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The memory is that these old factory/manufacturing jobs were high paying (middle class), secure, and accessible to people of low intellect, minimal education, a

The memory is that these old factory/manufacturing jobs were high paying (middle class), secure, and accessible to people of low intellect, minimal education, and limited social grace. The proposed replacements "caregivers, retail workers and customer-service representatives" are significantly lower wage and also require more "EQ" that the working man of the prior generation didn't need. The voters these politicians are addressing are working from a memory of a time when "men were men", that worked hard in a physical way to produce a physical product; in the memory, these working men didn't think and didn't emote, they produced. Now, the voter says, men have been "feminized" by being forced out of a productive, provider role where a single income could support the family. Instead, they are placed into a role where they need to express concern, care, and use soft skills instead of physical strength. And when they want the same pay and security they had before, they are instead told to "learn to code" (or learn whatever, get an education). Which is easy for a coastal educated person to say, but to a line of family men who have not just eschewed education but actively resisted it, this is a tough pill to swallow.

golergka 10y ago
> actively resisted it Honest question. Is this a reality or a degrading stereotype?
- rfrank 10y ago
  Definitely a stereotype.
- titanomachy 10y ago
  According to this poll [1], only 6% of Americans see college education as "not too important", and the rest see it as at least "fairly important". If there are people actively resisting education, they are a rather tiny minority. 1: http://www.gallup.com/poll/166490/americans-college-education-important.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/166490/americans-college-educatio...
- thesmallestcat 10y ago
  The entire comment is an absurd stereotype, and about what you'd expect to find in this forum. Manufacturing jobs weren't (and aren't) filled with a bunch of meatheads coloring by numbers any more than are construction jobs.
  - sithadmin 10y ago
    >Manufacturing jobs weren't (and aren't) filled with a bunch of meatheads coloring by numbers any more than are construction jobs. This is true, but the fact that there are definitely stigmas around higher education in underprivileged and working class communities in the USA is very much a reality.
    - Inconel 10y ago
      You're absolutely right that this stigma exists and needs to be challenged but I would add that in my experience one, although certainly not the only, reason for this stigma is that many working class people don't feel that the more educated classes have much respect for the kind of labor they do. I think US society in general views a lot of working class jobs as rather undignified and the stigma against education in these communities is in part an unfortunate reaction to that.
  - noobermin 10y ago
    >about what you'd expect to find in this forum I disagree, you find a diverse set of viewpoints on HN, this isn't representative. The fact that a distillation of r/theredpill dogma is the top comment is upsetting to me, but then again, I have come to expect that when the number of comments exceeds the number of upvotes on a story, such stories are more of a lightning rod of politicizing than it is substantial conversation. Eventually the up/down votes equalizes it out. There are a couple of interesting comments below this that shock discuss the content of the article and probably will take this comment's place.
    - steven777400 10y ago
      I'm sorry you're upset. I regret my original comment, and trying to remove it, today I found out HN doesn't let users delete comments older than a certain small amount of time.
- sithadmin 10y ago
  It's very much a common reality among working-class families of nearly any ethnic background in the USA. I have plenty of friends and some non-intermediate family members that have reported that their friends and family actively discouraged continuing their education after highschool for one reason or another. In some cases, reasons like "you'll earn more working an honest trade", and "college debt is a scam" are given (in some cases, these may actually be true). In others, things like "do you think you're better than the rest of us?", "that's for white people", and "only f-gs and liberals go to college" are hurled at those that want to continue their education. And in many cases, it doesn't even take active discouragement to prevent people from wanting to obtain any higher education. I have relatives that live in very small, rural farming towns that have actively resisted attending anything other than the local 2-year junior college, in part because the people that get 4-year degrees never come back to town. They're convinced that they would be betraying their family and friends by getting educated and finding a better living situation.
