Education is Ignorance and other Corporate Truthiness

Corporate America's education myth by David Sirota

The New York Times has a piece today on the latest myth being peddled by our government and the corporate interests who run it. It goes something like this: job outsourcing and declining wages is happening in America because Americans are getting more stupid, and thus the only way for America to stop the bleeding is to produce more students educated in science and math. This is a brilliantly crafted storyline because it both reinforces Americans' concerns about its public school system and, more importantly, distracts from the corporate-written trade policies that are really at the heart of America's economic problems. Oh yeah, one other thing - the storyline is also a shameless lie.

The Times' piece describes a new report showing that many major corporations - who continue to pocket billions in American-taxpayer-funded corporate welfare - are going to be shifting research and development jobs overseas to places like China and India. The Times obediently reports without any question at all that "the study contended that lower labor costs in emerging markets are not the major reason for hiring researchers overseas." We shouldn't be surprised at that - corporate executives are smart enough to know how to lie. And they are lying.

If you take 2 minutes and actually think about what's going on, you will realize the painful intellectual acrobatics it takes to try to claim otherwise. Low wages - and the trade policy that forces Americans to compete with low wages - is at the heart of this, nothing else.

Think for a moment about this education argument. The United States has the best universities in the world. While our education system certainly needs upgrading, the concept that we are not producing enough good graduates for R&D jobs is just silly. And the idea that India and China have better schools producing better-trained workers is also ridiculous. These countries may be quickly developing - but last I checked, most of the world's most prominent technical colleges and universities are here in the good old U.S. of A.

So now think like a corporate executive trying to maximize profits. You have one set of R&D workers here in the United States, and another set of less-skilled, less-educated R&D workers in the developing world. You can do one of two things - afford to pay fewer workers in America. Or, you can go to India or China, spend a fraction of what you'd spend here on wages, and be able to hire an army of researchers. Granted, each researcher overseas might be less-skilled than each researcher in the United States - but the sheer numbers of researchers you can get over there makes the economics of outsourcing work...

...Here's the truth these folks don't want to talk about. We can spend more money and train more science/math graduates, but unless we also train those graduates to accept working at slave wages, free trade makes sure those graduates have to enter into a competition for jobs with oppressed workers in the developing world...

Science training still does that. The scientific establishment works to make monastic tradesmen and women that work long hours with little reward other than the tradesperson experience. Is it any wonder corporations look to exploit them?

Society still looks askance at people who spend energy learning how the world works as opposed to how much they can plunder from it. I'll never forget an old ex-girlfriend laughing in my face when I told her how much I'd be making as a post-doc. It was less than what she made as a receptionist at an advertising firm before she'd finished college. She's the stay-at-home wife of a Wall Street hedge fund manager living in the Long Island suburbs spending the millions her husband makes and probably very satisfied with her life even though every cent she spends is legally exploited from others.

Most people just don't think that deeply with their conscious mind.

The unconscious disquiet is there, though. It leads to a fanatic devotion to religion in some. It's a disquiet effectively manipulated for the War on Terra. Seeing to the roots of it is something you just don't do in polite society.

It doesn't matter to most Americans that few know how to produce, or create, or analyze anything not related to manipulating others in order to make the most money.

The ruling Party has the nation led back to the Root, Hog, or Die ethic. It's no longer a world of limitless resources, but that's something they're in denial about. After all, you can take what you need, whether its native American oil rights or land in the Middle East. When the inevitable Malthusian crisis of this ethic develops, it will be like Easter Island when they cut the last palm.