14 ms·

You can do what the democrats have talked about, which we have successfully done in Nordic countries which is to spend a lot of money on re-educating the workfo

You can do what the democrats have talked about, which we have successfully done in Nordic countries which is to spend a lot of money on re-educating the workforce and making sure those at the bottom get decent skills. I grew up in a rustbelt like industrial town in Norway. We has shipyards, glass factory, paper mill, textile industry, lock systems etc. Almost all of it got closed down and moved overseas as I grew up. But we never ended up in the deep pit blue collar America ended up in, because government took a very active stance early to fight this with active policies. In towns where factories died, they moved public sector jobs from the capital. People got a lot of retraining for new jobs. There is a strong system for vocational training in technical jobs like Germany so people could get skills for more advance jobs which was easier to keep when competing against asian industrial giants. Our government offers free university education, so even less well off blue collar families could send their kids to good schools. And when economic times got harder it never hit blue collar works as hard as in America because we have free universal health care, heavily subsidized childcare, good pensions for everybody. Basically the welfare system we built up saved our blue collar workers. Yet Americans pretend that there is no solution to this problem except attacking minorities, Mexico, China etc. It is rich people like Trump and their agenda, which has made sure that blue collar workers in America have felt the influence of globalization harder than many other blue collar workers in the west.

neves 10y ago
You can't compare Norway, a high educated small country full of petromoney with the rest of the world. The recipe can't be reproduced.
- Inthenameofmine 10y ago
  The US has per capita more natural resource money than Norway. It just got privatized.
- kogepathic 10y ago
  > The recipe can't be reproduced. Yes it can. According to Wikipedia, Sweden has lower economic inequality than Norway does. [0] And the percentage of income held by the poorest 10% is nearly the same across Nordic countries. [1] I have quite a few friends from the Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland) and they are quick to tell you that things aren't perfect there, but I think you can say that government policies can create a more equal society even in countries without petromoney (e.g. Sweden). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality [1] http://www.viewsoftheworld.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/EuropeIncomeShareMaps.jpg http://www.viewsoftheworld.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Eu...
  - zond 10y ago
    This, yes.
  - noobiemcfoob 10y ago
    The key complaint many will have against the various progressive policies in Scandinavia when applied to the US is not the petromoney but the reality of a more homogeneous and educated citizenry. Despite AWS' claims otherwise, you can't just extend a service designed for 10 million to 320 million and expect even remotely the same performance.
    - kogepathic 10y ago
      The Nordic model we know today was developed and implemented in the 1970s. Obviously this kind of transformation takes time, and I have heard from Finnish friends that the education system quality is falling (it used to be within top-3 in the world for test scores, now they're only top-10). I'm sure when people thought of the model in the '70s, there were many people saying it would never work for a country of 5 million people, but 40 years later it still mostly works. > Despite AWS' claims otherwise, you can't just extend a service designed for 10 million to 320 million and expect even remotely the same performance. Are you saying the cost is too high, or it is simply infeasible to improve the lives of this many people? For the improvement of quality of life, see India's current efforts. Which I would argue are even more ambitious (e.g. bring water and electricity to nearly half a billion people) and, while not perfect, are going about as well as anticipated. For the financial argument, well there's a reason why everything in the Nordic countries is very expensive and people complain about the high taxes.
      - noobiemcfoob 10y ago
        >Are you saying the cost is too high, or it is simply infeasible to improve the lives of this many people? I'm saying a system designed for 10 million users cannot simply be extended to 320 million, particularly when that larger population is substantially more diverse. Consider a social science study looking at the same populations. Would you really expect any given finding in the Scandinavian populations to map to the US?
