South By North Strategies, Ltd.

Writing in The American Prospect, Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute argues that a better-educated workforce is not a cure-all for economic problems.

The huge increase in wage and income inequality over the last 30 years was not caused by a skills deficit. Rather, workers face a “wage deficit.” The key challenge is to provide good jobs and re-establish the basis for wages and compensation to grow in tandem with productivity, as they did before 1979.
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We do need more investment in education at all levels, so that the children of the working class have a better opportunity to compete for good jobs. We also need what Europeans call an active labor-market policy, so that the money we invest in training is directly connected to re-employment at good wages, rather than operating in a vacuum.
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The nation’s productivity increased by 80 percent from 1979 to 2009, and good productivity growth can be expected in the future. It is not education gaps that have caused nearly all of those gains to be captured by the top but rather economic policies that redistributed economic and political power.