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the SyllabusFrom Randall Collins, The Credential Society. New York: Academic Press, 1979, pp. 191-204.
As of the 1960s, the credential system went into a state of explicit crisis. The rising credential price of jobs had been going on for many decades, but at this point the change began to be consciously seen as inflationary. With near-universal high school completion and one-half the youth cohort attending college, these formerly valued goals lost much of their appeal. They no longer guaranteed a respectable job, at the high school level, or an elite one at the college level. At the same time, there was tremendous pressure from subordinated ethnic groups, especially blacks and Latin Americans, for integration into the dominant educational and occupational institutions. The result has been a multifaceted crisis in confidence in the system and a variety of reactions and criticisms.
Initially, in the context of a militant civil rights movement for minority integration, mass student rebellions broke out within the universities. The rebellions took advantage of the state of growing delegitimation of credential to demand revision of traditional curricular requirements. Such demands were usually put in the form of a shift to greater relevance,'' or toward the cultures of the ethnic minorities themselves. But in fact, the alternatives lacked substance; their principal appeal was negative, a reaction against the traditional requirements that were now recognized as purely procedural formalities of the process of gaining a credential. More recently, the idealistic rhetoric of curricular alternatives has been replaced by a manipulative cynicism. Students electing to remain within the system have adopted the goal of high grades, irrespective of content and by any means whatsoever, producing an inflation in college grades, while at the same time achievement levels have been steadily dropping.
Similarly, educators have reacted to their increasingly uncomfortable position of attempting to control masses of students in a situation in which previous legitimating ideals were no longer accepted. Most of the reformers' schemes--those of Holt (1964), Kozol (1972), even one of the most radical Ivan Illich (1970)--assumed that the real problem was to make education more relevant, less structured by academic status systems, closer to everyday concerns, and less regimented by bureaucratic requirements and compulsion. In these respects, they reflected the rhetoric of student activists. None of them came to grips with the underlying issue: the fact that education is part of a system of cultural stratification and that the reason most students are in school is that they (or their parents on their behalf) want a decent job. This means that the reasons for going to school are extraneous to whatever goes on in the classroom. Reformers expecting that intellectual curiosity can be rearoused by curricular reforms or by changes in the school authority structure were projecting their own intellectual interests onto a mass of students for whom education is merely a means to a nonintellectual end. This even applies to radical proposals like that of Illich that schools should be taken completely out of the classroom and into factories, offices, shipyards, or wherever else students want to learn. This overlooks the fact that most skills are--or can be--learned on the job; if the idea is that persons should have a chance to try any job they want, then schools are not what is needed, but rather some device to provide high interjob mobility.
Most of the "deschooling" talk was another version of Progressive education. It contained the same ideals, many of the same slogans, and it arose among school teachers at times in which schools have undergone crises of credential devaluation that destroy belief in their old functions. ''Deschooling" is not so much a way of abolishing schools because they are proven useless, but of revising them internally in order to retain students. The influence on this of teachers' interests in maintaining jobs for themselves is obvious; less obvious is the way in which the proposed curricular and authority changes--like those of Progressive education half a century earlier--help reestablish rapport between teachers and students, giving them a common rhetoric and de-emphasizing the authority relations that have been the focus of so much rebellion. In all this, ''deschooling" simply carries the Progressive innovations one step further. Indeed, there are many proposals--generally made by those who consider themselves educational ''liberals," but perhaps even advocated by adherents of ''deschooling'' plans--for extending compulsory education requirements to age 18 or beyond.
Outside the schools, there has been a heightened criticism of education as insufficiently relevant to jobs and a revival of the technical--utilitarian rhetoric that was so prominent in the mid-nineteenth-century crisis of American education. As in the previous crisis, we see the reemergence of competition among different types of educational institutions. The conventional secondary and higher educational sequence has been challenged by a resurgence of commercial trade schools, business-operated training programs, and the crowding of professional and paraprofessional schools such as business schools.