- Spivak 10y ago
  You don't deserve the downvotes. This is one of the main reasons, if the not the main reason that this kind of economics is hard. You can't, in general, take the institutions from one place, apply them to another and expect the same result -- or even similar results.
- lordnacho 10y ago
  Aren't other petro countries stunningly unequal? Equitorial Guinea, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela. If anything you'd think the oil would cause higher inequality rather than lower.
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago
  Denmark, Sweden, etc, beg to differ.
  - whoops1122 10y ago
    capitalism promotes the inequality.
Confusion 10y ago
The Nordic countries have as much problems with right-wing populists as any other country. Not having a job is not the problem. Or at least: having a job does not stop them from voting for right-wing populists.
- tormeh 10y ago
  Our right wing populists are your vanilla republicans. No really.
IMTDb 10y ago
USA does not have an oil fund that amounts do $150k per capita to pay for "free everything" (university education, universal health care, childcare) and good pensions for everybody. Norway generates more revenue with oil than the entires US of A, for 5 million people, and is third worldwide exporter for Natural Gas just behind Qatar and Russia, again with only 5 million people to serve (less than the population of New York) The policies you enjoy are paid for by those revenue, and are not applicable to "regular" countries. I admit tho that your politician did a good job at ensuring that those revenue are used for the good of the general population and are managed with the future in mind.
- zond 10y ago
  I'm from Sweden, and we have the same policies but basically no natural resources that are worth anything anymore. Unlike the US of A. It's not about oil, it's about realizing that a healthy, well educated and happy population is an investment that pays itself over time.
  - pc86 10y ago
    You've also got a top marginal personal income tax rate approaching 60% which is nearly twice that of the US and political suicide. I'm not making a judgment for or against high marginal taxes, I'm just saying "the US could do it too" ignores, well... the very core of economic and tax policy in the US.
    - zond 10y ago
      So now you leave the realm of economical possibilities and start pointing at political problems. Isn't that a little too simple? "No, we can't do that because we don't want to."
      - jimbokun 10y ago
        Well, it's important to engage the political realities. Doesn't make it impossible, but a hybrid proposal or smaller first step might be more practical, given the politics.
sabarn01 10y ago
We just don't have a system like that. I grew up in Appalachia the county next to mine has yet to get cell phones or the internet. There is no viable economic activity their and everyone who could has left. Those that stay cling to the idea that coal will create jobs again. We don't even have a basic agreement on how and what kids should be taught, and since we don't have public healthcare or social insurance for all its a big risk to move in order to search for better economic activity.
TulliusCicero 10y ago
> You can do what the democrats have talked about, which we have successfully done in Nordic countries which is to spend a lot of money on re-educating the workforce and making sure those at the bottom get decent skills. One of the issues with this is that while yes, you can get the people to become more skilled/educated, ultimately the jobs that take advantage of that skills and education are in cities, not in small towns or rural areas where so many of these people currently live. And that's probably not gonna change. Now, you could say, "well that's fine, we can give them moving stipends or something" but a lot of people are reluctant to leave what they've known as homes for so long. Such a strategy essentially puts these areas into hospice mode. That's an uncomfortable thought for probably most Americans. And moving public sector jobs, while it might work, is probably politically untenable in America; the areas that are dying are the same ones that are generally hostile to government.
- larl 10y ago
  Sure, hostile towards government while a large percentage of people actually work for government.
- jimbokun 10y ago
