I'm going to start posting this email from NYC Math Forum at NYC HOLD once a month:

In the matter of preaching to the choir, C-Span has a video of Alan Greenspan's testimony to the House Joint Economic Committee. There is a fascinating exchange between Greenspan and Senator Reed about the divergence in income between skilled/supervisory workers and unskilled workers. They agree this is a very serious problem. At one point, Reed asks what short term policies can be implemented to "enhance the incomes of most of the workers of America.

I transcribed about two minutes of testimony which you can hear for yourselves, starting around minute 34:00 of the video clip.

Greenspan:

Well, Senator, I don't think there are short term policies, other than the ones we typically use to assuage those who fall into unemployment or policies in the tax area in which we endeavor to redistribute income.

The basic problem, as we have discussed previously, as best I can judge, goes back to the education system. We do not seem to be pushing through our schools our student body at a sufficiently quick rate to create a sufficient supply of skilled workers to meet the ever-rising demand for skilled workers which means that wage rates are accelerating. But the very people who have not been able to move up into the education categories where they become skilled overload the lesser skills market and cause wages to be moving up well below average.

The consequence, of course, is an increased concentration of income. And, as I have often said, this is not the type of thing which a capitalist democratic society can really accept without addressing. And as far as I am concerned, the cause is very largely education.

It is not the children because at the 4th grade they are above the world average. Whatever it is we do between the 4th grade and the 12th grade is obviously not as good as what our competitors abroad do because our children fall below, well below, the median in the world, which suggests that we have to do something to prevent that from happening and I suspect, were we able to do that, we will indeed move children through high school, into college, and beyond in adequate numbers. As indeed we did in the early post WW II period, such that we do not get the divergeance in income which is so pronounced in the data we currently looked at.