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There are a fair number of comments dismissing this issue with a "retrain or get left behind" and expressing not a lot of sympathy for those who don't. Remembe

There are a fair number of comments dismissing this issue with a "retrain or get left behind" and expressing not a lot of sympathy for those who don't. Remember, the average IQ in the US is just below 100[1]. Exactly what kind of jobs do you expect to retrain these people for? And how are they equipped to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps? Most of these jobs provided on the job training or apprenticeships so it's not even a matter of "they did it once they can do it again". Also, many are battling obesity and related illnesses such as diabetes or struggling with mental illness and/or addiction. We need a systemic overhaul of the economic system and soon. Self driving vehicles will put 3-5 million out of work in the next decade. [1] https://iq-research.info/en/page/average-iq-by-country# https://iq-research.info/en/page/average-iq-by-country#

uiri 10y ago
the average IQ in the US is just below 100 This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of IQ as a measurement. IQ is defined as a normal distribution with a median of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. The average IQ in the US is 100 for any IQ test calibrated to measure the US population. No absolute statements regarding intelligence can be made on the basis of IQs; only relative statements about how an individual fits into the normal distribution measured by the test. This ignores the flaws in Flynn and Vanhanen's study when it came to calculating IQ scores for different countries. They used incomplete data sets collected at different times using different tests. For 104 out of 185 countries, they had no data available at all. Instead, they averaged neighboring or comparable countries - for instance El Salvador is an average of Guatemala and Colombia while Kyrgyzstan is an average of Iran and Turkey. I think it is fair to say that the average IQ for $COUNTRY is 100. This is a meaningless statement when it comes to discussing macroeconomics or comparing countries on the basis of IQ.
- DashRattlesnake 10y ago
  That's true, but it also seems kinda irrelevant to the OP (the link happens to be the 1st result for a google search of "us average iq"[1], so I think it was just a quickie cite to back up a statistic). Average IQ people (e.g. the welders and bank tellers) don't seem like they're in demand for high-demand knowledge-work jobs, so retraining is probably not the answer to any economic woes they're experiencing. [1] https://www.google.com/#q=%22us+average+iq%22 https://www.google.com/#q=%22us+average+iq%22
  - Ensorceled 10y ago
    Exactly. I have read over and over that US IQ rates tend lower than international. The point is it's even worse to try to train up US citizens to jobs requiring higher cognitive capacity.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- hamandcheese 10y ago
  It's meaningful in this context, since, chances are, those commenting here have a much higher IQ than 100.
  - Hydraulix989 10y ago
    Which was a point implied by the OP that still stands.
  - uiri 10y ago
    By definition, 50% of the population has an IQ between 90 and 110. While it is plausible that there is a disproportionately low number of HN commenters in the bottom quartile for IQ, I believe that the majority, if not the plurality, of HN commenters will fall in the range of (90, 110). 35% of the US population over 25 has a Bachelor's degree. Assuming that, say, the top 40% in IQ of the total population is capable of completing such a degree and that HN commenters are a randomly distributed subset of that population, that would leave a lower bound for IQ of 104 and a median IQ of 113. The reality is that IQ is unlikely to be the limiting factor when it comes to whether or not it is possible to retrain large portions of the working population.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Ensorceled 10y ago
  This completely misses my point as I'm only using IQ as a stand in for cognitive abilities, cognitive abilities that are required to retrain and function in non-repetitive occupations.
- TheCoelacanth 10y ago
  By that argument my IQ is 100 because I have the median score of the population consisting of myself. Of course, when using an IQ test calibrated for a larger population, my IQ is something different. Similarly, it makes perfect sense for the average IQ of a country to be different from 100 when using a test calibrated for a population that is a superset of the country's population.
karmacondon 10y ago