  "One of the issues with this is that while yes, you can get the people to become more skilled/educated, ultimately the jobs that take advantage of that skills and education are in cities, not in small towns or rural areas where so many of these people currently live." Somehow, our companies have become experts at enabling remote working 12 time zones away, but can't manage to pull off the same thing for someone in the rural US. I wonder why?
  - TulliusCicero 10y ago
    > Somehow, our companies have become experts at enabling remote working 12 time zones away Debatable. Most companies don't really have that many individual remote workers. Yes, they may have geographically distinct offices, but that's different.
  - jpindar 10y ago
    Remote working only works for jobs that are done via computer or telephone.
quizzas 10y ago
The issues of worker dissatisfaction in the U.S. is very similar to the ones in China, which was ironically built on economic equality.China, like Sweden and Norway, is ethnically homogeneous, but unlike Scandinavia its population is quite large. The larger the population, the more difficult it is to administer equal access to economic prosperity. China's revenues are technically built on capitalist models to maximize productivity, and it uses socialist ideals to do what it can with wealth redistribution, and yet is failing miserably. Socialism falls apart when the population far exceeds its ability to manage monetary policy. The U.S. is in a similar quandary without the socialist infrastructure; if China cannot do it, what are the chances the U.S. can? The U.S. must innovate a different approach built to scale and support a population of 1 billion people. It's like management 101: managing a workforce of 20 to prosperity is much different than managing a workforce of 10,000.
m_fayer 10y ago
This is all right on, but I would add one important point. Which is that some people cannot be retrained. It's the rare fifty year old who can adapt to a whole new field, learn all the theory and practice all the application, and then successfully compete against people half his age to land those entry-level jobs. If our economic system puts people in such a position through no fault of their own and they cannot escape it despite their best efforts, they need to be taken care of, for life if need be.
- jpindar 10y ago
  There's another thread on HN right now where it is being taken as a given that OUR OWN PARENTS cannot be expected to use a computer without breaking it (filling it with malware, etc.) I find that premise debatable, but if it is true, then how can they be retrained for technical jobs?
phkahler 10y ago
>> spend a lot of money on re-educating the workforce and making sure those at the bottom get decent skills. It is the height of snobbery to move the lesser skilled jobs out of the country and tell everyone they need to be smarter. There will always be a distribution of skills and it is not for the well educated to say "you just need to be like us". All the US needs to do is stop signing 900 page "free trade" agreements and start adjusting import taxes to bring manufacturing back. Call it what you will, but taking care of your own first is not a bad thing.
- prodmerc 10y ago
  They are taking care of their own first - cheapest labor and lowest taxes make the shareholders extremely happy.
  - gph 10y ago
    And that's why their candidate lost. Doubt Trump will do much better by normal folks, but it was obvious Clinton wouldn't.
  - phkahler 10y ago
    >> They are taking care of their own first - cheapest labor and lowest taxes make the shareholders extremely happy. One can hope that a government will consider its people "their own". Though that is not always the case.
    - prodmerc 10y ago
      You should realize I was talking about the corporate elite heh
- shamsalmon 10y ago
  What makes you think these jobs will ever come back in significant numbers? Even if the companies were forced to come back from overseas there would probably be a significantly smaller labor force because of automation. This problem is only going to get worse so it makes sense to go to a solution that is long term.
brightball 10y ago