Nevertheless, given the evidence that job skills of all sorts are actually acquired in the work situation rather than in a formal training institution, it is apparent that the technical training rhetoric is a response to the crisis of the credential market rather than a substantively significant change in educational content. New types of credentials are proposed because the public has lost confidence in the value of the old types. Hence the inflationary struggle for credentials seems to be building up in new directions. We now hear of the previously unprecedented use of Ph.D.s in accounting as credentials to acquire business jobs; we also hear of a massive expansion of internal and external credentialing in the business school sector. Skilled trades, contractors, and realtors continually establish more restrictive licensing programs, usually based on their own formal training requirements. Business corporations have established their own training programs.
The effect of these sorts of shifts is not to open up vocational career channels, but to increasingly monopolize and control technical jobs. For example, major automobile companies and chain stores are now monopolizing auto repair jobs for graduates of their own training programs. This not only replaces the current--and technically effective--pattern of mechanics acquiring skills through their own experience, but also results in company control of procedures (so-called ''preventive maintenance" and automatic replacement rather than repair of parts) that tighten their financial grip over consumers. In general, the emerging pattern is to build up restrictive credentialing in new sectors where the traditional school credentials had not penetrated.
The shift to private credentialing is the counterpart of the existing crisis of the public, formal school credentialing system. Apart from conflicting rhetorical claims, the crisis has a material aspect. The public schools and the university are facing difficulties from two directions. In the context of a general inflation affecting all prices in the material economy, schools have become expensive luxuries. In the public sector, taxpayers' reactions are cutting the level of financial support, and seem likely to cut it still further in the future. In the private sector (especially in higher education), rising operating costs and declining enrollments are likely to force the closing of a considerable number of institutions.
The underlying source of pressure is the condition of credential inflation. Education is both more costly and promises less of a payoff for given levels of credentials than previously; hence students and those who pay their bills are relatively less willing to make the investment (Freeman, 1976: 9-50). Thus the historical peak in the proportion of the youth group attending both high school and college was reached in the early 1970s. Since 1972, high school completion rates actually fell (StatisticalAbstract, 1976: Tables 230 and 231). Attendance rates at colleges and universities fell off for male students from 54% of the 18-19-year-old group, and 29% of the 20-24-year old group in 1970, to 50% and 26% for those age groups in 1975. Only an increased attendance rate for females from 42% of the 18-19-year-olds and 15% of the 20-24-year-olds in 1950, to 44% and 19% respectively in 1975--offset this trend (Statistical Abstract, 1976: Table 191). The survival of the traditional educational credential, then, seems to be increasingly tied to the efforts of women to break out of their subordinate occupational position while male employment may well be shifting into a separate set of trades-and-business-controlled credentialing institutions.
The credential system, severely challenged at one point, seems to be reshaping itself in new directions. From a long-term viewpoint, it may be the case that the crisis of the 1960s and 1970s is a temporary one, and that credentialing sequences may extend indefinitely into the future. Once temporary periods of imbalance are past and the numbers of students return to a level at which inflation in the credential price of jobs is kept at an acceptably gradual rate, it may be that the finances of schools will stabilize. Possibly even at some point in the future, the system could begin to grow again.
Of course, the growth of the credential system has not occurred simply by its own dynamics, but in interaction with the struggle for economic position and with the level of economic productivity. The accumulation of highly efficient capital has steadily decreased the labor needs of the economy. The American industrial plant operates at only about half of full capacity, and a continual problem has been unemployment and underemployment and the related problem of maintaining aggregate consumer demand. It is here that we can see the economic importance of our educational system--not because of the technical skills that it might provide, but rather as a counterbalance to excess industrial capacity. This works in two ways: Both because education is a major area of government spending (7.5% of the GNP in 1975; Statistical Abstract, 1976: Table 183) and because it absorbs a considerable portion of the labor force as students. The 9.7 million college and university students alone would add 10% to the labor force. Adding any sizable portion of the 15.7 million high school students would, of course, increase the problem proportionately (Statistical Abstract, 1976: Tables 185 and 571). Cutting back on education to any considerable degree would tend to have disastrous economic consequences.
