Education bubbles and rising inequality

Below are a series of comments I left on a post at Steve Sailer's. They look at the history of the relationship between rising inequality and education bubbles, as well as discussing some of the mechanistic links through which more and more schooling (and a more and more academic focus within schools) breeds widening inequality. Hence, all of these elite liberal plans to cure inequality by expanding education will make the problem worse. A populist liberal plan would scale back pointless education, and give it a more practical focus for most folks.

In Peter Turchin's model, status-striving drives inequality, and one of the most reliable signs of striving is a higher ed bubble. It turns out that, at least in America over the last 200 years, this bubble spread more broadly to pre-college schooling. Now it's extending toward a pre-K schooling bubble.

Once upon a time, not only did few people go to college, they didn't even bother with high school. My hillbilly grandfather spent most of his school days roaming around backwoods Appalachia hunting whatever little animals he could scrounge up for meals, and generally enjoying himself. He grew up to get good union jobs, mostly as a carpenter but also as a coal miner. That was during the Great Compression (he was born in 1914), when folks weren't going to harass him for not showing up to class -- he was already getting the education he needed.

I saw the same attitude in my aunt's senior yearbook from 1963 -- shop class for guys and home ec for girls. That reflects a practical rather than academic orientation, even for those who did continue through senior year of high school (and only about half of the freshmen would bother, when they could begin working instead).

However, this isn't just "the past" vs. "the present," as such scenes would have struck a Gilded Age observer as disturbingly backwards. Surely our great nation was headed down the sewer now that the proliferation of colleges was grinding to a halt and school kids weren't expected to be familiar with Greek or Latin.

Thus the changes with the status-striving phase of the cycle are both quantitative (more students enrolled, more colleges founded, more graduates competing against each other) and qualitative (more academic rather than practical).

Anyway, here are the comments, unedited, hence more off-the-cuff and probably agitated than if I re-wrote them into a post.

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Not only a "liberal" issue -- conservative morons have been in hysterics about mediocre schools dragging down our prosperity and international competitiveness since 1983, A Nation at Risk, which recommended the requirement of 3 years of high school math. No Child Left Behind built on that foundation.

Conservatives are not challenging the silly notion that Americans need more education -- a greater share of a given age group, a greater range of age groups, and for a longer duration of the school day and school year.

Nor do they challenge the elitist agenda of making the content all academic. Show me the thriving grassroots conservative movement that wants to bring back home ec for girls, shop class for boys, and vocational training more broadly.

Nope, all that they argue over is what academic topics and instructional techniques will be used in service of the unchallenged goal of more ed, and more academics.

E.g., focus on rote memorization rather than self-discovery of principles -- not asking whether the thing they're learning is worth everybody learning, or whether it'll be a huge waste of time, no matter how they learn it. The quadratic formula, for instance.

A Nation at Risk complained about how few high schoolers could write a persuasive essay. Why does a plumber need to know how to write a 5-paragraph essay? All that time, effort, and money to achieve the goal is pure waste.

Also, what kind of goal is it to have all Americans be able to BS their way through a half-baked argument? Might that turn us into a national of BS-ers?

As for inequality, expanding education leads to wider inequality. A brief overview of the history of American education:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_the_United_States

There was rising inequality from circa 1820 to 1920, falling inequality from then until sometime in the '70s, and rising again after then through today.

Compulsory education for youngish children was absent in the early days of the Republic, and only began spreading during the rising-inequality period, beginning in 1852 and ending in 1917. The high school movement was a little later, but also a Gilded Age / Turn-of-the-Century phenomenon.

Then, as now, the emphasis was on academics and classics, a waste of time for almost everybody passing through.

The rising-inequality period also saw an explosion of higher ed, both number of colleges and student populations. Sound familiar? Peter Turchin looked through data on law school enrollments, and found an explosion of law school attendance during that time as well. Again, ring a bell?

The Great Compression, when inequality was falling, saw the society putting a lid on the older status-striving pursuit of more and more education. The proliferation of colleges wound down, lots of kids skipped school and weren't punished, and vocational and practical classes started to develop. That was the heyday of home ec for girls and shop class for guys.

Pursuit of more ed, and more academic ed, is nothing more than status-striving. Hence, status-striving had to decline before inequality did, and it had to re-emerge before inequality could rise again.

The Progressive movement around the 1910s were pushing for vocational training, and inequality fell shortly afterwards. The Great Society programs began the "excellence for all" discontent and return to status-striving, and inequality began rising by the later '70s.

The grassroots change has to target the spiral of status-striving in this country, not inequality itself, which is an effect. I don't see that turning around any time soon, though, even with conservatives or lower-status folks. They take it as an insult, like "Oh, so you don't think my kids would benefit from high school, or an academically focused curriculum? My kids deserve more than you think, and I'll show you."

Less schooling, and a more practical focus in school -- that's what we need.

What's the mechanistic link between the expansion of education and widening inequality? It equips the aspiring elite with the skills and knowledge necessary to crush other people's skulls in order to climb to the top, and to BS your way through a self-advancing argument. So, the ceiling on incomes will rise.

It also wastes the formative years of the lower majority of the population, training them for a way of life that they'll never ever make a living in. It's worse than just sitting around doing nothing -- it's *mis*-direction of their efforts. They could have been learning a trade, apprenticing, or by middle and high school, working in wage labor. Earn early, save early, and retire early.

If they also get trapped in the expansion of higher ed, they're also mired in debt for life, while the successful elite will be able to pay of their student loans.

Establishing and continuing to run an expanding public school system requires public funding, i.e. taxes. Except for those too poor to pay taxes, the middle 70% (or whatever) of the population is paying regularly to have their children be misdirected. Schooling isn't exactly cheap.

Eventually, the elite's goal is to privatize schooling in order to mire the majority in debt for K-12 schooling, not just for college. And then pre-K -- $20,000 in student loans by the time you're 5 years old!