I honestly have always been a pro "total free trade" with even the notion of protective tariffs being totally dismiss-able...but I think it's time to look at things with more of a nuanced approach. When it comes to jobs, there is significant value provided to society as a whole from jobs that do not require a high degree of workforce re-education. Sometimes, people need a job that they can comfortably walk into and walk out of while they are between jobs. Walmart and McDonald's are the places providing that type of think because jobs that could be done cheaper elsewhere while importing the product were shipped off. What we are seeing is that by offloading "no training" jobs to other cheaper countries and retaining "heavy education" jobs here in the US we're creating an additional cost to work that now REQUIRES paying for school, investing time in learning a skill and then hoping the market for that skill remains viable so you don't have to then re-invest in a new skill later on in life. It makes me sincerely wonder if certain tariffs are more justified just to protect that type of work because it seems that the cost of not having it available is far higher than most people have accounted for. I live in the south east, an area that was highly dependent on the textile economy before it went belly up with the removal of protective tariffs. The effect was fairly devastating and it took many years to recover. Some areas never did while others flourished. Just makes me want to understand all the factors more.
shoover 10y ago
Our government offers free university education, so even less well off blue collar families could send their kids to good schools. And when economic times got harder it never hit blue collar works as hard as in America because we have free universal health care, heavily subsidized childcare, good pensions for everybody. Does your system contain costs on these benefits better than the US, or do you have the inflation and pay it with tax increases? In the US all the benefits you mentioned have painful inflation. How does the government keep up with the costs?
- binaryabyss 10y ago
  In the US much of this is supplied by the market, which seeks to increase its profits every year to provide value for stockholders. The government, having no need to profit, is able to provide services to its citizens much more affordably.
jimbokun 10y ago
"Our government offers free university education, so even less well off blue collar families could send their kids to good schools." Here in the US, we actually have a decent Community College system which, while not free, tend to be very reasonably priced. Obama proposed leveraging this system as a low cost option for people who don't want to run up massive education debt.
mars4rp 10y ago
The problem is we are thinking about it the wrong way, with all this advances in technologies, who said everyone should work? everyone in the society should benefit from advancement in technology not only %0.001 of population. why Zuckerberg should have this many billions, did he contributed 1,000,000 times more than a 1000th Facebook employee to the society? problem is with Tax system and how US spends it's budget. money comes out of people's pocket and goes to corporations bank accounts. for example with only $16B we can give shelter to all the homeless in this country. $16B is peanut compare to federal budget. it is a shame to have half a million homeless in the richest country in the word.
lkrubner 10y ago
I can't find it on Google, but there was a famous political quote around the 1988 election: "Every time a Democrat mentions retraining, they lose another 100,000 votes." The USA lost 2 million industrial jobs during the 1980s. It was, at the time, the worst decade for deindustrialization. The Democrats felt the answer was retraining. The Republican reply amounted to the assertion that the USA needed a strong dollar. And the Republicans won re-election in 1988. From this, the Democrats learned that they would be punished for mentioning retraining. So it lost ground as an idea in USA politics.
- xellisx 10y ago
  The problem stemmed to policies that started back in the 70's, which kept getting expanded, which allowed for cheaper imports. This of course had the US companies jumped on, since hell, those people over seas work for 2 cents a day vs my skilled employees that turn out a quality product want $50K a year!
htns 10y ago
I would not consider the Nordic re-education system successful. Cynically speaking, it's designed to strike the unemployed from official counts, and the unemployment rate still ends up being higher than in the US. (Sweden 7.8%, US 4.9%)
daveheq 10y ago
Trump is for cutting taxes and spending, so how would he re-educate the workforce and make sure they get decent skills? His party is the same, they don't want to help anybody except the rich and profitable corporations who fund their campaigns, and want you to just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and work harder. The Republicans were part of Congress' gleeful global corporate sell-out, and support international corporations getting more tax cuts and handing out jobs to the cheapest people in other countries even more than the Democrats do; the only things both parties can agree on are more war and more money to the rich and corporations at the expense of the worker.

