The stuff in the beginning of the article, is rather glossed over. Stuff like the bubbles and the economy, and the crippling national debt, you can't just ignor

The stuff in the beginning of the article, is rather glossed over. Stuff like the bubbles and the economy, and the crippling national debt, you can't just ignore that and then wonder why kids have been told that we need a college degree (and then we believe it). The reality is that between our deficit spending and the various bubbles in the economy, our younger generations (i.e. most of us 45 and under) will not have an easy path to retirement, if we ever can at all, and that's even assuming that you get a nice FANG job (unless both partners have one). There is simply no easy way through e.g. homeownership that doesn't seriously mess with our economic mobility, for the vast majority of us. There isn't really a way to financial security. And that is why most folks aren't opting for trade jobs. In the end, the folks with the trade jobs probably don't end up worse off than the folks with the college degrees, simply because college was so expensive. Or at least that's my take living in the Bay Area where e.g. construction workers get paid decently. So, everyone's kind of a little screwed, no matter what they did. Some of us who were lucky enough to e.g. get into tech before it got big are at least comfortable, but that's not that many of us. I don't think that e.g. going back to a gold standard would necessarily fix the problem of deficit spending. There've been many rulers in past history who inflated their currencies even though they were ostensibly fixed to some standard. If we want change, we need to start caring about economics – progressives including. And not just the populist stuff. In some other countries (like cough Germany cough) they are terrified of things like inflation, and for good reason. It's not to say that the German model would work for the U.S., but some of those sensibilities would at least have mitigated the asset bubbles that we're in in the U.S. In some ways we're victims of our own success. If the U.S. weren't successful in the past, then there wouldn't have been this idea that we could deficit spend to wage wars, and then deficit spend to cover the infrastructure gaps that we should've been paying attention to instead of bombing places that probably would've been better taken care of with more peaceful means. The countries in Europe didn't have the luxury of spending so big in these last few generations. The Euro still isn't quite the reserve currency the dollar is. But that's also probably why the rent in Paris or Berlin is less than the rent in New York or San Francisco. You pump all that money out over so many years, and it's going to have to end up somewhere. And that's why e.g. stuff like trade jobs don't look attractive enough.