MEGAN MCARDLE: U.S. Workers Brought the ‘Great Reset’ on Themselves.

College professors. Manufacturing workers. Recent college graduates. What do they all have in common?

They are all, as a group, seeing the terms of their employment reset downward. The average package available to those people is worse than what similarly situated people got a generation ago, Tyler Cowen writes in the New York Times. Tenure lines are being dropped in favor of adjunct jobs that pay worse and have no protection from firing. New manufacturing workers get lower wages and benefits. Recent college grads find fewer well paying, steady jobs. This is the end of a long process, not a sudden bump, but as Cowen notes, “Such processes are scary because we may be watching the slow unfolding of a hand that, in its fundamentals, has already been dealt.”

As this hand is played, the common response is to demand that we go back to the last hand, which was much better. It has become customary, almost a required ritual, for any academic writing about adjunct faculty in any context to insert a call for their work to be done by well-paid tenure-track faculty. No meditation on “American manufacturing” is complete without explaining why those workers need stronger unions to get them higher pay (or at least an explanation of why that won’t work). And I don’t need to tell you how much ink has been spilled on the plight of college graduates and their student loans.

The average American is at the heart of this story — as the victim and as the perpetrator. We suffer as employees because we exert influence as consumers.

Read the whole thing.