neves 10y ago

You can't compare Norway, a high educated small country full of petromoney with the rest of the world. The recipe can't be reproduced.

Inthenameofmine 10y ago
The US has per capita more natural resource money than Norway. It just got privatized.
kogepathic 10y ago
> The recipe can't be reproduced. Yes it can. According to Wikipedia, Sweden has lower economic inequality than Norway does. [0] And the percentage of income held by the poorest 10% is nearly the same across Nordic countries. [1] I have quite a few friends from the Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland) and they are quick to tell you that things aren't perfect there, but I think you can say that government policies can create a more equal society even in countries without petromoney (e.g. Sweden). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality [1] http://www.viewsoftheworld.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/EuropeIncomeShareMaps.jpg http://www.viewsoftheworld.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Eu...
- zond 10y ago
  This, yes.
- noobiemcfoob 10y ago
  The key complaint many will have against the various progressive policies in Scandinavia when applied to the US is not the petromoney but the reality of a more homogeneous and educated citizenry. Despite AWS' claims otherwise, you can't just extend a service designed for 10 million to 320 million and expect even remotely the same performance.
  - kogepathic 10y ago
    The Nordic model we know today was developed and implemented in the 1970s. Obviously this kind of transformation takes time, and I have heard from Finnish friends that the education system quality is falling (it used to be within top-3 in the world for test scores, now they're only top-10). I'm sure when people thought of the model in the '70s, there were many people saying it would never work for a country of 5 million people, but 40 years later it still mostly works. > Despite AWS' claims otherwise, you can't just extend a service designed for 10 million to 320 million and expect even remotely the same performance. Are you saying the cost is too high, or it is simply infeasible to improve the lives of this many people? For the improvement of quality of life, see India's current efforts. Which I would argue are even more ambitious (e.g. bring water and electricity to nearly half a billion people) and, while not perfect, are going about as well as anticipated. For the financial argument, well there's a reason why everything in the Nordic countries is very expensive and people complain about the high taxes.
    - noobiemcfoob 10y ago
      >Are you saying the cost is too high, or it is simply infeasible to improve the lives of this many people? I'm saying a system designed for 10 million users cannot simply be extended to 320 million, particularly when that larger population is substantially more diverse. Consider a social science study looking at the same populations. Would you really expect any given finding in the Scandinavian populations to map to the US?
Spivak 10y ago
You don't deserve the downvotes. This is one of the main reasons, if the not the main reason that this kind of economics is hard. You can't, in general, take the institutions from one place, apply them to another and expect the same result -- or even similar results.
lordnacho 10y ago
Aren't other petro countries stunningly unequal? Equitorial Guinea, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela. If anything you'd think the oil would cause higher inequality rather than lower.
Florin_Andrei 10y ago
Denmark, Sweden, etc, beg to differ.
- whoops1122 10y ago
  capitalism promotes the inequality.

Confusion 10y ago

The Nordic countries have as much problems with right-wing populists as any other country. Not having a job is not the problem. Or at least: having a job does not stop them from voting for right-wing populists.

tormeh 10y ago
Our right wing populists are your vanilla republicans. No really.

IMTDb 10y ago

USA does not have an oil fund that amounts do $150k per capita to pay for "free everything" (university education, universal health care, childcare) and good pensions for everybody. Norway generates more revenue with oil than the entires US of A, for 5 million people, and is third worldwide exporter for Natural Gas just behind Qatar and Russia, again with only 5 million people to serve (less than the population of New York) The policies you enjoy are paid for by those revenue, and are not applicable to "regular" countries. I admit tho that your politician did a good job at ensuring that those revenue are used for the good of the general population and are managed with the future in mind.

zond 10y ago
I'm from Sweden, and we have the same policies but basically no natural resources that are worth anything anymore. Unlike the US of A. It's not about oil, it's about realizing that a healthy, well educated and happy population is an investment that pays itself over time.
- pc86 10y ago
  You've also got a top marginal personal income tax rate approaching 60% which is nearly twice that of the US and political suicide. I'm not making a judgment for or against high marginal taxes, I'm just saying "the US could do it too" ignores, well... the very core of economic and tax policy in the US.
  - zond 10y ago
    So now you leave the realm of economical possibilities and start pointing at political problems. Isn't that a little too simple? "No, we can't do that because we don't want to."
    - jimbokun 10y ago
      Well, it's important to engage the political realities. Doesn't make it impossible, but a hybrid proposal or smaller first step might be more practical, given the politics.

sabarn01 10y ago

We just don't have a system like that. I grew up in Appalachia the county next to mine has yet to get cell phones or the internet. There is no viable economic activity their and everyone who could has left. Those that stay cling to the idea that coal will create jobs again. We don't even have a basic agreement on how and what kids should be taught, and since we don't have public healthcare or social insurance for all its a big risk to move in order to search for better economic activity.

