The Good Old Days

Today, the Wall Street Urinal published an op-ed piece about how the U.S. economy is now the "well-educated barrista economy," apparently mocking the fact that highly-educated Americans have been relegated to becoming coffee-servers to make ends meet.

The wage structure of the entire economy has shifted downward since the Great Recession, and young adults trying to start careers and families have been the principal, but hardly the only, victims.

All of that to say that you, as an American, are working in a more menial position.  You are overqualified for the work that you are having to do simply to feed yourself.

These developments are jarring. For the past generation we've been telling ourselves and our children that demand for higher-order skills is surging and that a college education is the key to the future. But recent research by three Canadian economists calls this proposition into question. Paul Beaudry and David Green of the University of British Columbia and Benjamin Sand of York University document a declining demand for high-skilled workers since 2000. In response, they say, "high-skilled workers have moved down the occupational ladder and have begun to perform jobs traditionally performed by lower-skilled workers, . . . pushing low-skilled workers even further down the occupational ladder and, to some degree, out of the labor force altogether." Well-educated baristas and unemployed high-school graduates are flip-sides of the same phenomenon.

But the "well-educated barrista" economy is simply one that is the result of globalization.  No longer are we working for international companies based in the U.S. that develop the Third World and bring wealth from outside the U.S. into it.  The capital no longer flows into the country.  Instead, those international companies hired workers in South or Southeast Asia to do the same job for less work.  They then re-located offshore or became global conglomerates with no real home in -- and no real loyalty to -- the United States. 

So the jobs left, and the capital that was flowing from outside the U.S. into it and its workers now flows from outside the U.S. to outside the U.S.  There is no longer a cushion of capital flowing into the U.S. and ubiquitously buttressing it as an economy and it as a society. 

The U.S. workers went from working for international corporations bringing wealth in to working in jobs within a segregated U.S. economy that simply shift wealth around.  There is no longer a positive movement of capital and wealth from outside into the U.S.  Jobs like being a "barrista" are the perfect example of this phenomenon.

And the standard of living of the U.S. has collapsed and will continue to do so.  If you can pay the same amount of money to workers in India that you can pay to workers in the U.S., those wage structures are going to support only the same standard of living.  Everywhere those wage structures exist will come into equilibrium as it pertains to standard of living.  No longer is the U.S. as a society and as an economy being buttressed over the Third World.  Instead, it has been overtaken.

Worse, these international corporations have the upper hand with the workers.  They can sell to the highest bidder for their services and employment.  This can mean relaxing regulations, worker safety, and environmental protections.  It can also mean that they even get away without paying any taxes. 

But the real problem with it all is that Joe Sixpack still can't seem to understand this sad state of affairs. Like the inmates sitting around Randle P. McMurphey, they simply cannot apprehend that they are being dispossessed.  Instead, Joe Sixpack rails against the Government.  As if it was the Government that somehow decided to subjugate him.  Still ignorant to Capital and what it demands, what it has wrested from him.  He does the bidding of the international corporations and Capital by attacking the only savior he has -- the Government.