoint) eduction. Guess whose consensus will matter now?
At the elementary and secondary school level, public education has been broken by politics. But this obscures a fundamental problem with public education processes today; while we still live in an information plantation economy organized on a factory basis, that means of organization and the factory-organized school system that staffs it are increasing out of step with what people are actually having to do — even in the factories that remain.
What politics has created is an increasing fragmentation of Horace Mann’s common school. Mann’s six principals were:
(1) the public should no longer remain ignorant;
(2) that such education should be paid for, controlled, and sustained by an interested public;
(3) that this education will be best provided in schools that embrace children from a variety of backgrounds;
(4) that this education must be non-sectarian ;
(5) that this education must be taught by the spirit, methods, and discipline of a free society; and
(6) that education should be provided by well-trained, professional teachers.
Mann sought to educate all children, of all classes together, providing a common learning experience. The early labor movement saw common schools as providing an opportunity to the folks not “born on third base” to have upward social mobility. Mann’s stated purpose was to “equalize the conditions of men”. These need to continue to be the progressive principles for education in America because in this case American tradition is progressive. The question is what form public education takes in an environment of constrained resources. And how to restore the “spirit, methods, and discipline of a free society” to the currently fragmented system.
Public schools are no longer performing because outside of the college-bound there is no reason for students to be there and a significant number of students tune in to that attitude and leave either physically or mentally. They are not performing because the traditional structures of instruction – one hour periods, six-hour days, summer vacations, and intense and high-stakes testing – are not adapted to the way folks actually learn or work today. Essentially they have devolved into teaching one fundamental lesson – do what you are told, remember the paperwork, the test is all that matters in the long term.
Some parents today rightly or wrongly are apathetic about a schooling that did nothing for their own opportunities an ill-equipped them to help their kids in school. They are surviving, so it must not matter.
Some parents are actively fighting Horace Mann’s principles for sectarian or bigoted reasons, or both. And there is an entire entrepreneurial industry capitalizing on this mood — sectarian schools, homeschooling, private schools, tailored textbooks and teach materials, and standardized tests. No to mention a barrage of propaganda/marketing.
Some parents are genuinely concerned enought to try homeschooling, a private or public charter school, a private school or even a sectarian school.
States and school districts have contracted private charter school companies with so-called proven methodologies. Or they have authorized public charter schools to use alternative teaching methods. At massive cost, school districts have sought to keep schools having a variety of backgrounds through pupil assignment, busing, and magnet schools. The backlash against these approaches that depart from neighborhood schools has been building. Public school buildings are expensive to build and maintain. Changing population densities are constantly causing some schools to close and others to be built. And yet, most schools are second to churches in underutilization of facilities. School districts must better organize how they use their buildings.
There is a lot about this that has been known for a generation but not addressed through policy or action. There is a lot that is the result of the distribution of housing into economically exclusive communities. At a minimum public school systems, if they are to survive are going to have to provide technical and instructional support to homeschooling parents, provide some common services for public charter schools that otherwise could not afford them, and deal with residential segregation by ethnicity and class that makes a common education difficult. Education is a fundamental infrastructure of economic, political, and cultural life. In the pursuit of employability, political and cultural life are being impoverished by the direction that public education and higher education are taking.
The New Normal is that public education will have fewer resources, dramatically fewer resources, to do their job. Households, local efforts, volunteers, and social entrepreneurs will have an increasing role in education. Whether sought or not.