  - madengr 10y ago
    My anecdotes are the opposite. Usually the parents had a job they hated (manufacturing or service sector), and encouraged their kids to attend college.
    - r_smart 10y ago
      I grew up poor. My father paints houses. He always used to tell me: "Work smarter, not harder." My roommate hired him to refinish his deck (He owns the house), and every time my father showed up for work and I was working from home, he was thrilled. My mother is barely literate, never really attended high school. She always read to me, encouraged me to read, and always made money available to buy books. The only things she cared about was me taking education seriously and not saddling myself down with kids too young (which might have backfired because neither I, or my brothers, have any interest in having children, which makes her sad). I guess I'm just saying: Have another anecdote to add to your collection. But I'd also say, don't think the GP is wrong. Both attitudes exist obviously.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- hasbroslasher 10y ago
  Yes, it is real. I'm from a small town in Montana with a strong timber industry presence, and loads of people stick around, largely because their parents want them to stay or because they don't want to leave everything they know. Often times, there's no choice because the kids didn't do well enough to go to "coastal school," nor could they or their parents afford it if they did. People from cities exhibit this kind of behavior too, but for some reason no one talks about it as negatively as they talk about staying in your shitty rural town after high school.
  - bluedino 10y ago
    >> and loads of people stick around, largely because their parents want them to stay or because they don't want to leave everything they know. We've really fallen as Americans, too eager to stick in one place. 2-3 generations ago many of our ancestors left everything they had in their home country to come here with nothing more than the money in their pockets and shirt on their back.
    - hasbroslasher 10y ago
      True. Not saying it's good, just providing some pathology.
    - Noos 10y ago
      Those Americans often suffered from homesickness so bad that it was possible to die from it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostalgia#As_a_medical_condition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostalgia#As_a_medical_conditi... Homesickness: An American History by Susan J Matt is a great book about how it existed in America. The song "Home Sweet Home" is banal to us, but was forbidden to be played during the Civil War because it caused homesickness and desertions.They used to hospitalize people suffering from nostalgia. It could be that bad. the past was nothing like the modern rootlessness we have now.
  - sjg007 10y ago
    Kids on the coast can inherit their families now $1m house... Meanwhile those that move are forced to save and save and maybe get lucky to buy a house.
- jcranmer 10y ago
  It is probably more stereotype than not. But there is some truth to it: I do know an anecdote of someone who was effectively disowned for daring to go to college. That case is almost certainly on the extreme side of the spectrum, but I wouldn't be quick to discount the fact that some places are actively hostile to the idea of higher education.
- sharkjacobs 10y ago
  It's certainly a generalization, and I think its fair (if recursive) to caution that every generalization is an overgeneralization. But as far as the "reality" goes, there are certainly personal anecdotes to support it, some about people I personally know.
- walshemj 10y ago
  I certainly saw this in school in the late 70'sin the UK
marcoperaza 10y ago
