Today’s New York Times OpEd section features a typically thoughtful piece by Paul Krugman that challenges a truism that I have held for many years, in spite of evidence all around me that it might not reflect reality. Krugman explains:
In “Degrees and Dollars” Krugman explains that technology is not just replacing workers who do certain kinds of menial, repetitive tasks, it is also replacing highly educated workers in areas like legal research, computer chip design, and medical diagnosis. So recent talk from the Administration that more higher education is the key to the future may not be the panacea that proponent claim that it is.Some years ago, however, the economists David Autor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane argued that this was the wrong way to think about it. Computers, they pointed out, excel at routine tasks, “cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules.†Therefore, any routine task — a category that includes many white-collar, nonmanual jobs — is in the firing line. Conversely, jobs that can’t be carried out by following explicit rules — a category that includes many kinds of manual labor, from truck drivers to janitors — will tend to grow even in the face of technological progress.
But in writing this blog, Krugman also reflects an unchallenged assumption of his own, one that plagues most discussions of education in the US. It is the idea that education is for jobs and jobs alone. We see virtually nothing said in the discussion about the way education can be a great enhancer of life quality. Granted, a steady, sufficient income is also a necessary ingredient to that full life, but I am increasingly of the opinion that to the extent that our educational system abandons the ideal of learning for its own sake, we impoverish ourselves in ways that no degree of economic “growth” will cure.
Krugman does make a very significant statement in his essay: “So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly.” Now the Good Professor is talking about building a society where collective bargaining and universal health care are givens, and he is absolutely correct on that. It is, as they say in mathematics, necessary but not sufficient. College degrees for every worker might not be as important now as in the past, especially when a degree might be earned just in time to see the anticipated job sent offshore or replaced by advanced tech, or both.
Building that new society means building new standards of what constitutes a good life and an accomplished, complete human being. Being educated enough to see and appreciate the world clearly and deeply should surely be part of that standards.
