Labor vs. Education? Surely Not.

In the Washington Post this morning, Harold Myerson, in criticizing the new "Hamilton Project," has this to say about the project's focus on education:

"The authors place great stress on improving American education -- a commendable and unexceptionable goal, but one that may do little to retard the export of our jobs since, as they acknowledge, it's increasingly the knowledge jobs that are going to India and even China.

How's that?

After all, the conventional wisdom is that we need to invest in the education system precisely because of increased competition for knowledge jobs from India and China. I'm not a flat-earth Kool-aid drinker by any means, but the basic point is right: Mobile capital and advances in telecommunications mean that if companies can hire smart, well-educated people for less money on the other side of the world, they will. Since we can't compete in the global labor market on price, our only option is to be smarter and more-well educated. Thus, education is increasingly important.

Has Myerson uncovered some brilliantly counter-intuitive argument here that he just didn't have the space to share with his readers because he was too busy taking shots at Robert Rubin?

Not really.

This is actually just a somewhat oblique and half-hearted attempt to push an argument that's popular with labor folks these days: education is worth less in the labor market than it used to be (a, shall we say, highly-debatable point), globalization is bad, we can't compete with the Indians and Chinese, so the only alternative is high trade barriers and strong unions.

I'm not against strong unions and frankly I'm glad the Post has at least one columnist who cares about labor issues and talks about them frequently. But to set the interests of workers and the interests of education reform in opposition to one another is a terrible and counter-productive idea, both as a matter of policy and politics.