Thus the credential system of occupational placement is caught between opposing forces. On one side the system has become central to propping up an economy of excess productive capacity and surplus labor. On the other side the system has become extremely expensive and relatively unrewarding for many individual investors and for its political supporters. Although a rough balance continues to be possible, the potential for crisis exists in either direction. Too rapid growth in the credential market brings disillusionment and withdrawal of material investment in it; too little investment, on the other hand, feeds economic depression.
VARIETIES OF SINECURE POLITICS
A number of different political positions have been taken regarding the credential market. Few of them explicitly recognize the arbitrary currency nature of the educational system; most operate within some more familiar legitimating rhetoric. Nevertheless, they might be named
Credential capitalism is the traditional laissez faire attitude toward individual competition in the credential marketplace. It naively assumes that one should get as much education as possible in order to cash in on as much career advancement as possible. As individualistic advice, it ignores aggregate effects on the value of the credential currency, or simply proposes to override them by outcompeting others, at whatever level it takes.
Credential socialism is the program of government intervention to equalize the distribution of educational opportunities. Like traditional political socialism, it has failed to have much effect on the underlying system producing the inequalities and instead has added on to it a superstructure that has mainly been successful in redistributing some of the wealth to itself. Like political socialism (including that which has gone under such American labels as 'liberalism" ), credential socialism is a popular position among employees of the alleged redistribution system itself: in the one case government bureaucrats, in the other case, teachers and administrators.
These have been the traditionally dominant ideologies about American education. More recently, there has been an upsurge of demands by particular ethnic groups for more opportunities for themselves to acquire credentials. Sometimes this has been demanded with socialist--egalitarian rhetoric, some times in the name of ethnic cultural nationalism. In either case, its actual material goals are entree on easier terms into the credential system, a demand entirely analogous to the traditional pattern in American politics of ethnic groups demanding a share of political patronage. This might simply be called ethnic-patrimonial credentialism or patronage-credentialism.
In reaction to such pressures from subordinated minorities, some members of dominant ethnic groups have created what might be called credential fascism: the effort to exclude particular minorities on principle. Earlier versions of racial ideologies have been updated for this purpose in the form of genetic arguments for inherited IQ differences. That this is a highly ideological stance is apparent from the evidence (cited in Chapters 1 and 2) that IQ predicts success only within the school system, and that the link between school success and occupational success is an entirely artificial one. Thus credential fascism attempts to shore up an arbitrary system of domination as the exclusive possession of its own ethnic group.
In a different direction, we find an upsurge of credential radicalism: the advocates of "free schools" or ''deschooling'' mentioned earlier. Their politics of liberating the schools by giving control to a communal group of students (and sometimes teachers) is rather like an extreme version of ''communism in one country." For local communal control of the credential-producing institution does nothing to affect the larger credential market within which they exist. If, as such schools usually attempt, their policy is to make credentials easy for students to attain, perhaps even automatically awarded (whether giving all "A" grades or automatically conferred degrees), they simply contribute to galloping credential inflation. In the larger context, such regimes tend to destroy their own economic base
In my opinion, there are only two honest and realistic positions in regard to credentialism. One might be called credential Keynesianism. This would explicitly recognize that education creates an artificial credential currency and that this is economically useful to offset deficiencies of aggregate demand. Thus both investment in the school system and the credentialing of occupations would be encouraged, not in order to promote work efficiency or equal opportunity, but simply in the interest of keeping the economy running. The danger of this kind of policy, like that of ordinary economic Keynesianism, is inflation, but this can be taken as a side effect of the system to be accepted and managed by quantitative manipulation of whatever variables are under government control. In other words, one could decide to work openly within the sinecure system, to recognize the migration of leisure into the interior of jobs, and to deliberately set out to enhance such sinecures.
