by From Lars Syll
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from Lars Syll
If economics was an honest profession, economists would focus their efforts on documenting the waste associated with protectionist barriers for professionals. They devoted endless research studies to estimating the cost to consumers of tariffs on products like shoes and tires. It speaks to the incredible corruption of the economics profession that there are not hundreds of studies showing the loss to consumers from the barriers to trade in physicians’ services. If trade could bring down the wages of physicians in the United States just to European levels, it would save consumers close to $100 billion a year.
But economists are not rewarded for studying the economy. That is why almost everyone in the profession missed the $8 trillion housing bubble, the collapse of which stands to cost the country more than $7 trillion in lost output according to the Congressional Budget Office (that comes to around $60,000 per household).
Few if any economists lost their 6-figure paychecks for this disastrous mistake. But most economists are not paid for knowing about the economy. They are paid for telling stories that justify giving more money to rich people. Hence we can look forward to many more people telling us that all the money going to the rich was just the natural workings of the economy. When it comes to all the government rules and regulations that shifted income upward, they just don’t know what you’re talking about.
In case you’re in doubt, you might better have a look at e. g. what Harvard economist and George Bush advisor Greg Mankiw writes on the rising inequality we have seen for the last 30 years in both the US and elsewhere in Western societies:
Even if the income gains are in the top 1 percent, why does that imply that the right story is not about education?
I then realized that Paul [Krugman] is making an implicit assumption–that the return to education is deterministic. If indeed a year of schooling guaranteed you precisely a 10 percent increase in earnings, then there is no way increasing education by a few years could move you from the middle class to the top 1 percent.
But it may be better to think of the return to education as stochastic. Education not only increases the average income a person will earn, but it also changes the entire distribution of possible life outcomes. It does not guarantee that a person will end up in the top 1 percent, but it increases the likelihood. I have not seen any data on this, but I am willing to bet that the top 1 percent are more educated than the average American; while their education did not ensure their economic success, it played a role.
To me, this is nothing but really one big evasive story-telling attempt at trying to explain away a very disturbing structural shift that has taken place in our societies. And change that has very little to do with stochastic returns to education. Those were in place also 30 or 40 years ago. At that time they meant that a CEO earned 10-12 times what “ordinary” people earn. Today it means that they earn 100-200 times what “ordinary” people earn.
A question of education? No way! It is a question of income and wealth increasingly being concentrated in the hands of a small privileged elite, greed and a lost sense of a common project of building a society for everyone and not only for the chosen few.