>Which is easy for a coastal educated person to say, but to a line of family men who have not just eschewed education but actively resisted it, this is a tough pill to swallow. I don't think it's so much a cultural thing as the high intellectual capabilities required for high paying knowledge jobs. Coding, for example, is just too hard for a huge segment of the population, regardless of how much training they get. If you really want to Make America Great Again, you need to make these jobs easier and accessible to more people, thus paying less but employing more. Easier said than done of course. Within software, Haskell is the wrong direction. I haven't used it, but it seems like Go aims to make coding simpler. But it's not just programming languages; it includes large scale system design, which currently needs to be reinvented with intense effort at every firm, even repeatedly within the same firm, even within the same product.
- thesmallestcat 10y ago
  TIL that the React ecosystem is a conspiracy against the poor.
  - marcoperaza 10y ago
    It's interesting really. Systems that give you more flexibility and power might make good engineers more productive, while making many more mediocre engineers less productive. Of course, the former largely drive these innovations. I've been out of web dev for a while now, but React's one way state to UI concept actually seems like an amazing simplification.
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    You realise that something can have bad outcomes for a given group without anyone intentionally seeking those outcomes, yes?
    - thesmallestcat 10y ago
      Yes, it was a joke.
- 10y ago
madengr 10y ago
"Coastal educated"? Nice stereotyping there.
choicewords 10y ago
The reality is there is still plenty of hard, material stuff that needs to be made. Just look at SpaceX. It's cool, it's tech and it is most certainly hard material science. We won't be able to make it with just soft skills and software. Improving our material lives (including not wasting resources) matters.
- duaneb 10y ago
  Hard material science is light years from manufacturing jobs.
  - Inconel 10y ago
    While true, aerospace is still probably one of the best skilled labor/manufacturing jobs available. There are quite a few regulations and certifications that need to be followed/held which makes it more difficult/costly to outsource. In the case of SpaceX or similar companies that fall under ITAR or do classified work, meeting those security requirements is an additional hurdle to outsourcing, although automation will still have an impact.
jordanb 10y ago
You make some good points but I think you go a little off the rails with the social commentary. The truth is that wages a worker can earn are bounded at the top by how much value they add. If they are paid more than the value they create they'll be fired (unless they're executives). A manufacturing line can produce millions of dollars of value with a few dozen workers. This means if the workers organize properly and if they're not undermined by foreign competition then they can potentially capture a lot of value and have high incomes. The "service" jobs that are replacing them add much less value. A caregiver can only work with one person at a time, and maybe six or eight in a workday. That guarantees the job will be low wage or not done at all. Our economy used to produce jobs by the tens of millions where an average guy with average ability and a willingness to endure hard work and monotony could buy a house, raise a family, go on the annual vacation to Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon, have his wife work as much or as little as she wants and eventually retire comfortably. The economy doesn't produce these jobs anymore. Now we have jobs that are still well compensated but comparatively small in number and highly specialized or jobs that are not and can not provide wages to live the lives people used to have.
- asperous 10y ago
  I think the upper bound on manufacturing jobs would be the cost of automation.
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    Automation isn't the enemy of manufacturing these days as much as decentralized manufacturing is. Once 3D printing evolves to the point of being suitable to print everyday items it would kill a lot of jobs all across the supply chain the manufacturing industry.
    - bluedino 10y ago
      >> Once 3D printing evolves to the point of being suitable to print everyday items That won't happen any time soon. Sure, you can print household items like a cup, plate, and possibly silverware but so many household things are made out of materials that aren't really 'printable' (a pillow or couch for example) or complicated devices with components (headphones, a can of air freshener, a laptop), manufacturing plays a role in all of those items.
2AF3 10y ago
Not sure which coastal school gave you the social grace to act like this...