Such a policy, of course, has implicitly been in force for some time. Schools have often been supported for reasons of employment policy, and there has been a long-standing liberalization within the system that has affected the ethos of many jobs, making them more casual and less subject to ritual acknowledgments that nothing but productive work is going on. An open, unhypocritical recognition of the sinecure component in our society would certainly constitute a cultural revolution in public honesty and would make it easier to assess and control the effects of the factors affecting sinecures.
My own preference, however, is for an opposite policy: credential abolitionism. (9) The prospects of continuing to expand the credential system indefinitely, to let job requirements inflate to the point where 4 years of college is needed for a manual laborer or 20 years of postdoctoral study is required for a technical profession, would be exceedingly alienating to all concerned. Moreover, it would not affect the rate of mobility, if past precedent is any indication, nor change the order of stratification among ethnic groups; it would simply reproduce their order at higher and higher levels of education. The alternative, to freeze the credential system at some point by allowing only given numbers of students to reach given levels, would be to freeze the existing system of stratification and to keep credential barriers in place that segregate the labor force into noncompeting sectors. Existing advantages of monopolization of lucrative job sectors would be maintained. Either way, letting the credential system expand, or holding it at its present level, would maintain existing stratification and would have culturally debilitating effects as well.
A serious change would depend upon abolishing the credential system. This does not mean abolishing the schools, but it does mean returning them to a situation where they must support themselves by their own intrinsic products rather than by the currency value of their degrees. Legally, this would mean abolishing compulsory school requirements and making formal credential requirements for employment illegal. Within the framework of civil rights legislation, such legal challenge to credential requirements has already established precedents (White and Francis, 1976). Since the evidence strongly shows that credentials do not provide work skills that cannot be acquired on the job, and that access to credentials is inherently biased toward particular groups, the case for discrimination is easy to make.
The main advantages of legal decredentialing would be two. It would improve the level of culture within those schools that continue to exist, and it would provide the opening wedge of a serious effort to overcome economic inequality.
The expansion of the credential-producing school system to mammoth proportions has made intellectual culture into a short-term obstacle for students to pass through on their way to their credentials. Thus it is hardly surprising that high school achievement test scores have fallen precipitously in the period since 1963 (Advisory Panel on the Scholastic Aptitude Test Score Decline, 1977), when school promotion became not only perfunctory but near universal. The pressures to get high college grades in order to enter graduate schools has had a similar effect upon substantive intellectual concerns. Humanistic culture has become very nearly the exclusive province of professional teachers of the humanities, and they themselves have turned their subjects from cultural ends to be created and enjoyed in themselves into the mere basis of a currency of numbers of publications on a professional vitae by which their careers in academic bureaucracies are made.
In science as well, it is likely that smaller would be better. Despite the self-serving rhetoric of university lobbyists, it is not at all necessary to have an extremely large component of university research to support the national economy or national security. Most practical inventions, in fact, are made in applied settings, and the basic science that they may draw upon tends to come from relatively small sectors of research carried out decades earlier (Sherwin and Isenson. 1967; Price, 1969). Moreover, the massive size of current American science is not proportionately efficient; the much smaller but proportionately more creative and better integrated organization of British science shows the superiority of a more elitist structure (see figures presented in Collins, 1975: 578). In the very large system, on the contrary, a kind of bureaucratization of scientific ideas takes place so that specialties are minute, mutually remote, and hard to integrate; information retrieval problems are serious; and the huge numbers of researchers enforces a lingua franca of the most rigidly operational and quantifiable concepts, to the denigration of more powerful theoretical ideas. The latter sort of problem especially afflicts the American social sciences, making them prematurely specialized around quantitative techniques while ignoring theoretical issues that give meaning to research. One might well claim that American social science--and natural science as well--has been living off of theoretical ideas that it has itself been unable to produce, either by importing the ideas from Europe or actually importing European theorists (as in the case of the refugees of the 1930s and 1940s, who have led American sciences in the last generation).
In sum, existing levels of mass credential production are unfavorable to American science and especially to humanistic culture. Further expansion of the credential system would be even more debilitating. Probably the Initial building up of the educational system in the early twentieth century encouraged high-level scientific production, but the scale of operations has long passed the level of diminishing returns.
