Thank you for setting us straight. And, fwiw, as a bonus, confirming your point about adding obtuse and nonsensical remarks.
Sheesh!
If wages for skilled technical workers are rising, somebody forgot to tell my paycheck. Average salaries for EEs are down about 30% in constant dollars from the 1979 high, and way, way down compared to housing and food costs.
There’s a lot of deliberate (or maybe reckless) misprision going on in this thread. Krugman is not arguing that education isn’t valuable, or that it isn’t important to provide better education to more people. He explicitly says that. What he’s arguing is that education (or the lack thereof) is not the main cause or the main solution for income inequality in our society. He claims that the highly educated generally have stagnant incomes just like the poorly educated, and that all of the income gains are going to a tiny group of people – many of whom are highly educated, of course, but that’s not what distinguishes them – who are profiting from their pre-existing wealth, their monopoly market power, and/or their political power. And, if that’s a problem, the solution has to be in taking wealth and power away from them and distributing it to others, not in pretending that if everyone could read and do arithmetic at grade level there would be a Niman Ranch free-range chicken if every pot and a Mayerbach in every garage.
I am horribly challenged in that I seem to lack the gene that lets me understand why income/wealth inequality per se is a problem worth worrying about. If the people at the bottom are doing OK, I don’t care what’s going on at the apex of the pyramid. That’s why I care a lot more about education than about income inequality. But there are lots of people who DO seem to care about income inequality – some of them even Republican members of Congress, or at least enough of their constituents that they have to pretend to care – and Krugman is writing to and about them, not educators.
“I am horribly challenged in that I seem to lack the gene that lets me understand why income/wealth inequality per se is a problem worth worrying about. If the people at the bottom are doing OK, I don’t care what’s going on at the apex of the pyramid. That’s why I care a lot more about education than about income inequality. But there are lots of people who DO seem to care about income inequality – some of them even Republican members of Congress, or at least enough of their constituents that they have to pretend to care – and Krugman is writing to and about them, not educators.”
What it is, is the philosophy that there is only a finite amount of money, and if people are the top are making tons of it, then they must be stealing it from those at the bottom. The reaon why I’m poor is because you are rich, and if you would just pay your fair share (or at least not make so much money), I would be better off. It’s not because I had lots of babies when I was young and single, didn’t get educated or a skill, it’s because you are taking all the money.
Now I’m definitely in support of taxing all income equally, but I also don’t have the gene that blames my failures on other peoples successes. Unless I’m gambling.
JHS, would you mind clarifying the meaning of the quoted sentence. I have now read it 4 times and do not understand the use of the term misprision, and especially not when coupled with reckless and deliberate.
Fwiw, I understand its use in the judicial system and the derived uses as scorn or misunderstanding as in the opposite of comprehension.
I happen to think that in this case, while different interpretations of the statements of Krugman on education are possible, the same is hardly the case in his conclusion. For what it is worth, I am not sure that there is a logical sequitur between that conclusion and the education Gordian knot.
On a last note, my take on Krugman is that he might so incredibly smart that he tends to skip a few steps in going from A to Z and that he forgets than common mortals who do not have his intellect might be surprised about the path he took to arrive at his conclusions. And especially hard when the reader and observer finds his solutions rather farfetched or misaligned with different views.
PS Again, this has nothing to do with partisanship, but everything with trying to “comprendre” what the smart people are trying to say.
Numerous analysis have pointed out that if you compared the standard of living of people living just at the poverty line today in the US to their cohort back in the 1920’s, it would look like you had landed on Mars. Healthcare, longevity, safety of the food supply, lack of lead in the air they breathe, not to mention toilets and sometimes air conditioning and a car, telephone, tv, etc… Not talking about the homeless population- but people living at what we consider to be the poverty line.
So I agree with Busdriver that the focus on inequality ignores the fact that a high percentage of our population is significantly better off than 90 or 100 years ago. When a kid gets measles it’s largely because he/she is either too young to be immunized, or that his/her parents made a foolish and ignorant choice. Kids don’t get smallpox or polio. (and I remember polio from my childhood and I’m not elderly, at least not yet). The rising tide (many tides- technological and scientific innovation, Medicaid/Medicare, Social Security, clean air/water acts, seatbelts in cars, a high percentage of women who don’t smoke during pregnancy…) has indeed lifted most of our boats. The focus on cash income completely ignores the higher standard of living that millions of people take for granted- not the 1%, but everyone else.
xiggi, I was using “misprision” as a synonym for “misreading” or “misunderstanding,” not as a technical legal term (as in “misprision of felony”). I thought it was either dishonest or a knee-jerk mistake for you to suggest that Krugman was saying education was fine, and everything would be perfect if we engaged in radical income redistribution. That would be a pretty outrageous position, and it isn’t what Krugman was saying at all. Neither part of it, actually. He wasn’t saying that the status quo in education is fine, just that its huge problems aren’t the cause of income inequality. And he’s not even saying that he’s in favor of radical redistribution. I thought his line about raising corporate taxes, etc., was clearly ironic hyperbole: If income inequality is such a serious problem, there are obvious (and probably unacceptable) ways to address it directly. Shifting the focus to education as a solution is a red herring if the issue is the distribution of wealth and power.
