I’ve never been sold on the notion of education as the saving grace of this unholy economic system. The problem in the country–and the world–is not that people are not smart enough or that they need to go to college. It’s that we have a system that drives down wages no matter how smart you are–except if you are in the top one percent.

   So, I happened to be looking at this chart (from a study by the National Employment Law Project) and what you see pretty quickly is that most of the recent jobs from Dec 2009 to July  2010 were in jobs that don’t need a lot of education.

   The most glaring point to me is that the top four jobs accounting for over 14 million jobs in that period paid less than $10 an hour. And if you scan the chart you can see that the median wage of the majority of those occupations is under $30K a year.

   That’s not a livable wage–particularly if you assume, as I do, that many of those low-paying jobs come with minimal, if any, health coverage benefits and probably very little if any pension.