Schumpeter on How Higher Education Wrecks Freedom Æ Brownstone Institute

So whatever problems Schumpeter observed about college graduates  the lack of real skills, the job insecurity, the resentment against genuine productivity, the urge to muck around with the public mind without consequence  is vastly worse today. 

The last several years have seen the formation of the absolute hegemony of a ruling class that has zero experience in any real-world commercial activity at all. Waving their diplomas and CVs, they feel themselves entitled to dictate to everyone else and endlessly pound the system of free commercial activity to conform with their own imaginings of social and cultural priorities, regardless of what either people or economic reality demand. 

The move toward every manner of great reset priorities is an excellent example. DEI on campus, ESG in the corporate world, HR in all management of everything, EVs in transportation, impossible burgers as meat, wind and solar as energy sources, and you name it: all are products of exactly the forces Schumpeter describes. 

They are by, for, and of the intellectuals born of university environments, implemented and enforced by people with a limited market for their knowledge set and so attempt to rearrange the world to better secure their place within it. This is the expert class that Schumpeter predicted would dismantle freedom as we know it. 

Sure enough, the people who ruled the day during the catastrophic Covid lockdowns were not the practitioners much less the workers who delivered the food or the small business owners or even the hands-on epidemiologists. No, they were the theorists and the bureaucrats who faced zero consequence for being wrong and are still in hiding today or simply blaming someone else in the bureaucracy. Their plans for now are to keep their heads down and hope that everyone forgets until they can reemerge to manage the next crisis. 

In this way, we see that Schumpeter was completely correct. The rise of mass higher education did not breed a sector of society that is wiser and more responsible but just the opposite. He already saw this developing 80 years ago. It took time, but it would be justified to call him a prophet. 

via brownstone.org

Jeffrey Tucker.

That darn Schumpeter.