Tariff-free trade policies are great because they increase commerce, and we can mitigate those policies' negative effects on the blue-collar job market by upgrading our education system to cultivate more science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) specialists for the white-collar sector.
Known as the bipartisan Washington Consensus, this deceptive theory projects the illusion of logic. After all, if the domestic economy's future is in STEM-driven innovation, then it stands to reason that trade policies shedding "low-tech" work and education policies promoting high-tech skills could guarantee success.
No doubt, you've heard this fairy tale from prominent politicians and business leaders who incessantly insist that our economic troubles spring from an education system that is supposedly no longer graduating enough STEM experts.
It sounds vaguely logical, except, the lore relies on the assumptions that 1) American schools aren't generating enough STEM supply to meet employer demand, 2) the education system — not neoliberalism — is driving this alleged STEM drought and 3) if America came up with more of such specialists, they would find jobs.
Consider a recent study by Rutgers and Georgetown University that found colleges "in the United States actually graduate many more STEM students than are hired each year."
As researchers discovered, many students are pursuing finance instead of STEM careers because Wall Street jobs "are higher paying" and offer "employment stability" and "less susceptib(ility) to offshoring."
This is the truth that the Great Education Myth aims to obscure. It's not that schools are ill-equipped to train STEM specialists. It's that the students who might boost our STEM workforce are choosing to avoid STEM majors because they see an economy that is more hospitable to careers in Wall Street casinos rather than in high-tech innovation — a financialized economy based less on creating tangible assets than on encouraging worthless speculation.
This doesn't mean that our education system is perfect. But it does mean that without reforming the trade, tax and regulatory policies that reward high-tech outsourcing and incentivize careers in finance, our schools can never be an engine of value-generating information-age jobs.
Tariff-free trade pacts inflate the profits of transnational businesses by helping them troll the globe for cheap exploitable labor. Loopholes exempting foreign earnings from taxes encourage companies to move jobs overseas. And both deregulation and bailouts disproportionately balloon financial industry revenues.
The neoliberal corporate class makes big money off this status quo and neoliberal lawmakers get their cut via campaign contributions. The last thing either wants is an honest debate about neoliberalism's downsides. And so they play to our lust for silver-bullet solutions, endlessly telling us that everything is the schools' fault.
Read David Sirota’s entire article, “The Neoliberal Bait-and-Switch”, online at http://www.creators.com/opinion/david-sirota/the-neoliberal-bait-and-switch.html
Check out Michelle Martin’s interview (Tell Me More at NPR) with this article’s author David Sirota and finance expert Alvin Hall http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130188617
If one can get past the obvious political tone of the article, and the ridiculous overuse of the term “neo-liberalism”, the article makes assertions worth consideration. There is merit to the assertion that tariff-free trade policies have stimulated movement of jobs overseas. The migration of “blue-collar” jobs overseas created a jobs void that has been filled by service-oriented and “white-collar” jobs. This created an imbalance in the economy and, as a result, increased vulnerability to an economic recession. There is also some truth to the assertion that producing more STEM-educated workers will not, by itself, generate STEM-related industries. What are the implications of this article for Jacksonville? It seems to underscore the need for the simultaneous efforts to prepare a workforce for businesses and/or industries being lured to, or created in, the region. Whether the targeted industry is STEM-related, or not, jobs of the future will require a more educated worker. It has been established that the education-level of the general populace of the region leaves much to be desired. Given the time it takes to change the education profile of a region, the time to start emphasizing educational improvement is now. There also seems to be a need for a strategic plan that identifies businesses and/or industries that are well-suited to the region and implementation of efforts to lure or create those businesses and/or industries.
ReplyDelete