golergka 10y ago

> actively resisted it Honest question. Is this a reality or a degrading stereotype?

rfrank 10y ago
Definitely a stereotype.
titanomachy 10y ago
According to this poll [1], only 6% of Americans see college education as "not too important", and the rest see it as at least "fairly important". If there are people actively resisting education, they are a rather tiny minority. 1: http://www.gallup.com/poll/166490/americans-college-education-important.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/166490/americans-college-educatio...
thesmallestcat 10y ago
The entire comment is an absurd stereotype, and about what you'd expect to find in this forum. Manufacturing jobs weren't (and aren't) filled with a bunch of meatheads coloring by numbers any more than are construction jobs.
- sithadmin 10y ago
  >Manufacturing jobs weren't (and aren't) filled with a bunch of meatheads coloring by numbers any more than are construction jobs. This is true, but the fact that there are definitely stigmas around higher education in underprivileged and working class communities in the USA is very much a reality.
  - Inconel 10y ago
    You're absolutely right that this stigma exists and needs to be challenged but I would add that in my experience one, although certainly not the only, reason for this stigma is that many working class people don't feel that the more educated classes have much respect for the kind of labor they do. I think US society in general views a lot of working class jobs as rather undignified and the stigma against education in these communities is in part an unfortunate reaction to that.
- noobermin 10y ago
  >about what you'd expect to find in this forum I disagree, you find a diverse set of viewpoints on HN, this isn't representative. The fact that a distillation of r/theredpill dogma is the top comment is upsetting to me, but then again, I have come to expect that when the number of comments exceeds the number of upvotes on a story, such stories are more of a lightning rod of politicizing than it is substantial conversation. Eventually the up/down votes equalizes it out. There are a couple of interesting comments below this that shock discuss the content of the article and probably will take this comment's place.
  - steven777400 10y ago
    I'm sorry you're upset. I regret my original comment, and trying to remove it, today I found out HN doesn't let users delete comments older than a certain small amount of time.
sithadmin 10y ago
It's very much a common reality among working-class families of nearly any ethnic background in the USA. I have plenty of friends and some non-intermediate family members that have reported that their friends and family actively discouraged continuing their education after highschool for one reason or another. In some cases, reasons like "you'll earn more working an honest trade", and "college debt is a scam" are given (in some cases, these may actually be true). In others, things like "do you think you're better than the rest of us?", "that's for white people", and "only f-gs and liberals go to college" are hurled at those that want to continue their education. And in many cases, it doesn't even take active discouragement to prevent people from wanting to obtain any higher education. I have relatives that live in very small, rural farming towns that have actively resisted attending anything other than the local 2-year junior college, in part because the people that get 4-year degrees never come back to town. They're convinced that they would be betraying their family and friends by getting educated and finding a better living situation.
- madengr 10y ago
  My anecdotes are the opposite. Usually the parents had a job they hated (manufacturing or service sector), and encouraged their kids to attend college.
  - r_smart 10y ago
    I grew up poor. My father paints houses. He always used to tell me: "Work smarter, not harder." My roommate hired him to refinish his deck (He owns the house), and every time my father showed up for work and I was working from home, he was thrilled. My mother is barely literate, never really attended high school. She always read to me, encouraged me to read, and always made money available to buy books. The only things she cared about was me taking education seriously and not saddling myself down with kids too young (which might have backfired because neither I, or my brothers, have any interest in having children, which makes her sad). I guess I'm just saying: Have another anecdote to add to your collection. But I'd also say, don't think the GP is wrong. Both attitudes exist obviously.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
hasbroslasher 10y ago
Yes, it is real. I'm from a small town in Montana with a strong timber industry presence, and loads of people stick around, largely because their parents want them to stay or because they don't want to leave everything they know. Often times, there's no choice because the kids didn't do well enough to go to "coastal school," nor could they or their parents afford it if they did. People from cities exhibit this kind of behavior too, but for some reason no one talks about it as negatively as they talk about staying in your shitty rural town after high school.
- bluedino 10y ago
  >> and loads of people stick around, largely because their parents want them to stay or because they don't want to leave everything they know. We've really fallen as Americans, too eager to stick in one place. 2-3 generations ago many of our ancestors left everything they had in their home country to come here with nothing more than the money in their pockets and shirt on their back.
  - hasbroslasher 10y ago
    True. Not saying it's good, just providing some pathology.
  - Noos 10y ago
    Those Americans often suffered from homesickness so bad that it was possible to die from it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostalgia#As_a_medical_condition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostalgia#As_a_medical_conditi... Homesickness: An American History by Susan J Matt is a great book about how it existed in America. The song "Home Sweet Home" is banal to us, but was forbidden to be played during the Civil War because it caused homesickness and desertions.They used to hospitalize people suffering from nostalgia. It could be that bad. the past was nothing like the modern rootlessness we have now.
- sjg007 10y ago
  Kids on the coast can inherit their families now $1m house... Meanwhile those that move are forced to save and save and maybe get lucky to buy a house.
jcranmer 10y ago
It is probably more stereotype than not. But there is some truth to it: I do know an anecdote of someone who was effectively disowned for daring to go to college. That case is almost certainly on the extreme side of the spectrum, but I wouldn't be quick to discount the fact that some places are actively hostile to the idea of higher education.
sharkjacobs 10y ago
It's certainly a generalization, and I think its fair (if recursive) to caution that every generalization is an overgeneralization. But as far as the "reality" goes, there are certainly personal anecdotes to support it, some about people I personally know.
walshemj 10y ago
I certainly saw this in school in the late 70'sin the UK

