IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-0-230-37301-3_2.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Education, Employment and Earnings

In: How to Save the Underclass

Author

Listed:
  • Robin Marris

Abstract

In the past quarter-century there has been a huge rise in education – for both sexes and for all classes and ethnic groups. Previously, in Britain, the system was not meritocratic: with two-thirds of the population receiving no more than a basic education, numerous able children were eliminated by the ‘11+’ exam. Now, in Britain, as in the US, at least two thirds of the population get better than a basic education. In Germany that always was so, and the old region of West Germany today, despite a current economic crisis caused by an overvalued exchange rate, has only a moderate meritocracy – with a level of total welfare which may well be as high as any in the world. The other side of the coin is the rise in ‘non-employment’. Many nonemployed are people who have taken early retirement or become statesupported invalids and some of these increases may reflect natural tendencies to reduce working life as we become more affluent. But the trends are also partly ‘endogenous’ to the weak labour market. If fewer people had become invalids or retired early, would they have found jobs? They might well have just transferred from one kind of non-employment to another. By the same token, if there really are single women who have deliberately conceived children only to get income support, in a weak labour market, the decision could be quite rational

Suggested Citation

  • Robin Marris, 1996. "Education, Employment and Earnings," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: How to Save the Underclass, chapter 2, pages 40-61, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-37301-3_2
    DOI: 10.1057/9780230373013_2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-37301-3_2. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.