[karmajunkie]

Throughout most of the post-Depression decades, even unskilled labor received close to a living wage—that's what the point of a minimum wage is. A (mostly mandatory) high school diploma was about the highest education you really needed to be a productive member of civic society. Once that contract started breaking down and the education arms race began in earnest during and after the Vietnam war, we have seen a modern reversion to Victorian attitudes towards work and unskilled labor especially. People are expected to engage in what amounts to indentured servitude in taking on massive student loans, and castigated for not investing in their own future if declining to engage in this.

There is a subtle genius in setting up an economy in which you promote the idea of a meritocracy, divert economic gains at first to those that jump through educational hoops as a demonstration of merit, and over time set an ever-increasing minimum bar for participation in economic gains, while at the same time pushing the marginalized to take on the cost of education which was formerly borne by society at large as an common good. I've got to hand it to high capital—they took a beating after the Depression era reforms, but they know how to play a long con.