The other major argument for decredentialing is that only in this way can we move toward overcoming income inequality. Educational requirements have become a major basis of separating work into distinct positions and career lines, and hence in keeping labor markets fragmented. The gap between blue-collar and white-collar jobs constitutes a barrier to direct promotion in almost all organizations and is upheld by the disparity in educational requirements for each. These requirements are not necessary for the learning of work skills of these different sorts, but operate precisely to prevent members of one group from having the on-job opportunities to learn the skills of the other. Similarly, specialized ''professional" and "technical'' activities are reserved for separate labor pools by the same means. Thus it is not only ethnic and sexual segregation that produces ''dual labor markets" (Edwards et al., 1975), but above all educational requirements that have become built into the definitions of ''positions" themselves. Moreover, as direct ethnic and sexual discrimination becomes increasingly illegitimate and subject to legal challenge, educational discrimination becomes increasingly relied upon as a surrogate means of group domination. (10)
Hypothetically, income equality would occur if there were no barriers to movement among occupations. Hence positions that paid less than others, or whose work is especially dirty or unpleasant, would have to raise their wage to attract labor; positions that paid more than the average, or that had especially attractive work (such as planning and giving orders), would attract a surplus of applicants and could lower their wages. It has been proposed that educational barriers are the principal impediment to this income-equalizing tendency of a free labor market (Thomas. 1956). This is correct as far as it goes. But eliminating credential requirements would be only the opening wedge of the necessary restructuring. Under existing conditions, a large surplus of qualified applicants for managerial positions would not likely lower their salaries (Thurow, 1975); the number of positions would remain limited and those few who did hold such positions would act to appropriate high salaries in any case.
This is clear from a realistic model of organizational behavior that sees power (i.e., ''political labor'') rather than productivity as the key to income and advancement. Hence organizations themselves are the obstacle to a freely operating labor market. Similarly, although the elimination of credential requirements might increase competition within the professions, this would not necessarily eliminate stratification within any particular profession. Lawyers and engineers with links to wealthy organizational clients would still get large fees, and only the most decentralized and small-scale aspects of legal services would be subject to competitive price reductions.
Nevertheless, elimination of educational requirements for jobs would be a necessary step in any overall restructuring of the occupational world to produce greater income equality. The key would be to break down current forms of positional property. Managerial work could be brought back into responsiveness to labor market pressures if it did not constitute a distinctive long-term ''position" but was one activity to be shared among workers who carried out immediate production as well. By job rotation across the existing lines of authority and specialization, all types of work would become subject to a common labor pool and respond to the same wage conditions. This would mean that opportunities for learning various kinds of work on the job, including technical and managerial work, would have to be rotated or otherwise widely shared, possibly by rotating apprenticeship of ''assistant-to" assignments. To do so would require eliminating current definitions of jobs as allegedly based upon prior, external preparation by specialized education.
Educational credentials, then, are not the only basis of barriers to a free labor market, but they are a crucial component of the system of barriers that would have to be removed. Secretaries, for example, are in a perfect situation for on-job learning of managerial skills. At present, the sex-caste barrier defines their positions as a separate enclave, however, so that virtually no secretary is ever promoted to take her boss's position. Nevertheless, this is not only technically feasible, but once was the standard promotion line, before the late nineteenth century, when secretaries were males acting as apprentices for later administrative responsibility.
The current feminist movement has by and large ignored this form of positional discrimination; its emphasis has been on getting into the elite professions and managerial positions by following existing career channels--hence female college enrollments have gone up rapidly even as male enrollments have tended to decline. Desirable as this may be, it is an elitist reform that will have little effect on the economic prospects of the majority of women, especially in the vast clerical sector of bureaucracies. Indeed, applicants bringing more educational credentials to the professional and managerial labor markets will further raise, and in turn specialize, the credential requirements of those positions, making them even less accessible to promotion from within from the secretarial ghetto.