If the two options are retraining vs an overhaul of the economic system, I think retraining is much more likely. No one wants to change careers. I certainly don't. But the economic realities are what they are. It would be nice to change the economy with basic income or government work programs, both of which I'm in favor of. I just don't see how that will realistically happen in the next 10-15 years. So we need to make retraining great again. Invest time and money into making the process easy, affordable and open to as many people as possible. Maybe we need more schools, or organized apprenticeship programs or maybe teaching robots. This is a problem that has to be solved with innovations in business and/or technology. At least until we can gain the political position to make major changes to our financial and economic ways of life.
- Ensorceled 10y ago
  Retrain for what exactly? If driverless trucks and cars eliminate a several million truck drivers and taxi cab drivers where do we find jobs to replace those lost occupations? We have millions of underemployed people already, working 30 hours a week at Walmart and similar jobs. It's not like there are millions of jobs just looking for trained people to fill them.
- DashRattlesnake 10y ago
  How to do you "retrain" to get abstract "skills in areas like critical thinking and problem-solving"? When I think "retraining" I think training to perform a different kind of routine job in a different domain or industry. For example, decades ago, the NYT retrained its Linotype operators to a similar computer data entry job[1]. [1] https://vimeo.com/127605643 https://vimeo.com/127605643 or https://archive.org/details/FarewellEtaoinShrdlu https://archive.org/details/FarewellEtaoinShrdlu or https://www.nytimes.com/video/insider/100000004687429/farewell-etaoin-shrdlu.html https://www.nytimes.com/video/insider/100000004687429/farewe...
- zepto 10y ago
  How do you make retraining great again? It's easy to say, but I have never heard anyone ever actually suggest a way, or for that matter suggest anything that people can be retrained for. Do you have any answers?
kefka 10y ago
"Well, who cares if they're retrained. They're not inputting in the economy right now, and before was minimal at that. So why should we invest in do-nothings and laggards and lazy peoples? We'll give money to the people actually doing things, like CEOs and company makers." --- Is that a good attempt at this new era of pro-trump, anti-worker hatred? Edit: Seriously now? This kind of commentary is very much on-topic. By definition, low-wage people and poor people have roughly 0 input into the economy. That's not a moral or ethical issue, that's just numbers. I've seen countless times here, of discussions on which markets to chase after (from HN viewpoint), and many times, entrepreneurs say to not go after the low wage classes - no fungible income. This commentary also plays in to the idea that "Someone is poor because they do not work hard, and so they deserve that fate. Someone is rich because they worked hard, and due to their working hard are successful." -- These ideas are core to the Republican and Democrat parties, although the Democrats have the idea that it might not, kind of , maybe not be as true. Whereas the Republicans ran the "Welfare Queen", a known fraudster, as the eminent welfare model, that all welfare recipients are like. I would have figured that at least some people would have seen where that kind of 'quote' would have went towards. There's quite a lot of meat up top there, with core values packed in there by a bulk of one of our political parties.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  I don't think there's anything 'new' about it.
- Ensorceled 10y ago
  Pretty much. I think I need to read Atlas Shrugged again.
- nickff 10y ago
  Please try not to put words in the mouths of your opponents; it doesn't help anyone. Address their concerns, give them a new perspective, and try to understand why they really disagree with you. Despite your intuitions, you are not a better person than all 61.9 million Trump voters (or all 63.6 million Clinton voters).
  - 10y ago
noobiemcfoob 10y ago
I agree with your diagnosis, but I fear the knee jerk reaction to solve it with government programs. In my mind, we need to do more lateral thinking on what can make value for the economy and why.
- fullshark 10y ago
  What's a better idea than gov't programs for adult education / job training? Most companies aren't interested in investing the resources to retrain employees unless training lasts a few months at most. Even market solutions will require a lot of gov't interference to work imo (things like job "mortgages" i.e. student loans for adults).
  - randomthrowr88 10y ago