TulliusCicero 10y ago

> You can do what the democrats have talked about, which we have successfully done in Nordic countries which is to spend a lot of money on re-educating the workforce and making sure those at the bottom get decent skills. One of the issues with this is that while yes, you can get the people to become more skilled/educated, ultimately the jobs that take advantage of that skills and education are in cities, not in small towns or rural areas where so many of these people currently live. And that's probably not gonna change. Now, you could say, "well that's fine, we can give them moving stipends or something" but a lot of people are reluctant to leave what they've known as homes for so long. Such a strategy essentially puts these areas into hospice mode. That's an uncomfortable thought for probably most Americans. And moving public sector jobs, while it might work, is probably politically untenable in America; the areas that are dying are the same ones that are generally hostile to government.

larl 10y ago
Sure, hostile towards government while a large percentage of people actually work for government.
jimbokun 10y ago
"One of the issues with this is that while yes, you can get the people to become more skilled/educated, ultimately the jobs that take advantage of that skills and education are in cities, not in small towns or rural areas where so many of these people currently live." Somehow, our companies have become experts at enabling remote working 12 time zones away, but can't manage to pull off the same thing for someone in the rural US. I wonder why?
- TulliusCicero 10y ago
  > Somehow, our companies have become experts at enabling remote working 12 time zones away Debatable. Most companies don't really have that many individual remote workers. Yes, they may have geographically distinct offices, but that's different.
- jpindar 10y ago
  Remote working only works for jobs that are done via computer or telephone.

quizzas 10y ago

The issues of worker dissatisfaction in the U.S. is very similar to the ones in China, which was ironically built on economic equality.China, like Sweden and Norway, is ethnically homogeneous, but unlike Scandinavia its population is quite large. The larger the population, the more difficult it is to administer equal access to economic prosperity. China's revenues are technically built on capitalist models to maximize productivity, and it uses socialist ideals to do what it can with wealth redistribution, and yet is failing miserably. Socialism falls apart when the population far exceeds its ability to manage monetary policy. The U.S. is in a similar quandary without the socialist infrastructure; if China cannot do it, what are the chances the U.S. can? The U.S. must innovate a different approach built to scale and support a population of 1 billion people. It's like management 101: managing a workforce of 20 to prosperity is much different than managing a workforce of 10,000.

m_fayer 10y ago

This is all right on, but I would add one important point. Which is that some people cannot be retrained. It's the rare fifty year old who can adapt to a whole new field, learn all the theory and practice all the application, and then successfully compete against people half his age to land those entry-level jobs. If our economic system puts people in such a position through no fault of their own and they cannot escape it despite their best efforts, they need to be taken care of, for life if need be.

jpindar 10y ago
There's another thread on HN right now where it is being taken as a given that OUR OWN PARENTS cannot be expected to use a computer without breaking it (filling it with malware, etc.) I find that premise debatable, but if it is true, then how can they be retrained for technical jobs?

phkahler 10y ago

>> spend a lot of money on re-educating the workforce and making sure those at the bottom get decent skills. It is the height of snobbery to move the lesser skilled jobs out of the country and tell everyone they need to be smarter. There will always be a distribution of skills and it is not for the well educated to say "you just need to be like us". All the US needs to do is stop signing 900 page "free trade" agreements and start adjusting import taxes to bring manufacturing back. Call it what you will, but taking care of your own first is not a bad thing.

prodmerc 10y ago
They are taking care of their own first - cheapest labor and lowest taxes make the shareholders extremely happy.
- gph 10y ago
  And that's why their candidate lost. Doubt Trump will do much better by normal folks, but it was obvious Clinton wouldn't.
- phkahler 10y ago
  >> They are taking care of their own first - cheapest labor and lowest taxes make the shareholders extremely happy. One can hope that a government will consider its people "their own". Though that is not always the case.
  - prodmerc 10y ago
    You should realize I was talking about the corporate elite heh
shamsalmon 10y ago
What makes you think these jobs will ever come back in significant numbers? Even if the companies were forced to come back from overseas there would probably be a significantly smaller labor force because of automation. This problem is only going to get worse so it makes sense to go to a solution that is long term.

