Sylvia Nasar's Problem with Inequality

[Rakesh Bhandari]

Nasar's article ended with a noxious implication.  As long as those who are
over-represented among those whose relative standing is falling fast are
not blacks and women, the new inequality is legitimate. I think this
suggests how inequality can become legitimate today if among the losers the
high school educated and high school dropouts are over-represented. The
theory of human capital now provides the arsenal for invidious
distinctions, though among its proponents racism probably remains an
auxilliary hypothesis. Perhaps we can use Bourdieu's writings about
education and credentials (*reproduction*, *state nobility*) to piece
together a critique of the ideology of human capital. The high brow
reformists Bowles and Gintis make the interesting argument that the demand
for college educated workers has increased even where the 'cognitive
skills' for the tasks at hand are easily met by lower wage high educated
people because the college degree has come to represent higher levels of
punctuality and respect to authority, qualities employers can afford to
care about given how cheaply college educated workers can themselves be had
nowadays.

yours, rakesh