> Though I have read the Galbraith book carefully, I don't have it with me
> at this terminal.
>
This is a very interesting post.
> So here is just a general response, beginning with a note on the
> regressive method.
>
>
> Since those who have a college degree may lack unobserved skill,
> any unexpected weakness in the correlation between educational attainment
> and income level need not be taken as proof that skill or cognitive
> ability accounts for little of the variance in income. That is,
> educational attainment is a poor proxy for skill/underlying cognititve
> ability and we cannot determine its power to account for income outcomes
> by reference to educational attainment.
Absolutely.
>
>
> Plenty of low skilled people could have college degrees and unsuprisingly
> fare badly as income earners while those who truly have unobserved skill
> or cognitive ability do really tend to make big bucks.
I think making big bucks may be in a certain measure independent of cognitive ability.The assumption here is that intelligent people would necessarily choose to make big bucks. The desire to accumulate wealth has to factor into the equation and people differ markedly on that score.
>
>
> That lawyers remain the highest paid profession makes a joke out of the
> idea that high income is accounted for by the skill of its recipient
> (unless skill means ability to enter a corrupt profession for the sole
> purpose of making money); meanwhile companies use H-1 visas to get
> the very best foreign programmers and engineers at basically working class
> wages which should shoot down any hypothesis about the positive relation
> between unobserved skill/cognitive ability/IQ and income.
It may, it may not you are talking about a statistical relation and a weak one at that, even if it exists it may not be the crucial determining variable.
>
>
> Why do process engineers make less than design engineers make less than
> lawyers? It's not because each has a higher IQ or more unobserved skill
> than the other. It's simply because each is successively removed from the
> production process and closer to the bourgeoisie which devalues the
> contribution of production and productive labor generally, That is the
> primary task of bourgeois ideology and the ruling ideas are those of the
> ruling class. And this seems to be reflected practically in the
> income structure of even so called skilled workers. As labor
> economist Rosemary Crompton once argued, there is no other way
> to understand the basically arbitrary hierarchy in the wages of lawyers to
> design engineers to process engineers.
I don't think you can entirely explain this on the relationship of the profession to the means of production. Until recently, doctors were a very highly paid profession and Engineers pay was less in the US. The Doctors had a strong craft guild the AMA which was able to ration the supply of doctors, increasing the demand. Doctors, are almost totally removed from the means of production if you mean material goods and services. On the other hand, this relationship was not uniform throughout the world.
I hypothesis I think may holds up world wide is the closer one is to controlling the financial allocation of Capital, and the exchange of Capital the higher the pay. For example Lawyers, who settle contractual relationships between businesses are highly paid probably more so than trial lawyers. Corporation Executives are very well compensated. University Presidents. I personanally believe this is largely independent of ability. Ditto for the direct pay and indirect pay of legislators. In short, all other things being equal, the people who control the allocation of Capital are those with the most pay.
>
>
> Another note: since there has been greater intra class variance (that is,
> income inequality among those who have college or high school degrees or
> no degrees), unobserved skill can be invoked to account for greater intra
> group variance as well.
>
> Yet I think the most important thing to remember is the actual social and
> material construction of unskilled labor. Tasks are simplified in order on
> the one hand to lower training costs and to give bite to threats to
> replace unruly worker and on the other hand to make possible the
> automation of tasks which have been simplified.
True, although people have found that this hurts the efficiency of an enterprisealthough its good for social control. Its better to rotate labor throught tasks. This is what quality control and the new automobile assembly like Toyota, I think Saturn where one worker can stop the assembly line is about.
>
>
> Labor is thus trained to carry out simplified
> tasks and inculcated with the disposition to do so from an early age. This
> is key to the power capital has over labor, and has studied by Harry
> Braverman and David Noble. Yet as productivity expands and industries grow
> more slowly or even contract or perhaps simply move abroad and new
> industries emerge, labor has never enjoyed the broad technical education
> to enjoy free rotation and variability in tasks.
What do you call a process Engineer educated at M.I.T. or yourself.
>
>
> Of course it may be that no new industries are
> emerging (the world is not buying much of skill intensive capital goods
> nowadays) and this actively de-skilled labor has no where to go but the
> badly paid, pure service industry. But even if new industries
> demanding new skills are emerging and growing quickly, capital so
> actively deforms labor that it undermines labor's
> mobility even as industrial development depends on it.
It may be that new industries require cognitive skills and technical problem solvingability. The strongest force for eductional reform in Massachusetts are the employers. They are behind having a stiff certification exam for primary school teachers. This is because there is not competent labor at the lowest levels who can adequately read and write. This creates a shortage of rudimentary skilled labor and probably raises the cost of a skilled worker. I think Capitalism can cut both ways. Note the demand for better education is not comming from Labor at least here to my knoweldge.
> The bourgeois
> ideologues blame the sinking of the dispossessed and the immobility of
> labor on the IQ and race of the proletariat but these horrors of
> unemployment and outright superfluousness are built
> into the capitalist division of labor, the capitalist system of education,
> and the habitus of the working class. The deskilled underclass and the
> immobile unskilled worker are not the products of low IQ but the
> capitalist division of labor.
This is unclear. In a social democracy following Max's argument, saleclerkscould become professors of Dress types etc. and paid with relatively high wages. I doubt the current distribution of wealth is determined by the nature of Capitalism exclusively. It has something to do with the strength of Labor within it.
> The full development of the social
> individual can only proceed after the destruction of class society. This
> is one of Marx's most brilliant insights.
>
> best, rakesh
By the way that passage you quoted of Marx is as usual brilliant. He's discussing in part the conflicting and contradicting needs for Universal Labor as the means of production change on the one hand, and on the need for routinization to ensure social control on the other. Its conceivable that the in the long run the only tasks which it will efficient to employ human labor are the skilled and general ones. Whether skilled and knowledgable labor is more difficutlt to controlled than labor in more complicated settings is not obvious. I certainly don't see a revolt of poorly paid University English professors.
--Best
Mike
-- Michael Cohen mike at cns.bu.edu Work: 677 Beacon, Street, Rm313 Boston, Mass 02115 Home: 25 Stearns Rd, #3 Brookline, Mass 02146 Tel-Work: 617-353-9484 Tel-Home:617-734-8828 Tel-FAX:617-353-7755