    > Most companies aren't interested in investing the resources to retrain employees unless training lasts a few months at most. > Even market solutions will require a lot of gov't interference to work imo (things like job "mortgages" i.e. student loans for adults). Ah, so more socializing of the costs, privatizing of the profits.
  - noobiemcfoob 10y ago
    I think my main point is we can't keep solving this problem with "more training and education" (regardless of where it is coming from). An individual can only learn so much and only cares so much about whatever widget you put before them. What we need is more work the unskilled but capable can do with little new learning. The best thing for education and job training is for an individual to have a vision of what it is they're working towards. Teach men to build boats by loving the sea, yadda, yadda.
  - nickff 10y ago
    Job training and retraining programs don't work very well, which is why you see so many interviews with people who have done 5-10 of them. There are a number of studies that show this, and none (that I am aware of) which demonstrate good efficacy (and I would expect the programs to trumpet the latter result). Perhaps some sort of improved retraining program would work, but I don't think we should be dumping money into the existing programs. I should also add that I would very much like these programs to work, and am very disappointed that they don't, as I believe that skilled jobs help the worker lead a happier, more fulfilling life, as well as helping the people who benefit from the work product.
Humdeee 10y ago
Here in Canada we have a place for all these people. Some even start and end their careers there. It's called the Public Service.
dv_dt 10y ago
To me, the economic difficulties of the millennial generation are an indicator that primary-training through college doesn't really pay off as well as it used to because the margins have been eaten at both ends. Schools cost too much with debt individually loaded onto the student, and the wages from jobs that are available have been optimally minimized by years of corporate 'efficiency'. I don't think this is a fundamental problem of people choosing low-paying majors, it think it is a fundamental problem of our economy not knowing how to productively employ enough people trained at some level of education regardless of major (and really it doesn't know in large part because it accounts for wages in a way that incorrectly captures the relation to optimize ofr system-wide economic improvement). The limits for displaced workers are similar but worse, the margins at both ends for re-training are even smaller, and the payoff periods to provide return on training-investment are much shorter. Companies have basically divested themselves of in-house training because they themselves can't/aren't building financial models to justify the training investment. But somehow individuals with some level of minimal gov't 'help' are supposed to pickup the tab to do it? In our economic philosophy, there needs to be an a channel that allows for optimization in ways that conventional economics cannot account correctly. E.g. we have to start to differentiate between capital power used to lock-in markets vs the use of power to be competitively offer value to society in the long term. If the profit accounting is wrong, then the optimizations are wrong for society or the physical world and we collectively make a mass of individual decisions in a bubble of financial rules that don't pay off for the whole system. That's the only to fix economics in the long run in mature economies - otherwise the imbalance of power between capital and labor creates downward pressure on wages that drives the long term destabilization of the entire system.
antisthenes 10y ago
The issue isn't just driving jobs, or at least that's only part of the more complex issue. In reality, it's more like a "death by a thousand cuts". To give you a concrete example, I work in e-commerce and part of the automation we're building will eliminate 2 full-time jobs on the side of the manufacturer - people who are just entering orders manually, instead of using some form of EDI that forwards the order from the customer directly to the dropshipper. While that sounds insignificant, consider that this is only for a single business relationship between 2 fairly small companies. There are tens of thousands of companies like this in the US and once those automated systems are in place, those jobs aren't coming back. Believe it or not, there are still lots of things being done by hand in small and medium-sized businesses, my guess is automation could easily shrink their required labor by 10-15% over the next decade as well.
- Ensorceled 10y ago
  Yeah, driving is only an example, a large one to provide scope of the problem. It's a lot of people and they can't all be retrained for new jobs ... there isn't that many new jobs for them to train for.