brightball 10y ago

I honestly have always been a pro "total free trade" with even the notion of protective tariffs being totally dismiss-able...but I think it's time to look at things with more of a nuanced approach. When it comes to jobs, there is significant value provided to society as a whole from jobs that do not require a high degree of workforce re-education. Sometimes, people need a job that they can comfortably walk into and walk out of while they are between jobs. Walmart and McDonald's are the places providing that type of think because jobs that could be done cheaper elsewhere while importing the product were shipped off. What we are seeing is that by offloading "no training" jobs to other cheaper countries and retaining "heavy education" jobs here in the US we're creating an additional cost to work that now REQUIRES paying for school, investing time in learning a skill and then hoping the market for that skill remains viable so you don't have to then re-invest in a new skill later on in life. It makes me sincerely wonder if certain tariffs are more justified just to protect that type of work because it seems that the cost of not having it available is far higher than most people have accounted for. I live in the south east, an area that was highly dependent on the textile economy before it went belly up with the removal of protective tariffs. The effect was fairly devastating and it took many years to recover. Some areas never did while others flourished. Just makes me want to understand all the factors more.

shoover 10y ago

Our government offers free university education, so even less well off blue collar families could send their kids to good schools. And when economic times got harder it never hit blue collar works as hard as in America because we have free universal health care, heavily subsidized childcare, good pensions for everybody. Does your system contain costs on these benefits better than the US, or do you have the inflation and pay it with tax increases? In the US all the benefits you mentioned have painful inflation. How does the government keep up with the costs?

binaryabyss 10y ago
In the US much of this is supplied by the market, which seeks to increase its profits every year to provide value for stockholders. The government, having no need to profit, is able to provide services to its citizens much more affordably.

jimbokun 10y ago

"Our government offers free university education, so even less well off blue collar families could send their kids to good schools." Here in the US, we actually have a decent Community College system which, while not free, tend to be very reasonably priced. Obama proposed leveraging this system as a low cost option for people who don't want to run up massive education debt.

mars4rp 10y ago

The problem is we are thinking about it the wrong way, with all this advances in technologies, who said everyone should work? everyone in the society should benefit from advancement in technology not only %0.001 of population. why Zuckerberg should have this many billions, did he contributed 1,000,000 times more than a 1000th Facebook employee to the society? problem is with Tax system and how US spends it's budget. money comes out of people's pocket and goes to corporations bank accounts. for example with only $16B we can give shelter to all the homeless in this country. $16B is peanut compare to federal budget. it is a shame to have half a million homeless in the richest country in the word.

lkrubner 10y ago

I can't find it on Google, but there was a famous political quote around the 1988 election: "Every time a Democrat mentions retraining, they lose another 100,000 votes." The USA lost 2 million industrial jobs during the 1980s. It was, at the time, the worst decade for deindustrialization. The Democrats felt the answer was retraining. The Republican reply amounted to the assertion that the USA needed a strong dollar. And the Republicans won re-election in 1988. From this, the Democrats learned that they would be punished for mentioning retraining. So it lost ground as an idea in USA politics.

xellisx 10y ago
The problem stemmed to policies that started back in the 70's, which kept getting expanded, which allowed for cheaper imports. This of course had the US companies jumped on, since hell, those people over seas work for 2 cents a day vs my skilled employees that turn out a quality product want $50K a year!

htns 10y ago

I would not consider the Nordic re-education system successful. Cynically speaking, it's designed to strike the unemployed from official counts, and the unemployment rate still ends up being higher than in the US. (Sweden 7.8%, US 4.9%)

daveheq 10y ago

Trump is for cutting taxes and spending, so how would he re-educate the workforce and make sure they get decent skills? His party is the same, they don't want to help anybody except the rich and profitable corporations who fund their campaigns, and want you to just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and work harder. The Republicans were part of Congress' gleeful global corporate sell-out, and support international corporations getting more tax cuts and handing out jobs to the cheapest people in other countries even more than the Democrats do; the only things both parties can agree on are more war and more money to the rich and corporations at the expense of the worker.