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One can come up with a completely alternative explanation for what's happening with Trump/Sanders, Farage/Corbyn, Modi, etc. based on constructs like 'end of av

• mtgx 11y ago
  It doesn't help that not only does the US not adopt free college and other educational programs to ensure its workforce is prepared for the 21st century going forward (as an investment into the country's future, not a "freebie" - just like infrastructure spending), but it actually gives everyone large amounts of life-long debt through the broken tuition loan system it has put in place. Then, they export all low-skill (or even higher skill) jobs abroad. So the low-skilled masses are getting screwed from all sides.
  • scottlocklin 11y ago
    What do you do with the people who are too dumb to go to college? Serious question; one that seems to get left out among the college educated who are running the place. It's like basketball players assuming everyone is over 6 feet tall and athletic.
    • unchocked 11y ago
      Simple: you dumb college down. If college is the new high school, then college becomes a default path that is more valued for its socialization experience than for academic knowledge imparted. And like AP classes in high school, you have hard majors where the "life of mind" is taught, and push the smart kids to go into those.
      • 13thLetter 11y ago
        Don't know if you're serious, but there's a problem here: an enormous rent, in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, is now being extracted from the students sent in for "socialization" -- both in direct costs to the college, and indirectly in the reduction of their earning potential during those years. Furthermore, it is being extracted specifically from a class of people who probably have a hard time laying their hands on that money, and being paid to already upper-class people. We managed to socialize ourselves in the past just fine without doing this. "Free" college, by the way, does not solve this problem; all it does is slightly improve the lot of the poor by instead spreading the rent over the class of all taxpayers, while making the payouts to an unproductive administrative class even bigger. I suspect the second part explains the popularity of this idea among the administrative class, though.
        • TeMPOraL 11y ago
          I'm confused about calling student loans "socializing". This seems like an essence of American capitalism. Elsewhere, in more "socialized" parts of the world, college is free and total costs are nowhere near that of the US, because it's much less profitable for rent-seekers to set up shop where there isn't much money flowing.
          • douche 11y ago
            Different kind of socializing, I imagine. The sort of training-wheels for life as a real adult that college tends to be. With all the "networking", which usually manifests as getting blackout drunk on cheap alcohol and bad weed three or four nights a week.
      • the_ancient 11y ago
        Of course... I think everyone should have to spend the first 40 years of their life in some kind of government run institution being learned.... Only then can they be true productive members of society...
      • methodover 11y ago
    • pjmorris 11y ago
      First, I'd question the use of the word 'dumb'. That said, I think the question is worth some thought. My thought on the matter is that there are plenty of vital roles that don't depend on college, e.g. plumbers, fire fighters, and many kinds of heath care and service sector roles. College might be best suited for those who deal in abstractions... but there are plenty of necessary concrete jobs as well.
      • arcticfox 11y ago
        >but there are plenty of necessary concrete jobs as well. Fewer and fewer of them unfortunately. Just wait until self-driving trucks put 5 million truck drivers out of work...
        • dboreham 11y ago
          Very. Long. Wait.
      • scottlocklin 11y ago
        There will have to be more of them than college jobs, as there are more people with "less than college" smarts. Those jobs don't seem to have materialized.
  • the_ancient 11y ago
    Why you believe that a workforce prepared for the 21 century requires at minimum 16 years of education? This over application of degrees for jobs that should not need a degree at all is one of the problems. Vocational Training should be the path the vast majority of people take, and should be all that is required for the vast majority of even 21 century jobs. We do not need government provided schools, we need to restructure our very idea of what education is, and employers need to stop over valuing a degree.
    • shas3 11y ago
      No! Honestly, I think it is the exact opposite. You need more than 16 years of education for the jobs of the future. Vocational teaching cannot teach you statistics and linear algebra required for machine learning, which itself again, cannot be taught in vocational training. For each of these you need all the math prerequisites up to and including freshman undergrad!
      • eruditely 11y ago
        Regular people do not need to learn machine learning. Vocational training sounds great for all the ambiguous and hard to specify tasks required for essentially every industry. These fruits of all our machine learning labors will take some time to materialize.
      • justinclift 11y ago
        Hmmm, how about tradies? eg plumbers They're not unskilled at all, but they also don't go to "college" for the majority of their on-the-job learning.
• Avshalom 11y ago
  > These are social consequences of the growing gap between highly skilled and low-skilled workers. The former are more and more important to the economy even as the latter become less so with technological progress and globalization The thing is though, janitors aren't any less important or in demand than they were a 50 years ago, or retail workers, burger flippers, waiters. Less of the low skill work has been offshored than the high skill frankly because it's all service industry, it requires locality.