uiri 10y ago

the average IQ in the US is just below 100 This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of IQ as a measurement. IQ is defined as a normal distribution with a median of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. The average IQ in the US is 100 for any IQ test calibrated to measure the US population. No absolute statements regarding intelligence can be made on the basis of IQs; only relative statements about how an individual fits into the normal distribution measured by the test. This ignores the flaws in Flynn and Vanhanen's study when it came to calculating IQ scores for different countries. They used incomplete data sets collected at different times using different tests. For 104 out of 185 countries, they had no data available at all. Instead, they averaged neighboring or comparable countries - for instance El Salvador is an average of Guatemala and Colombia while Kyrgyzstan is an average of Iran and Turkey. I think it is fair to say that the average IQ for $COUNTRY is 100. This is a meaningless statement when it comes to discussing macroeconomics or comparing countries on the basis of IQ.

DashRattlesnake 10y ago
That's true, but it also seems kinda irrelevant to the OP (the link happens to be the 1st result for a google search of "us average iq"[1], so I think it was just a quickie cite to back up a statistic). Average IQ people (e.g. the welders and bank tellers) don't seem like they're in demand for high-demand knowledge-work jobs, so retraining is probably not the answer to any economic woes they're experiencing. [1] https://www.google.com/#q=%22us+average+iq%22 https://www.google.com/#q=%22us+average+iq%22
- Ensorceled 10y ago
  Exactly. I have read over and over that US IQ rates tend lower than international. The point is it's even worse to try to train up US citizens to jobs requiring higher cognitive capacity.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
hamandcheese 10y ago
It's meaningful in this context, since, chances are, those commenting here have a much higher IQ than 100.
- Hydraulix989 10y ago
  Which was a point implied by the OP that still stands.
- uiri 10y ago
  By definition, 50% of the population has an IQ between 90 and 110. While it is plausible that there is a disproportionately low number of HN commenters in the bottom quartile for IQ, I believe that the majority, if not the plurality, of HN commenters will fall in the range of (90, 110). 35% of the US population over 25 has a Bachelor's degree. Assuming that, say, the top 40% in IQ of the total population is capable of completing such a degree and that HN commenters are a randomly distributed subset of that population, that would leave a lower bound for IQ of 104 and a median IQ of 113. The reality is that IQ is unlikely to be the limiting factor when it comes to whether or not it is possible to retrain large portions of the working population.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Ensorceled 10y ago
This completely misses my point as I'm only using IQ as a stand in for cognitive abilities, cognitive abilities that are required to retrain and function in non-repetitive occupations.
TheCoelacanth 10y ago
By that argument my IQ is 100 because I have the median score of the population consisting of myself. Of course, when using an IQ test calibrated for a larger population, my IQ is something different. Similarly, it makes perfect sense for the average IQ of a country to be different from 100 when using a test calibrated for a population that is a superset of the country's population.

karmacondon 10y ago

If the two options are retraining vs an overhaul of the economic system, I think retraining is much more likely. No one wants to change careers. I certainly don't. But the economic realities are what they are. It would be nice to change the economy with basic income or government work programs, both of which I'm in favor of. I just don't see how that will realistically happen in the next 10-15 years. So we need to make retraining great again. Invest time and money into making the process easy, affordable and open to as many people as possible. Maybe we need more schools, or organized apprenticeship programs or maybe teaching robots. This is a problem that has to be solved with innovations in business and/or technology. At least until we can gain the political position to make major changes to our financial and economic ways of life.

Ensorceled 10y ago
Retrain for what exactly? If driverless trucks and cars eliminate a several million truck drivers and taxi cab drivers where do we find jobs to replace those lost occupations? We have millions of underemployed people already, working 30 hours a week at Walmart and similar jobs. It's not like there are millions of jobs just looking for trained people to fill them.
DashRattlesnake 10y ago
How to do you "retrain" to get abstract "skills in areas like critical thinking and problem-solving"? When I think "retraining" I think training to perform a different kind of routine job in a different domain or industry. For example, decades ago, the NYT retrained its Linotype operators to a similar computer data entry job[1]. [1] https://vimeo.com/127605643 https://vimeo.com/127605643 or https://archive.org/details/FarewellEtaoinShrdlu https://archive.org/details/FarewellEtaoinShrdlu or https://www.nytimes.com/video/insider/100000004687429/farewell-etaoin-shrdlu.html https://www.nytimes.com/video/insider/100000004687429/farewe...
zepto 10y ago
How do you make retraining great again? It's easy to say, but I have never heard anyone ever actually suggest a way, or for that matter suggest anything that people can be retrained for. Do you have any answers?

kefka 10y ago

"Well, who cares if they're retrained. They're not inputting in the economy right now, and before was minimal at that. So why should we invest in do-nothings and laggards and lazy peoples? We'll give money to the people actually doing things, like CEOs and company makers." --- Is that a good attempt at this new era of pro-trump, anti-worker hatred? Edit: Seriously now? This kind of commentary is very much on-topic. By definition, low-wage people and poor people have roughly 0 input into the economy. That's not a moral or ethical issue, that's just numbers. I've seen countless times here, of discussions on which markets to chase after (from HN viewpoint), and many times, entrepreneurs say to not go after the low wage classes - no fungible income. This commentary also plays in to the idea that "Someone is poor because they do not work hard, and so they deserve that fate. Someone is rich because they worked hard, and due to their working hard are successful." -- These ideas are core to the Republican and Democrat parties, although the Democrats have the idea that it might not, kind of , maybe not be as true. Whereas the Republicans ran the "Welfare Queen", a known fraudster, as the eminent welfare model, that all welfare recipients are like. I would have figured that at least some people would have seen where that kind of 'quote' would have went towards. There's quite a lot of meat up top there, with core values packed in there by a bulk of one of our political parties.

