On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have viable career paths that are NOT being selected because the income simply won’t be enough. We miss out on a lot of talented and motivated individuals that would love to get into a particular field, but it just doesn’t pay as well. Teachers and corrections officers come to mind. The career I’m in was not my first choice, but it pays better than what I wanted to do.
Honestly, it’s not just capitalism. Education is anywhere from free to really cheap in Germany, and we still don’t get many people from poorer families into uni.
I see the main problem here as a sort of class divide between people with university degrees and people without. For example: if you work in a public library and don’t have a uni degree you will never get more money than salary level 9 (4k/mo) just having a degree and not doing any more/different work more or less instantly puts you on 12 or higher (6k+)
This I think understandably makes people without uni degrees kind of resentful of those who do have them. And if you grow up resenting a certain group of people you are much less likely to join them.
So, no. “Just” getting rid of the cost won’t magically get these people into higher education.
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Capitalism is interested in your ability to enhance the bottom line of the company you work for.
That’s a very broad reading of Capitalism as a system of incentives. But when you break it down, you find that it isn’t holistically profit-maximizing. It is locally rent-seeking. Which is to say, if we all work for a freeway that moves $10M/day in commerce and I - personally - have the opportunity to erect a toll gate that earns me $100k/day but inhibits $1M/day in commerce as a result, I will build that toll gate.
We saw this problem play out with the collapse of the Sears Roebuck Company under CEO Edward Lampert. Lampert took the capitalist ideology to its logical conclusion and began pitting individual departments within the greater corporate behemoth against one another. Consequentially, he dissolved all the economies of scale Sears had aggregated. Far from enhancing the bottom line, his business strategy dissolved all the economies of integration and scale that the firm had built up over its 120 year history.
Wherever the tenants of rent-seeking are applied, individuals with power will attempt to extract surplus wealth from weaker agents beneath them, even when that would destabilize the system as a whole. This can be disastrous for the “bottom line”. We used to even classify it as such, labeling these behaviors as “price gouging” and “embezzlement”. Now we see these initiatives as “creative destruction” and applaud their implementation.
Wow I’ve never thought of it that way. That makes so much sense. This kind of implies all subscription based services will inevitably devolve into paying more for less in a race to the bottom until the whole thing collapses. Which is interesting because I remember hearing about an economics paper that showed that the most profitable business model is bundled subscriptions. It’s kind of amazing someone can say that with a straight face looking at what has happened to cable TV.
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