It was interesting the note that Robert Reich, the first Clinton Labor Secretary and a prolific writer and speaker on economics, wrote in his blog recently that the answer to the problems caused by globalization, the Great Recession, and the employment crisis is more education for Americans.

Several things struck me: (1) the rest of the world is not standing still in an educational funk while the clever Americans steal a march on them.  China, to use one example, is turning out vastly more engineers and other technically skilled graduates each year than we are. So we have to sprint to stay in place. (2) Reich was a Cabinet officer beginning 16 years ago.  Why did he and the Clinton administration fail to provide the training programs and the education Americans needed?  If it is relatively straighforward, why didn't you do it, Bob, when you had your shot at political power?  (3) When the Russians put up sputnik in 1957, and I'm old enough to remember the shock well, the United States went into a tizzy and responded with crash programs in science and engineering.  We founded inter alia what became DARPA (the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency). But apparently we dropped the ball somewhere along the way, because Americans today are not getting the educations they need to remain competitive. So 50 plus years of jabbering about more education has produced the situation we find ourselves in today. Pretty ironic.

Could the lack of students in science and technology stem at least in part from the fact that we have jettisoned manufacturing as the central focus of our economy?  Could it be that there was little reason for our best and brightest to go into hard sciences and technology when the industries that used those skills were in rapid decline.  The educated classes could instead take their MBAs and do deals on Wall Street -- deals that made them quite rich at relatively young ages.

Since over two-thirds of Americans still don't finish college, one wonders what kind of jobs normal folk are going to be educated for. It used to be that a single manufacturing job could provide a family with a middle class life, and send the next generation to college if they were so inclined.  Not any more -- as manufacturing jobs have disappeared and those that remain pay less with fewer benefits.

No, more education is not the solution. It is necessary, but not sufficient. Putting an end to the era of foreign trade cheating and the hollowing out of the American R&D and industrial base is.  That, of course, would require the Obama administration and the Congress to  overthrow the last 20 or 30 years of one-sided trade policies, and respond to the current crisis with a whole new set of industrial policies that stand years of free trade agreements and the WTO on their respective heads.

However, that would also require the policitcal will, courage, and foresight to break with the conventional wisdom of the last three decades and start down a radically new path. It ain't gonna happen with this president and his team of economic advisors, who now think that we just haven't tried hard enough to export. For them, prosperity is just around the corner of the next free trade agreement. And any reevaluation of this approach would be protectionist heresy.  After all, look the domestic and international chorus crying protectionism when the President put some mild and perfectly legal tariffs on subsidized Chinese tires flooding the U.S. market.

So pushing more education as the solution sounds extremely reasonable.  Who could be against an educated workforce?  But will the educated  workforce actually have any real work to do if the foreign trade cheating and currency manipulation and the subsidies go on unchallenged and unabated? The answer is a simple no. All educated up, and no particular place to go.  Just like the college graduates of the last two Junes.

Sorry, Bob, education without massive trade policy reform is just another rhetorical trick.  And since it takes a full generation to really make a widespread dent in the "education deficit," the trade defict will have sucked most decent paying work out of the country in the meantime. More education is not the solution it's cracked up to be; in fact, it's a political wolf ticket.

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