st3v3r 10y ago
I don't think there's anything 'new' about it.
Ensorceled 10y ago
Pretty much. I think I need to read Atlas Shrugged again.
nickff 10y ago
Please try not to put words in the mouths of your opponents; it doesn't help anyone. Address their concerns, give them a new perspective, and try to understand why they really disagree with you. Despite your intuitions, you are not a better person than all 61.9 million Trump voters (or all 63.6 million Clinton voters).
- 10y ago

noobiemcfoob 10y ago

I agree with your diagnosis, but I fear the knee jerk reaction to solve it with government programs. In my mind, we need to do more lateral thinking on what can make value for the economy and why.

fullshark 10y ago
What's a better idea than gov't programs for adult education / job training? Most companies aren't interested in investing the resources to retrain employees unless training lasts a few months at most. Even market solutions will require a lot of gov't interference to work imo (things like job "mortgages" i.e. student loans for adults).
- randomthrowr88 10y ago
  > Most companies aren't interested in investing the resources to retrain employees unless training lasts a few months at most. > Even market solutions will require a lot of gov't interference to work imo (things like job "mortgages" i.e. student loans for adults). Ah, so more socializing of the costs, privatizing of the profits.
- noobiemcfoob 10y ago
  I think my main point is we can't keep solving this problem with "more training and education" (regardless of where it is coming from). An individual can only learn so much and only cares so much about whatever widget you put before them. What we need is more work the unskilled but capable can do with little new learning. The best thing for education and job training is for an individual to have a vision of what it is they're working towards. Teach men to build boats by loving the sea, yadda, yadda.
- nickff 10y ago
  Job training and retraining programs don't work very well, which is why you see so many interviews with people who have done 5-10 of them. There are a number of studies that show this, and none (that I am aware of) which demonstrate good efficacy (and I would expect the programs to trumpet the latter result). Perhaps some sort of improved retraining program would work, but I don't think we should be dumping money into the existing programs. I should also add that I would very much like these programs to work, and am very disappointed that they don't, as I believe that skilled jobs help the worker lead a happier, more fulfilling life, as well as helping the people who benefit from the work product.

Humdeee 10y ago

Here in Canada we have a place for all these people. Some even start and end their careers there. It's called the Public Service.

dv_dt 10y ago

To me, the economic difficulties of the millennial generation are an indicator that primary-training through college doesn't really pay off as well as it used to because the margins have been eaten at both ends. Schools cost too much with debt individually loaded onto the student, and the wages from jobs that are available have been optimally minimized by years of corporate 'efficiency'. I don't think this is a fundamental problem of people choosing low-paying majors, it think it is a fundamental problem of our economy not knowing how to productively employ enough people trained at some level of education regardless of major (and really it doesn't know in large part because it accounts for wages in a way that incorrectly captures the relation to optimize ofr system-wide economic improvement). The limits for displaced workers are similar but worse, the margins at both ends for re-training are even smaller, and the payoff periods to provide return on training-investment are much shorter. Companies have basically divested themselves of in-house training because they themselves can't/aren't building financial models to justify the training investment. But somehow individuals with some level of minimal gov't 'help' are supposed to pickup the tab to do it? In our economic philosophy, there needs to be an a channel that allows for optimization in ways that conventional economics cannot account correctly. E.g. we have to start to differentiate between capital power used to lock-in markets vs the use of power to be competitively offer value to society in the long term. If the profit accounting is wrong, then the optimizations are wrong for society or the physical world and we collectively make a mass of individual decisions in a bubble of financial rules that don't pay off for the whole system. That's the only to fix economics in the long run in mature economies - otherwise the imbalance of power between capital and labor creates downward pressure on wages that drives the long term destabilization of the entire system.

antisthenes 10y ago

The issue isn't just driving jobs, or at least that's only part of the more complex issue. In reality, it's more like a "death by a thousand cuts". To give you a concrete example, I work in e-commerce and part of the automation we're building will eliminate 2 full-time jobs on the side of the manufacturer - people who are just entering orders manually, instead of using some form of EDI that forwards the order from the customer directly to the dropshipper. While that sounds insignificant, consider that this is only for a single business relationship between 2 fairly small companies. There are tens of thousands of companies like this in the US and once those automated systems are in place, those jobs aren't coming back. Believe it or not, there are still lots of things being done by hand in small and medium-sized businesses, my guess is automation could easily shrink their required labor by 10-15% over the next decade as well.

Ensorceled 10y ago
Yeah, driving is only an example, a large one to provide scope of the problem. It's a lot of people and they can't all be retrained for new jobs ... there isn't that many new jobs for them to train for.