The Wall Street Journal featured an op-ed piece last week by two members of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, Edward Lazear and Katherine Baicker. Their article discussed recent job growth, wages growth, and per capita personal disposable income growth.
What was noteworthy is that the authors debunked the notion that most of the benefits of this growth are enjoyed by "the rich," and not "the poor." Rather, they found that college-educated wage-earners saw their earnings grow by 22% since 1980, while those of high-school drop-outs declined by 3% for the same period.
Thus, not unexpectedly, becoming wealthier, or earning more money, in our society is dependent upon education-based skills. This is no bad thing. I'd be much more worried about foreign competitive pressures if we learned that most wage growth was for only high school-graduated workers.
If anything, this should renew our government's focus on how to productively engage teachers' unions to help improve education, rather than simply siphon off more public tax dollars on teacher compensation. Failure to promote competent students to the college level, and beyond, is a real threat to our economic strength.
Rather than worry about the apparent disparity in wages among "classes," which is somewhat tautological, doesn't it make more sense to understand the reason for shrinking wages, and work to eliminate the cause- lack of adequate educational quality?
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