[PEN-L:29456] RE: Re: underemployment

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: RE: [PEN-L:29450] Re: underemployment

I wrote:
> >  ... It's bad for the left for there to be a bunch of
> > disaffected educated people who can't get decent jobs who join the
> > obscurantist right. Maybe we can draw them into our camp,
> > but in order to do
> > so, we have to pay attention to them.
> >
> > ... we need to increase the demand for educated people.

Tom W. writes:
>What is an educated person?

As with the article under discussion, I was using the usual, credentialist, definition, even though I know from experience that folks with high degrees are often ignorant and/or stupid. It's the usual definition that is relevant to the issue of people getting Ph.D.s and then being unable to find a job in their home country (e.g., England as in the article or Egypt as in my reference). 

>What is a decent job?

Again, this is something that can't be defined abstractly by a theorist in his or her office. It's socially defined: most people define it in terms of job security, decent health care benefits, adequate wages, etc. (in the "primary labor market"), which are themselves defined socially. In England or Egypt, people who have "advanced degrees" know when they don't have decent jobs, i.e., when they're under-employed.

(Academics can't measure under-employment, while it seems very subjective and thus "fuzzy" and to be avoided by those social scientists with "physics envy," but it's a real phenomenon for those who suffer from it, as with Ph.D.s driving cab because there are no jobs teaching philosophy.)

>Why would an educated person join the obscurantist right? 

Why would William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor and a co-winner of a Nobel Prize, embrace the genetic-determinist theory of IQ and all sorts of racist nonsense? Again, just because one's socially-defined as "educated" doesn't guarantee knowledge outside one's specialty and/or intelligence and/or sanity. Throw in social stressors such as under-employment, and the bigotry is more likely to come out.

(When the Ayatollahs took over, one of the members of my department (a highly educated man) took his entire family back to Iran, because he wanted his wife and kids to obey him. Or least I am told, since this occurred before I worked here.)

>Where is "our camp"?

the left's "camp" is obviously very small and divided. Please don't remind me. (BTW, I was using the word "camp" as a metaphor.)

>How does one "pay attention"?

using reading and other ways of inputting information, by thinking about it. If possible, by doing something about it. (For a country like Egypt, I argue that education resources should be going for literacy more than for producing more high-level credentials.)

> What does it mean to increase the demand for educated people? How does one do that?

If "educated people" are defined as having exalted credentials, it's obvious that raising the demand for them involves more government efforts to do research on science and the like, to provide public services such as medical care, to provide education itself, etc. If there are more folks with basic education, this indirectly helps create a demand for highly credentialed folks.

>Who is the "we" that needs to do it?

The government, but of course it won't do so unless there are large numbers of people pressuring it to do so. In a country like Egypt, the focus on elite education is a result of the power of the richer classes. This needs to be counteracted.

Jim