What are the links between the Occupy Wall Street crowd and the massive, overgrown higher educational system in the United States?
Perhaps the most penetrating answer can be found in Joseph Schumpeter's "Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy," first published in 1942. Herewith several penetrating observations from chapter XIII of that powerful work:
One of the most important features of the later stages of capitalist civilization is the vigorous expansion of the educational apparatus and particularly of the facilities for higher education......
Inasmuch as higher education thus increases the supply of services in professional, quasi-professional and in the end all 'white collar' lines beyond the point determined by cost-return considerations, it may create a particularly important case of sectional unemployment....
It may create unemployability of a particularly disconcerting type . [such a person] becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work . . . due to either lack of natural ability - perfectly compatible with passing academic tests - or to inadequate teaching. Both cases will . . . occur more frequently as ever larger numbers are drafted into higher education.
All those who are unemployed or unsatisfactorily employed or unemployable drift into 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 swell disproportionately. They enter it in a thoroughly discontented frame of mind. Discontent breeds resentment.
For substantiation of how our current situation mirrors, to a surprising extent, Schumpeter's insights, see my previous Topics in Political Economy on "Too Big to Fail: The Academic Establishment" and "Jobs Looking for Workers."
However, I am not ready to accept Schumpter's thesis that capitalism is ultimately doomed by the "inability of the capitalist order to control its intellectual sector effectively." At least, not quite yet.
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