In this sense, a better long-term strategy for overcoming sexual stratification in employment would be to press for job reshaping instead of educational credentials, to explicitly substitute on-job apprenticeship as a means of managerial recruitment.
How might the credential restructuring of a strong profession such as medicine take place? As it stands, American medical training is attached at the end of a very long and expensive education that keeps the supply of physicians low and their incomes and social backgrounds very high. This formal education appears to have little real practical relevance; most actual training is done on the job in the most informal circumstances, through the few years of internship and residency. The existing medical structure is not only highly expensive, inefficient, and inegalitarian in terms of career access; but it is also tied to a system of job segregation in which the menial tasks are shunted off onto a separate medical hierarchy of women with the assistance of low-paid ethnic minorities in service jobs with no career possibilities.
It is likely that far greater quality and efficiency could be attained by eliminating the distinction between nurses and doctors and combining their career sequences with that of hospital orderlies. (No doubt this would offend the status concerns of doctors, but it would at least challenge them to take their altruistic claims seriously.) All medical careers would begin with a position as orderly, which would be transformed into the first stage of a possible apprenticeship for physicians. After a given number of years, successful candidates could leave for a few years of medical school (2 years seems sufficient background for most practitioners, and this could be done equally well at an undergraduate or postgraduate level, with the option being left open) and then return to the hospital for advanced apprenticeship training of the sort now given in internship and residency programs. The motivation of orderlies would be enhanced, and the implicit opportunities for apprenticeship-type training could simply be brought into the foreground. Advanced specialties could continue to be taught as they now are through further on-job training; only medical researchers would be involved in lengthy schooling. The overall effect would certainly be less expensive and would provide better medical care from all personnel; there is no evidence to make one believe that the technical quality of treatment would suffer. (11)
Similarly, even an explicitly education-based hierarchy, such as a university department, could open up its career channels to secretaries on an apprenticeship basis. If one regards it as important that department and higher-level supervisers should be academic professionals, it still would be possible to merge the various training sequences or rotate the positional duties themselves. Students could be required to do secretarial duties as part of their training, and secretaries could be given the opportunity to acquire academic training as part of their work. This would make for changes in the structure of power, to be sure, that might not be palatable to incumbents of currently dominant positions, but such power differences are the crux of the obstacle to greater income equality.
Fundamental changes in the structure of inequality, then, and in the quality of modem culture, imply the abolition of credentialing. A thoroughgoing program of this sort would eliminate approximately half of existing inequality. It would not directly touch the other source of inequality, the distribution of physical and financial capital. But socialist programs for overcoming this inequality attack only half the problem; Gini coefficients in socialist countries are approximately one-half of those in capitalist countries, averaging around .240 in the former and .440 in the latter (Stack, 1976). But even these lower Gini coefficients indicate a structure of occupational inequality than remains when capital is socialized. The socialist countries as well as the capitalist ones still need a second revolution.
I have argued that decredentialing of this order would have momentous, even revolutionary consequences. It could not be carried out without a thorough restructuring of organizational forms. This would be especially necessary because the currently existing credential system helps counteract the problem of excess capacity, and some other means of keeping up employment would have to be found. In the context of a thorough-going reform, such measures would not necessarily be difficult, by institutionalizing a shorter work week and/or by giving longer vacations. Under current conditions, of course, such measures are much more difficult to implement because of the income redistribution they imply; instead, spending on education has been a politically cheap way of practicing Keynesian economics in America.
The issue of credential stratification points us at the central feature of occupational stratification today: property in positions. To restructure these would be a more fundamental economic revolution than any we have yet seen. For that very reason, we cannot expect this reform to be easily made. It is possible that organizational and professional career hierarchies could be restructured piecemeal by local action. But local resistance would be hard to overcome without a widespread atmosphere of reform and a highly mobilized movement in this direction. It is far easier for allegedly liberal or even radical movements to continue the long-standing tradition of expanding access to the credential system. These efforts will only extend the inflationary nature of that system. In that direction, one can foresee that current issues around educational costs, discrimination, and integration will go on unresolved into the indefinite future.
