These historical trends suggest that President Trump's protectionism is already doomed. The point isn't that international trade always benefits American workers; it doesn't. Trade, national or global, redistributes wealth, especially because the largest and most successful companies have long ceased to think in terms of national markets. They set up shop wherever it's most profitable, using complex global supply chains. When it comes to Apple's iPhone, for instance, more than 200 suppliers worldwide provide parts for final assembly in China. Good infrastructure and a workforce with skills that match corporate requirements matter. Yet wage differentials aren't irrelevant either; that's partly why China, Mexico, and Vietnam have attracted massive amounts of job-creating investment -- and why India, too, has begun to do so.
The relevant question isn't whether the global economy can be redesigned to protect American workers -- it can't -- but what their government will do to help them to gain the skills needed to compete effectively in a rapidly changing marketplace. Reforming public education might be a good place to start (but don't look to Donald Trump to do it). If American workers are to do better in the global marketplace, this country's public schools must ensure that their students graduate with the math, science, and other skills needed to get decent jobs. That, however, would mean attacking the inequality that's increasingly been built into the public education system (as into so much else in this society).
Education: The Zip Code Premium
Horace Mann, the nineteenth-century American educator, referred to public schooling as "beyond all human devices... the great equalizer of the condition of men, the balance wheel of the social machinery." Since the early years of the republic, Americans have embraced the idea that schooling is critical in helping individuals realize their aspirations and in guaranteeing equality of opportunity. In principle, there has been a consensus that economic circumstances beyond the control of children shouldn't block their way into the future. In practice, it's been quite a different story, partially because of how public schools are funded.
Local property and business taxes are the largest source of support for them, so kids born into a community crammed with pricey homes and thriving businesses will attend well-funded public schools that attract good teachers with decent working conditions and salaries. Such students are more likely to have smaller classes, more guidance counselors, nurses, and psychologists, more computers per pupil, better textbooks and instructional equipment, richer curricula, and better libraries.
In addition to local taxes, which provide 45% of public school funds, state revenues provide another 46%, and federal assistance an additional 9%. Some state governments also offer extra money to poorer school districts, but not enough to begin to close the gap with more affluent ones. In any case, those funds have been falling since 2008. Additional federal support doesn't come close to leveling the playing field.
The United States is one of the few countries in the 35-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a grouping of wealthy nations, in which central government funding plays such a limited role in reducing disparities between schools. In those countries, national budgets provide, on average, more than 50% of school funding.
Public schools in affluent communities have another advantage. Thanks to their incomes, professional qualifications, social networks, and experience, the parents of students in such schools are far more capable of raising private money to supplement school budgets, which means extra educational equipment and instructional materials, and more staff. Most such private fundraising is done by parent-teacher associations (PTAs), which tend to be more active and more successful in affluent communities. (Indeed, poor districts may lack PTAs altogether.)
Consider a typical California example. In Hillsborough, where the median family income is $229,000, the school district raised an extra $1,500 per student; in Oakland, where median income was just under $58,000, it was only $100 per student. Similarly, in wealthy northwest Washington, D.C., four elementary schools raised $300,000 apiece in one year, sums unthinkable for schools in Washington's poorer communities like those east of the Anacostia River, where the median household income is $34,000. Such differences are the norm nationally.
It's true that PTA funding -- $245 million in 2010 (an increase of 300% since 1990) -- looks like a drop in the bucket compared to total government spending on kindergarten-through-12th-grade education ($603 billion in 2013). That, however, misses the point, since the private funding is so concentrated in wealthy neighborhoods.
Money can't fix everything, but it counts for a lot in an ever more unequal society. And there's overwhelming evidence that the educational success gap between the wealthiest 10% of Americans and the rest has been growing for decades -- unevenly since the 1940s, at an accelerated rate since the 1970s, and by 30%-40% percent between 1991 and 2010. If you want graphic proof of how the income-achievement divide matters, it's easy to find: students in schools with greater resources (including wealthy parents), for example, regularly do better in standardized tests and essentially any other metric of academic achievement.
And remember, student performance in high school increases the likelihood both of college attendance and success once there. All of this indicates the obvious: that one way to improve the economic prospects of American workers would be to ensure that the public school system provides all students with the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in a global economy that privileges people who have solid technical know-how. Channeling more funds to schools in poorer communities would, however, require sacrifices from the segments of society that our "populist" president really represents. So perhaps you won't be surprised to discover that, though Education Secretary Betsy DeVos favors "school choice," neither she nor her boss seems to have the slightest interest in doing anything about the growing inequalities and inequities of public education, which Trump's cherished "base" of working and lower-income people need the most. In fact, cuts in his education budget total about $10 billion and target a raft of programs that help poor and working-class families.
Missing: Worker-Friendly Policies
Once employed, workers will face challenges throughout their lives that their parents, let alone grandparents, couldn't have imagined. No matter what Donald Trump does about trade pacts and tariffs, companies will continue to shift production overseas to stay ahead of their competitors, which means that well-paying manufacturing jobs in America will continue to disappear. They will also export some of what they make abroad back to the United States, increasing job insecurity and driving down wages. Trump's rants won't reverse this well-established trend.
Add in one more thing: automation, robotics, self-driving vehicles, artificial intelligence, and e-commerce will continue to reduce the role of human labor in the economy, even as they create new jobs with skill premiums. Those with high-end jobs (banking, the law, scientific research, and medicine, among others) will, of course, continue to earn significant incomes, but workers without a college education in the service sector, which already accounts for nearly 80% of the country's gross domestic product, will find it ever tougher to get higher-paying jobs with decent benefits. This, in turn, means that they will have an even harder time saving for retirement, paying for their childrens' educations, liquidating accumulated debts, or covering the cost of medical care.
So what to do?
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