Why You and I Aren’t Suffering Very Much
This comes from Matthew Yglesias, who comments:
Virtually every single member of Congress, every Senator, every Capitol Hill staffer, every White House advisor, every Fed governor, and every major political reporter is a college graduate. What’s more, we have a large amount of social segregation in the United States — college graduates tend to socialize with each other. And among college graduates, there simply isn’t an economic crisis in the United States.
(HT to Ezra Klein.)
Fascinating. This recession isn’t impacting all sectors equally,is it?
Looks to me like it’s hitting Obama voters the hardest.
A common misperception, Bruce. Both the rich and the poor voted for Obama, strangely enough. It was the middle class that voted against him.
Over the past couple of months I’ve seen several articles about manufacturers who cannot find qualified job applicants. They reported that there plenty of good, blue collar jobs out there. But the pool of talented job applicants with technical skills low. One firm wanted to hire 20 machinists, but someone who didn’t finish high school (or did poorly in high school) probably doesn’t not have the skills to operate a complicated machine.
This may have been true at one time, but my son graduated from college in December and still hasn’t found a job. He has applied at many places, but doesn’t get a response. I think he would have been better off learning plumbing or A/C repair.
If George W. were president, there would be feature stories every other day in the New York Times — front page and above the fold — describing pain, misery, hunger, poverty, you name it.
There would be story after story on how the official unemployment rate masks the real (much higher) rate of joblessness. And the East Coast media would have gone berserk if Laura Bush took an entourage to stay at the Ritz Carlton in Spain. They really would have called her Marie Antoinette.
So the benefit of having Obama as president is that our daily newspapers are not nearly as dpressing as they otherwise would be.
I would bet that it’s easier for a college grad to get a job. But, it’s still not a great job market. I would be a large factor is the person’s degree. Those nutrition/history/liberal arts majors are probably hurting right now.
Physics (his major) doesn’t seem to be a sought after major.
I agree with you, Virginia. My personal opinion is that a college degree is less valuable today than it was 30 years ago. Maybe it is due to the larger percentage of college-degreed adults, which I believe is 30%.
I also wonder why if all our Congressman are so educated, why the level of debate is so elementary?
Sound bytes rule, more than substantive civil discussion.
The more alarming statistic, in my opinion, is the wealth gap.
According to the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances, the top 10% own 72.3% of total financial assets.
Go to: http://www.ebri.org/pdf/notespdf/EBRI_Notes_05-May10.IAs.pdf
Page 3.
Don Levit
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