

The struggle of Knowledge Workers vs. Manual Workers - civilian
http://www.joshuakennon.com/the-secret-most-of-the-occupy-wall-street-folks-havent-realized-is-the-struggle-is-not-between-the-rich-and-poor/

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scarmig
Don't buy it. If you cut out the top 1%, the income distribution doesn't look
that dissimilar to how it did 40 years ago. Most gains have gone to that elite
stratum. And engineers and doctors comprise only a very small proportion of
that 1%.

"[Engineers] have wages that are increasing on an inflation-adjusted basis if
– and this is the key – they are any good at their job." This is technically
true, but it's not the driving force behind what #OWS is protesting. The
magnitude of that inflation-adjusted increase in wages is very small compared
to the increase in wages and investment income of those who rely on ownership
or proximity to capital instead of labor for their wealth.

The actual driver of increasing inequality isn't the growth in wages of
"knowledge workers." It's the financialization of the American economy.
Investment bankers and financiers aren't knowledge workers. Calling them that
is misleading, because it's easy to distinguish between them and (doctors and
engineers), and clumping them all together gives a misleading view of how
society has changed in the past several decades.

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twainer
Agreed. That piece reads a bit too much like a HuffPost 'article'.

The idea that industrial workers' skills would become obsolete is not only
wrong, it's also an idea that far predates Drucker. The skills aren't obsolete
as much as they are under competition from previously unreachable pools of
labor in other parts of the world.

As the comment above notes, a real problem with income distribution in
American society comes more from a tax code that allows/favors corporations
over small businesses and passive income over income derived from labor of any
sort. This is not just about money - it is about personal control.

It isn't even enough to compare wages; the picture is much worse when one
considers personal debt load in relation to earnings. What emerges then is
really two parallel countries - rapidly drifting apart. On one hand you have
the wealthy and super-wealthy insulated from economic shock and personal debt.
On the other hand you have a class of people who seem 'middle-class' but who
are in hock for housing and education and stand a small distance away - a job
loss, a serious illness - from disaster. Earnings supported the birth of the
middle-class in post-war America but, sadly, it is only debt that has
sustained it.

That kind of state-within-a-state is not unique to post-industrial economies
at all - which makes the author's closing opinion rubbish. That situation -
whether in Russia or Brazil or Colombia or even Israel - is much more a result
of social and economic policies and the OWS group is instinctively correct in
feeling like such policies are not in their favor.