For me, as I said, I’m not certain at all that the issue IS the distribution of wealth and power. But that doesn’t have much to do with what Krugman is saying here. He’s calling out Republicans and Democrats both for, effectively, saying “Let’s educate everyone better so everyone can get better jobs,” instead of saying “Let’s make all of our jobs better jobs.”
As someone who was homeless for a short time and very poor for a much longer time, I can assure you it is no picnic at the bottom of the social order. I won’t like it if the rules of society break down, but I will understand it.
You’re right. We’re no longer eating tainted food, whew.
However, many, MANY poor people are still living in disgusting conditions, with lead paint, and are suffering greatly for it. They live in food deserts where, while not eating lead, they’re certainly not eating well. Rarely are fresh fruits and vegetables available, even for those who want it.
Yes, we’re doing better than 100 years ago. Yippie. So are the rich. However, compared to most nations in the Global North, our poor are treated and living pathetically.
I am completely in favor of doing more for people at the bottom of the social order. But I don’t think it would do them any good if Bill Gates only had a billion times what they have as opposed to a trillion times more. Absolute living standard is the issue for me, not how wide the gap is between richest and poorest.
JHS, regardless of the added definition of misprision, I am afraid that you are the one who is exhibiting it here, and this for both what I wrote as well as what Krugman offered us. You seem happy to attribute ironic hyperbole to Krugman, and at the same time make a great effort to read between the lines of my posts on this issue. To be clear, you missed my points entirely and then proceeded to “misprision” them.
Dishonest and knee-jerk mistakes are clearly in the eye of the beholder.
JHS, have you read the Piketty book, Capital in the 21st Century? It’s a tome with mountains of data, about why income inequality and wealth inequality are bad. Piketty demonstrates that both income inequality and wealth inequality are increasing, that they are already at or near Gilded Age levels. He suggests that if we do nothing, we’ll return to a time when no amount of hard work and workplace success will bring someone to an upper middle class lifestyle, like the 1800s in Europe when “those who could somehow lay hands on inherited wealth were able to live far better than those obliged to make their way by study and work.”
Think inherited** wealth is insignificant in today’s world? Think again. What do you suppose the value of inherited wealth is in a year, compared to the amount of money earned in a year, for all of France? About 12%. For every ten euros someone earns in France in a year, someone inherits a bit more than a euro. That’s a lot, and the percentage continues to rise. There’s no particular reason to believe the number is very different in the US.
(** Inherited wealth plus gifts. Patrimonial money, in other words. )
Piketty is a tough slog, but well worth reading. I’m too lazy to read and comprehend something like Piketty alone, so I did a book club with a couple of friends.
Capital in the 21st Century is probably the only economics book that draws extensively for examples from Balzac, Jane Austen and The Aristocats.
Absolutely correct-- this is Krugman’s view, and he repeats it over and over again. If lack of education were the cause of income stagnation, then people who had education wouldn’t be experiencing income stagnation. But that’s not what we are seeing.
If education is no longer the answer to rising inequality, which Krugman asserts was never the case, what is the answer?
One way we could have anything resembling a middle-class society — a society in which ordinary citizens have a reasonable assurance of maintaining a decent life as long as they work hard and play by the rules — would be by having a strong social safety net, one that guarantees not just health care but a minimum income, too. And with an ever-rising share of income going to capital rather than labor, that safety net would have to be paid for to an important extent via taxes on profits and/or investment income.
If the evils of such redistribution offend some, what, exactly, would they propose instead?
[quote]
If education is no longer the answer to rising inequality, which Krugman asserts was never the case, what is the answer?
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It is annoying to repeatedly have to go back and see what somebody said because it is being mischaracterized.
I do think you are a very smart guy Xiggi, so I can only assume you are doing this on purpose.
I am disappointed.
???
I’m not seeing what dstark and xiggi are supposed to be disagreeing about?
Why do so many people in this country support people who are in favor of only helping the rich? Isnt that called being against your own self interest?
Why should there be any corporate taxes at all? Corporations are owned by people who have to pay taxes on all profits they receive. All corporate taxes do is encourage companies to shift money abroad so that it may never be taxed.
@EarlVanDorn, um, no, that’s not the way corporate taxes work. Really.