Is increasing economic inequality inevitable without catastrophe?

ucbalumnus
Wed, 10 May 2017 18:10:13 +0000

New jobs are being made, but the labor markets are increasingly becoming walled off with higher barriers to entry, making it more difficult to change and retrain for a new type of job. Higher barriers to entry include increased credentialism (e.g. requiring BA/BS degrees for jobs that do not need either the general skills indicated by a BA/BS degree or specific skills based on the content of a BA/BS degree major), more jobs requiring professional licensing, and the cost of education (in both money and time) increasing for the student (this includes both the general cost of education as well as the trend toward requiring more education for some professions, such as the relatively recent increase in educational requirements for accounting and occupational therapy, and law and medicine in decades past).

The pace of change in labor markets may also be increasing. Combined with the increasing cost of changing and retraining to new jobs, that points to a bleaker outlook for the future, and more downward than upward mobility for the current middle class.