  • toyg 11y ago
    But their careers have been cut short by their employers becoming international conglomerates that simply don't promote from the ranks. You start on the shop floor, you die on the shop floor; and wage compression does the rest. The exceptions are very rare (mcdonalds and a few others).
    • cwilkes 11y ago
      I'm not so sure of that ... what's the upward mobility of a small 20 person factory that's probably owned by a family that has the top three jobs in the company? Vs a large company with 3000 employees?
  • shostack 11y ago
    > "The thing is though, janitors aren't any less important or in demand than they were a 50 years ago, or retail workers, burger flippers, waiters." I think you might be underestimating the shift towards automation that is occurring in many services industries, and will only accelerate as robotics and other technologies improve [1]. As soon as companies can automate a robot (or outsource remote control of a non-autonomous one to a cheaper country), they will unless they position themselves on the quality of their human-based customer care, which is an increasingly rare thing. [1] http://www.salon.com/2015/05/10/robots_are_coming_for_your_job_amazon_mcdonalds_and_the_next_wave_of_dangerous_capitalist_disruption/ http://www.salon.com/2015/05/10/robots_are_coming_for_your_j...
• wycx 11y ago
  I would suggest that the growing gap you describe is a symptom of continued application of neoliberal policies. It is not that there was a status quo for the last 40 years, it is that the last 40 years has seen accelerating erosion of the conditions/social contract established in western countries in the post depression/WW2 era. Placing the rights of capital above all others, particularly giving capital a level of mobility that is not afforded labour, combined with an unquestioning embrace of trade liberalisation results in a race to the bottom for labour. It is only due to the stranglehold of neoliberal thinking on modern economic thought that globalisation is considered inevitable.
  • XorNot 11y ago
    Now there's an interesting thought experiment: what does a country with high internal labor mobility look like?
  • dnautics 11y ago
    I would suggest that the growing gap comes because government steals from the poor and gives to the rich through inflation. One ought to have seen a dividend for the working guy due to lowered prices from increased efficiency brought about by technology, but instead the Fed has chosen to favor "stable prices" which is done by lowering interest rates (I.e. making it easier for rich people to access capital)
    • thisislame 11y ago
      Deflation, not inflation, steals from the poor and gives to the rich. Deflation depresses wages and increases the value of assets (including outstanding debts! rich people use debt, poor people have debt.)
      • dnautics 11y ago
        poor people either aren't in debt (because no one will lend to them), or have debt on such short timescales or high interest rates that inflation has a negligible effect on the real value of their indebtedness.
• njharman 11y ago
  The real income inequality has nothing to do with skills, the inequality is between those who work and those who own. Top few percent vs everyone else. If you think skilled jobs are automation / off-shoring proof, I'll see you in the bread lines in 10-20yrs.
  • shas3 11y ago
    Heh I didn't say that. Automation just means available jobs will get increasingly higher skilled.
    • Terr_ 11y ago
      It's with mixed-feelings that I anticipate the day when people "work" by by solving sub-problems for weak AI. For example, being flashed security-images while wearing a skullcap so that a machine "reads" whether (in your judgement) the picture contained something suspicious. Not that many people don't work as interchangeable parts in machines today, we just call them companies.
      • jdavis703 11y ago
        Or we'll just find new jobs that were previously impossible, or at least unfeasible to do without the aid of AI. Just like how film photographers complained about digital cameras and related technology like Photoshop. Photographers haven't been put out of business (not even by everyone wielding a camera phone). The people that have been put out of business were those who couldn't figure out how to add value to what machines could now do. There are plenty of photographers doing just fine still, but they all realized they need to offer something that machines can't do, like high quality image manipulation.
        • mrob 11y ago
          The major value photographers add to what the machine can do is social status. People like an identical photograph more if they know it was taken by a famous photographer. Social status is a positional good. It's not possible to have high social status unless others have low social status, and those with low social status are in the majority. They cannot be successful photographers, no matter how good their skills, because technical advances have made skills much less important than status. This kind of change limits social mobility and is bad for society.
• ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  The libertarian worldview obviously exists, but it exists to inform the traditional oppression-based (left) or barbarism-based (right) fear-sets. It doesn't seem sustainable as a politics. Liberty as a value is not a thing competitive with fear. There are generally much (many?) fewer narratives that illustrate why liberty is important than why oppression or barbarism is. But there will be synthesis of libertarian concepts into those ideas.