There's some interesting work from economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis,

who looked at the kind of lifetime return on a college degree.

And it found that once you include debt, the lifetime return to a degree had been just steadily dropping generation by generation.

I'm Bethany McLean.

Did you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism and whether greed's a good idea?

And I'm Luigi Zengalis.

We have socialism for the very rich, rugged individualism for the poor.

And this is Capital Isn't, a podcast about what is working in capitalism.

First of all, tell me, is there some society you know that doesn't

run on greed? And most importantly, what isn't? We ought to do better by the people that get left

behind. I don't think we shouldn't kill the capital system in the process. So Karl Marx had a very

clear theory about how capitalism would end. As the system matured, society would split into two

classes, the owners of capital and the workers who had nothing to sell but their labor.

Workers would become increasingly exploited and alienated until they finally revolted.

And here's where the story does get really interesting. Marks imagine that the revolution

would be led by the industrial working class. But historically, revolutions are often catalyzed by people who are educated and ambitious,

people who are expected to rise and instead find themselves blocked.

Which makes the moment we're living in especially intriguing.

Because some of the most visible labor activists in the United States today are not factory workers, but college graduates.

In his new book, Mutiny, New York Times reporter Nome Scheiber, who has spent the past decade

covering labor in the workplace, writes that the college wage premium is how much more you make

with a degree compared with if you only have a high school diploma. But a tectonic ship started

...