To be realistic, one should bet on an expansion of current credentialism, even though this brings reformers no closer to their avowed goals than a donkey chasing a carrot held over its nose. This means, though, that crises of the class struggle continually threaten, not only within the material economy, but within the cultural economy as well. And using the educational system as a basis for an arbitrary currency of domination means that it suffers a continually increasing internal contradiction in the consciousness of its inhabitants. For all its claims to be raising the level of rationality of its students, education itself operates as part of a larger system that denigrates its own contents and ignores any insights it might provide into the nature of that system.
Hence although it would be unrealistic to expect a decredentialing revolution in the short run, it would be equally unrealistic to rule it out in the long run. Given the trend of credential expansion toward potentially absurd levels, it seems more than likely that credential abolitionism will come to the fore whenever any very sharp imbalance occurs between the size of the school population and the distributional processes of the material economy.
In effect, we are very much more like a tribal society than we like to admit. Despite our self-image of rational control, our institutions are no more reflectively chosen than the tribal initiation rites, secret societies, and implacable gods that our educational and occupational procedures resemble so much. Or to shift the analogy to more large-scale societies, we are subject the same forces that transformed India over the centuries into a series of closed occupational castes, or that made medieval Europe a network of monopolistic guilds. Such societies undergo convulsions from forces beyond their control, as in the Reformation, which destroyed the religious currency upon which the medieval monopolies were legitimated. In the long run unless we raise our own level of rational control over our institutions, we can expect that such forces will be waiting for us.
(9) The various forms of "credential politics'' might be labeled more generally as factions in "sinecure politics.'' This generates some interesting historical parallels. "Sinecure capitalism," in fact existed in the late Middle Ages in Europe, and in many other agrarian societies, where sinecures (prebends) could actually be bought and sold. The very mention of this is taboo for our society, though, and "sinecure capitalists'' are doomed to operate under a misleading ideology. "Sinecure socialism," on the other hand, is rather close to the goal of Marxists, who could share out equally the fruits of superproductive technology if they would propose to do this by distributing occupational positions instead of incomes. "Sinecure ethnic-patrimonialisrn" or "sinecure patronage'' is familiar already: It is what ethnic patronage politics always was. "Sinecure fascism" would be the equivalent to returning to the medieval principle reserving nonwork positions for a hereditary aristocracy. "Sinecure radicalism'' would be making work relations highly egalitarian; current movements for participatory democracy are quite close to this, but without yet recognizing that most of what is being shared is not work responsibilities but on-the-job leisure and on-the-job politicking. "Sinecure Keynesianism'' means a radical extension of WPA-style make work hiring; some short-lived revolutions such as the Paris Commune of 1871 carried this out fairly widely. "Sinecure abolitionism'' has its religious precedents, notably the Protestant Reformation, which led to the elimination of monasteries and many other church prebends. In that case, the result was government confiscation of these properties, greatly enriching the new absolutist state--the real economic significance of the Reformation. Whether there would be analogous consequences of a modern-day "sinecure Reformation' is worth careful consideration.
(10) Educational requirements were highest in those organizations making the strongest efforts to racially integrate employment, according to the 1967 San Francisco Bay Area Employer survey reported in Chapter 2.
11 To repeat the relevant points cited in Chapters 1 and 6: Medical school requirements are essentially arbitrary screening devices, as virtually no one ever flunks out of medical school, subsequent performance bears no relation to school grades; and the actual practical training of doctors is of the most casual sort--orderlies probably could acquire as much over the course of their work experience, especially if they are at all motivated (contrary to the enforced expectations of their current roles) to acquire it. Moreover, a reformed medical system ought to be more technically efficacious than the one that exists now. American medical care, despite the haze of national glorification in its own pronouncements and in the mass media, is a good deal less effective than that provided in the less professionally autonomous medical systems of Europe. This is illustrated by the higher infant mortality rate and lower longevity in the United States than in almost every European country, despite the superiority of the United States in GNP per capita of from 50 to 300% (Taylor and Hudson 1972: 253. 314).