"Although I certainly believe that any member of our highly digital society should be familiar with how these platforms work, universal code literacy won’t solv

"Although I certainly believe that any member of our highly digital society should be familiar with how these platforms work, universal code literacy won’t solve our employment crisis any more than the universal ability to read and write would result in a full-employment economy of book publishing." I read the article. I have seen similar arguments made by Nicholas Carr in "Peak Code" (http://www.roughtype.com/?p=5594 http://www.roughtype.com/?p=5594) Perhaps learning to code and universal code literacy (for now, lets not argue exactly what literacy means) may, or may not save individual jobs. I sense as software development as a discipline matures, at the level of the firm, software developer wages as percent of a software project's budget, may shrink. At a macro level, software development as percent of GNP may rise but the software developer employment may look like the numbers involved in manufacturing, or farming. The point I feel Ruskoff misses is that coding literacy may not save an individual's job. Or having a sizable chunk of the U.S economy (or any sophisticated modern economy's) GDP coming from software development. However a critical mass of the population programming, like universal literacy, will most likely translate into vast productivity gains and ability to create new opportunities. An example. The idea behind "software carpentry"http://software-carpentry.org http://software-carpentry.org) is about teaching scientists just enough programming, so they can write tools be productive at their main activities, instead of doing things by hand, or hiring programmers. As a whole, research immensely benefits. It is easy to extend these ideas to the populate in general (and yes, I, like chef Gusteau, believe anyone can program). When I come to think about it, maybe this is what the BBC Microbit is about. I feel fields like home automation would explode once a critical mass of the population are code literate. To get back to Ruskoff's analogy, book publishing would be a much smaller industry if universal literacy did not create the supply of writers and demand in the form of readers.