On Sun, 18 Jul 2004, Jacob Segal quoted BS (initials appropo here!):
> The real point is personal responsibility: almost any worker has a chance to
> make a job a well-paying job by acquiring more skills and education. The
> jobs are not parceled out to the Passaic Workers' Commune by the Commissar
> of Jobs. People get the jobs for which they are qualified, by skill and
> education. If a young person gets a college degree with good grades, then
> gets a business school degree with very, very good grades, he'll get a job
> at Goldman Sachs that will pay him about $200,000 in the first year. If he
> goes to nursing school and learns operating-room skills, he can expect to
> make $80,000 a year almost immediately in many hospitals. If she learns to
> do electrical work in houses in Los Angeles, she can expect to make $40 an
> hour, plus overtime.
This is the bulwark of ideology in a capitalist society: social structure and inequality are direct results of personal responsibility (or lack of it). The goofiness of BS's argument above is clear to first-year college students if you ask them to do a little thought experiment: imagine all of the workers in the U. S. possess technical qualifications for high-prestige, high wage jobs. The major effect of this would be lots and lots of highly qualified people in poverty wage jobs. (The security guards, fast food workers, day care workers, and Wal-mart workers do crucial, necessary jobs in our society, and these jobs are not going to disappear just because all the poor people in the U. S. get a college education.)
--And in direct contradiction to BS, the U. S. secondary labor market (low pay, irregular hours, little or no benefits) is growing more rapidly than the primary labor market (high pay, benefits). Again, getting technical qualifications isn't going to change the social structure that creates demand for low-wage workers.
It astounds me that somebody as intelligent as BS doesn't get this. (On second thought, I guess it doesn't: intelligent people were providing vaguely plausible justifications for the benefits of slavery in the antebellum South, too. --And they probably believed their own arguments.)
Miles