Increasing Wealth
From the data, it is obvious that the United States has a positive correlation between number of years of education and gross wages:
As a result of these numbers, everybody and their dog agrees that, to reduce poverty and increase wages, we should increase the average timespan of education. Statistics since 1950 show that we have been doing just that:
However, the data shows that real wages in the US have been stagnant over the past thirty years. This piece of data is apparently obscure enough that I had a hard time finding a graph for it, even though it concerns one of the most basic facts about the country’s well-being:
The only reasonable conclusion, it seems, is that a large part of the pursuit of education is cargo cult science.
Anon said,
November 9, 2008 @ 7:38 pm
Wages!=total compensation. The wages chart is an artifact of the fact that total compensation has gone up at pretty normal rates during that period, but it has been spent on ever more expensive health insurance.
jsalvati said,
November 9, 2008 @ 7:43 pm
I don’t claim to know a lot about this subject, but I do know that real wages and real compensation (includes benefits) are markedly different.
Tom McCabe said,
November 9, 2008 @ 7:53 pm
“I don’t claim to know a lot about this subject, but I do know that real wages and real compensation (includes benefits) are markedly different.”
I don’t know where to find hard data on this, but anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that standard company benefit programs (health insurance, pensions, vacations, etc.) have been cut back since 1970 in sectors without strong unions.
Anon said,
November 9, 2008 @ 7:57 pm
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2008/10/bending-over-ba.html
Tom McCabe said,
November 9, 2008 @ 8:49 pm
“The wages chart is an artifact of the fact that total compensation has gone up at pretty normal rates during that period, but it has been spent on ever more expensive health insurance.”
Health insurance is tricky to value, but I *very* much doubt that the dollar value of the increase in quality of life over the past thirty years matches the dollar value of the increased premiums. If companies all bought “hole insurance”, which paid for people to dig holes and then fill them back in, and the price of such insurance had increased by a factor of ten in thirty years (http://www.project.org/images/graphs/Spending_Main.jpg), nobody would suggest that this somehow represented increased employee compensation. Obviously, health care has increased in quality over the past thirty years, but by how much? And employers don’t buy health care directly, they buy insurance, which from all reports has gone *down* in quality (higher deductibles, more bureaucracy, more loopholes, etc., etc.).