Via the Volokh Conspiracy:
The Wall Street Journal today features a quote from Joseph Schumpeter, writing in 1942,
on ways in which college education can make a person less
psychologically fit and less willing to engage in manual labor,
notwithstanding greater employment opportunities in manual trades:
The man who has gone through a college or university
easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without
necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work. His
failure to do so may be due either to lack of natural ability—perfectly
compatible with passing academic tests—or to inadequate teaching
... those who are unemployed or unsatisfactorily employed or
unemployable drift into the vocations in which standards are least
definite or in which aptitudes and acquirements of a different order
count. They swell the host of intellectuals in the strict sense of the
term whose numbers hence increase disproportionately. They enter it in a
thoroughly discontented frame of mind. Discontent breeds resentment.
And it often rationalizes itself into that social criticism which as we
have seen before is in any case the intellectual spectator’s typical
attitude toward men, classes and institutions especially in a
rationalist and utilitarian civilization.
Well, here we have numbers; a well-defined group situation of
proletarian hue; and a group interest shaping a group attitude that will
much more realistically account for hostility to the capitalist order
than could the theory—itself a rationalization in the psychological
sense—according to which the intellectual’s righteous indignation about
the wrongs of capitalism simply represents the logical inference from
outrageous facts ... Moreover our theory also accounts for the fact that
this hostility increases, instead of diminishing, with every
achievement of capitalist evolution.
Back when the Occupy movement was in full swing, I commented here at Volokh
that it represented the fragmentation of the New Class elites into
upper and lower tiers. The upper tier, which included the bankers and
those dealing directly with capital, did pretty well notwithstanding the
financial crisis; though they do face a long run problem insofar as the
“knowledge class” skills they brought to the global economy in the
1990s have long since spread throughout the world and become
commodified, lowering their global rents. But the long run effects have
been devastating on the lower tier of the New Class – public employees,
the “helping” and therapeutic professions, those whose professions
consisted essentially of mediating between upper tier New Class
capitalists and the rest of the population, managing the rest of society
while the globalized New Class capitalists outsourced themselves in the
global economy.
As Schumpeter pointed out in 1942, an expensive university education
makes it much harder to consider manual trades, even if employment
opportunities are greater there....MUCH MORE
