MORE ON INEQUALITY. Professor Drezner's promised post is up, and it's extensively researched. He illustrates a number of ways in which the lot of poorer people has improved in absolute terms, in ways that don't show up in the income accounts. Cal Pundit has a response, focusing inter alia on the return to a university education: "He gets the "income mobility" argument right, I think, but is much too sanguine about the health of the middle class. Sure, more kids are going to college, but that's never going to be more than a minority of the population. And while resentment toward the rich may indeed be muted in America, will it stay that way if current trends continue? I have my doubts." I'll leave the second point to the yuppies to sort out. Bottled water and a $50 serving of pasta and sauce that would be miserly in the Gulag fail to impress me (spark up the barbie, grill the bratwursts, open the PBR, that's good enough for me, and I scratchbuild my toys, thank you very much.)

Cal Pundit misses the college point completely. Just about anybody who wants to go to college can probably find someplace that will accept them. Only a minority of the population might be able to get a slot in one of the highly ranked schools, but that's irrelevant if your only criterion is making money. (It might make a difference if you aspire to be a court intellectual to the Democratic Party or get into Polite Blue State Society or the right law firm or an influential public policy magazine, but I digress.) The more troubling problem facing the students, the universities, and the employers is the loss of signal stemming from the consumerist mentality of some students and parents, catered to by administrators and some professors, the use of the university to do over what the high schools fail to do in the first place (and some corporations then hire people to provide the information the universities don't deliver), and the fear of low grades that might steer students away from the subjects that yield higher returns on their investments.