American Workers: Smarter but Poorer

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

"American Workers: Smarter but Poorer": (Despite the neoliberal
boomlet (the so-called "New Economy") of the 1990s, real hourly
earnings are still lower than the peak of the mid-1970s. Whose fault
is that? If you ask technocrats, the culprits are the working class
themselves -- especially students and teachers -- who have allowed
educational standards to decline and failed to match employers'
demands for higher skills: "[t]he fall in real wages of people with
low skills and widening earning differentials since the 1980s are
also evidence of upskilling in Canada, the European Union and the
United States (OECD 1996b)" [Literacy in the Information Age: Final
Report of the International Adult Literacy Survey, 2000, p. 8].
Especially in the United States, alarming soundbites are used to
create a sense of national crisis of education: "Nearly half of all
adult Americans cannot read, write, and calculate well enough to
function fully in today's society, and people in their early 20's
have poorer literacy skills than did those in a 1985 survey,
according to a federal study" [Debra Viadero, "Half of Adults Lack
Skills, Literacy Study Finds," Education Week, September 15, 1993].
Is that really true?  Michael J. Handel, a professor of sociology at
University of Wisconsin, finds no evidence for educational decline
and statistically significant "upskilling" that are said to explain
stagnant real wages and widening income inequality.  It's time to
bury the "skills mismatch" myth.) -- FULL TEXT:
<http://montages.blogspot.com/2005/03/american-workers-smarter-but-poorer.html>.
--
Yoshie

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