피케티의 신작 'capital and ideology' 에서 설명하고 있는 교육과 정치와의 관계 변화
The most striking point proposed by Piketty is his argument about the important and reversing role of education in political alignment. The impressive data which Piketty harnesses demonstrate very convincingly that while the left used to be the political arm of the under-educated, it has become the domain of the educated. This, however, has less to do with the strategies of the left. I will argue that it is mostly due to deep structural changes in modern societies which reconstituted different social classes and their political interests.
Education in Piketty’s account is a proxy for the changing nature of work and production towards the end of the 20th century. This change is associated with an important value shift in a significant section of the population, redefining political preferences and inducing change in the political supply. Fundamentally, this great transformation is fuelled by structural changes in the economy – the rise of modern technologies, increased trade, and the expansion of the education system. To answer Piketty’s concluding question, the educational shift precedes and is thus independent of mass migration, which became politically significant only from the mid-1980s onwards.
Why has the relationship between education and the left vote flipped? There are two sides of the education coin. First, the higher educated have become far more diverse than they used to be. In the 1950s and 60s, the higher educated were a relatively narrow group of professionals – doctors, lawyers, professors, engineers – generally assured secure and well rewarded employment. By the 2000s, the highly educated greatly increased their population share, and span a wide spectrum of business professionals, technical professionals, and intellectual professionals. While they share high levels of education and training, they differ widely in the types of tasks they perform, as well as in their employment outlooks, as many university graduates search for work in vain.
The work of Daniel Oesch demonstrates the importance of different ‘work logics’ which influence the formation of political preferences and electoral affinities. It is thus particularly socio-cultural professionals (professors, teachers, journalists), engaging in interpersonal contact, who tend to support culturally progressive and economically left-wing parties, while business and technical professionals tend to be slightly less culturally progressive and economically right-wing. This effectively splits the highly educated into what Piketty calls the ‘Brahmins’ and the ‘Merchants.’
The second side of the education coin is the low-educated working class. This segment of the population has been the traditional bastion of left-wing support, but its structural transformation has been even more dramatic than that of the higher educated. The traditional industrial working class has almost disappeared from developed societies. It has been made redundant through the exodus of industrial production to less-developed countries, it has been displaced by machines, robots and computers, and to its socio-political position came large swathes of lower grade service workers – the restaurant staff, the drivers, the cleaners. They are today the ‘working class’ of developed societies.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2019/09/16/the-brahmin-left-vs-the-merchant-right-a-comment-on-thomas-pikettys-new-book/
The battle between two elites: the haves and have-yachts
https://www.ft.com/content/6e3e5b2c-ab18-11e8-89a1-e5de165fa619
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