marcoperaza 10y ago

>Which is easy for a coastal educated person to say, but to a line of family men who have not just eschewed education but actively resisted it, this is a tough pill to swallow. I don't think it's so much a cultural thing as the high intellectual capabilities required for high paying knowledge jobs. Coding, for example, is just too hard for a huge segment of the population, regardless of how much training they get. If you really want to Make America Great Again, you need to make these jobs easier and accessible to more people, thus paying less but employing more. Easier said than done of course. Within software, Haskell is the wrong direction. I haven't used it, but it seems like Go aims to make coding simpler. But it's not just programming languages; it includes large scale system design, which currently needs to be reinvented with intense effort at every firm, even repeatedly within the same firm, even within the same product.

thesmallestcat 10y ago
TIL that the React ecosystem is a conspiracy against the poor.
- marcoperaza 10y ago
  It's interesting really. Systems that give you more flexibility and power might make good engineers more productive, while making many more mediocre engineers less productive. Of course, the former largely drive these innovations. I've been out of web dev for a while now, but React's one way state to UI concept actually seems like an amazing simplification.
- vertex-four 10y ago
  You realise that something can have bad outcomes for a given group without anyone intentionally seeking those outcomes, yes?
  - thesmallestcat 10y ago
    Yes, it was a joke.
10y ago

madengr 10y ago

"Coastal educated"? Nice stereotyping there.

choicewords 10y ago

The reality is there is still plenty of hard, material stuff that needs to be made. Just look at SpaceX. It's cool, it's tech and it is most certainly hard material science. We won't be able to make it with just soft skills and software. Improving our material lives (including not wasting resources) matters.

duaneb 10y ago
Hard material science is light years from manufacturing jobs.
- Inconel 10y ago
  While true, aerospace is still probably one of the best skilled labor/manufacturing jobs available. There are quite a few regulations and certifications that need to be followed/held which makes it more difficult/costly to outsource. In the case of SpaceX or similar companies that fall under ITAR or do classified work, meeting those security requirements is an additional hurdle to outsourcing, although automation will still have an impact.

jordanb 10y ago

You make some good points but I think you go a little off the rails with the social commentary. The truth is that wages a worker can earn are bounded at the top by how much value they add. If they are paid more than the value they create they'll be fired (unless they're executives). A manufacturing line can produce millions of dollars of value with a few dozen workers. This means if the workers organize properly and if they're not undermined by foreign competition then they can potentially capture a lot of value and have high incomes. The "service" jobs that are replacing them add much less value. A caregiver can only work with one person at a time, and maybe six or eight in a workday. That guarantees the job will be low wage or not done at all. Our economy used to produce jobs by the tens of millions where an average guy with average ability and a willingness to endure hard work and monotony could buy a house, raise a family, go on the annual vacation to Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon, have his wife work as much or as little as she wants and eventually retire comfortably. The economy doesn't produce these jobs anymore. Now we have jobs that are still well compensated but comparatively small in number and highly specialized or jobs that are not and can not provide wages to live the lives people used to have.

asperous 10y ago
I think the upper bound on manufacturing jobs would be the cost of automation.
- dogma1138 10y ago
  Automation isn't the enemy of manufacturing these days as much as decentralized manufacturing is. Once 3D printing evolves to the point of being suitable to print everyday items it would kill a lot of jobs all across the supply chain the manufacturing industry.
  - bluedino 10y ago
    >> Once 3D printing evolves to the point of being suitable to print everyday items That won't happen any time soon. Sure, you can print household items like a cup, plate, and possibly silverware but so many household things are made out of materials that aren't really 'printable' (a pillow or couch for example) or complicated devices with components (headphones, a can of air freshener, a laptop), manufacturing plays a role in all of those items.

2AF3 10y ago

Not sure which coastal school gave you the social grace to act like this...