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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   32688 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025

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The education inflation is hitting every part of our lives. How western societies are setting themselves up isn't sustainable. And even if it were, it's so wasteful it shouldn't be done anyway.

Yes, but when you've outsourced your industrial base to other countries because it's cheaper and more convenient to let them pollute their environments and exploit their workers so you can then buy the finished product, you need something to occupy your excess labour force. And that means "more education" because governments think that everyone getting a degree means they will all get good, high-paying jobs and businesses are constantly calling for "we need better educated workers" and all of this means that the economy will (magically) grow once every worker has at least a bachelor's degree (because studies show the college-educated get better jobs and earn more over their lifetimes, so naturally a degree is the magic panacea). So now to have any hope of a reasonable life, you need a good job, and to get a good job, you need the piece of paper.

Developing [rare earth] mining and processing capabilities requires "a long-term effort," meaning the United States will "be on the back foot for the foreseeable future," concluded a recent report by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC.

Policymakers should have seen this coming, analysts said.

"I hate to be the person who says this," said Ms Klinger, "but I remember saying over a decade ago, if we should have a rare supply chain crisis, it would be entirely avoidable".

So how did the world get to this point?

The answer is very simple, according to Ian Lange, associate professor of mineral economics at the Colorado School of Mines: it wasn't that profitable.

"I would have said, it was a conscious decision to get rid of a low-value industry," he told RTÉ News.

It's also heavily polluting.

According to a study published by the Harvard International Review in 2021, for every tonne of rare earth produced, the mining process "yields 13kg of dust, 9,600-12,000 cubic metres of waste gas, 75 cubic metres of wastewater, and one ton of radioactive residue".

For many years, it made sense for the US, Europe and others to outsource to China, which ultimately, through state subsidies, weaker labour and environmental regulations, R&D investment as well as sheer industrial scale could - as in other manufacturing sectors - simply do it cheaper.

you need something to occupy your excess labour force.

Note also that the education-managerial complex itself exists as a type of universal basic job to occupy that excess labor force, and it also serves to keep what would normally be the labor force warehoused and suppressed.

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