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You know one thing I find interesting is you specifically call out "unskilled job", which I think has a point but the OP mentions specifically his son studying

You know one thing I find interesting is you specifically call out "unskilled job", which I think has a point but the OP mentions specifically his son studying to be a carpenter that I would consider a "high skilled" job, even if it is blue collar, and then you suggest there was a small period of time when an 18 yo could provide for a family with unskilled labor. I then realized that for much of history up until recently by the time a young man was 18 years old he was already a skilled craftsman at his craft to a large extant. The young man would've been training with his father at his craft from the time he was ten years old and so by the time he was 18 would be proficient in what he had to do. I wonder then is part of the issue we face due to the fact that we spend so much time trying to instill a modern education into youth until they are adults that they have to spend an additional 4-8 years acquiring an actual skill in order to be able to provide value in the workforce?

giantg2 5y ago
I largely agree. My grandfather grew up on a farm, graduated 8th grade, then continued to work the farm while mining coal with the other men in his family. That wasn't uncommon in his time.
toyg 5y ago
Yep. And we do it largely because we started from a schooling model built to shape factory workers, and then tried to develop it by aping what the upper classes did - regardless of whether their models could actually scale or were at all desirable in large numbers. Sadly, doing so also stripped dignity from vocational / blue-collar work - even when it pays (very) well, kids are told that a life in the trades is for the uneducated, ignorant swines. Ironically, part of this development is led by emancipation of the lower classes themselves: "I break my back every day but my son will study and be a doctor". A sentiment we all admire, but ends up reinforcing the idea that the father's blue-collar work is crap - and that's not how it should be, all workers should have equal dignity and value.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Modern factory work is going to need a lot of that "upper-level" knowledge too, due to technical change. Pure "blue-collar" work where one could neglect education altogether is either gone or fast disappearing.
  - throwaway6532 5y ago
    That's going to be severely problematic for those in the bottom 15% of the intelligence distribution when there comes a point that there is nothing in society they could do that wouldn't be actively counter productive. Modern society and its trajectory seems a fundamentally unsustainable enterprise.
    - Aloha 5y ago
      Bottom 30% even - we must have a somewhat equitable distribution of opportunity, otherwise you end up with unrest.
      - throwaway6532 5y ago
        The funny thing is... I would say for about a couple of hundred thousands years before the Neolithic Revolution, we did.
        Aloha 5y ago
        The spread between rich and poor was a whole hell of a lot smaller - industrialization broke alot of our carefully evolved social structures.
        throwaway6532 5y ago
        social media then amplified all of their flaws
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > A sentiment we all admire, but ends up reinforcing the idea that the father's blue-collar work is crap - and that's not how it should be, all workers should have equal dignity and value. Assuming that value equals price, the only way everyone would have an equal price is if supply and demand were exactly equal across all occupations over a long period of time. That is not a realistic expectation. And the only way for people (by and large) to be incentivized to do the things where supply is not meeting demand is to have a higher price where supply of labor is more needed than elsewhere.
  - ska 5y ago
    > Assuming that value equals price That's a big assumption. There are lots of careers with social and financial values that diverge, ignoring that would I think miss the point OP is trying to make.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      My point is everyone can never have equal “value”. The blue collar father urging their kid to be a doctor is not doing it because he thinks he is inherently less “valuable” than a doctor. The father is urging their kid because the father has experience on the type of quality of life a blue collar father can provide versus a doctor father can provide, which is a function of the price that they can sell their labor at.
      - ska 5y ago
        You are still being reductive in a way that I think misses the point grandparent was trying to make. It may be true that not everyone's career can have the same value, but it's hopeless to try and define that by paychecks alone - that's just not how society values things. In other words your argument could works equally well for the father urging their kid to do something that on average won't pay better, but will bring them more respect and social standing.
        lotsofpulp 5y ago
- tragictrash 5y ago
  I'm all for equal dignity and value, but I think you are misunderstanding the situation here. The fact is that money buys better health and familial outcomes. The parents want that for their kids. Manual labor, regardless of how well it pays takes a toll on your body and generally pays less than a lot of the highly sought after knowledge worker jobs. I really think the rising cost of living is whats driving these kinds of ideas. The parents want their kids to make more money so they can have a better life - a reality in america. Others see this and assume that the blue collar job is bad or something. If we had an adequate healthcare system that didn't favor the super rich with good outcomes, I would agree. Until then, my kids are going to be encouraged to go into a career where they can make lots of money sitting in an air conditioned office. I've worked the blue collar tough as fuck jobs, and now I work in an air conditioned office making 15x as much. Objectively, which one is the better job? I agree, not how it should be, but you gotta get yours. Also, if you've ever worked in the trades you would know that a large portion of them are ignorant and uneducated. That stereotype exists for a reason. Its just a fact, and they have a tougher time navigating life because of it. I've lived it.
  - buscoquadnary 5y ago
    > Also, if you've ever worked in the trades you would know that a large portion of them are ignorant and uneducated. That stereotype exists for a reason. Its just a fact, and they have a tougher time navigating life because of it. I've lived it. I agree with you there, I think there is a tendency to romanticize the life of a blue collar worker, and thing of them as the noble simple idealized "proletariat", when as you point out the stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason. But I have to wonder is part of that because of the brain drain in the trades that resulted from everyone going to college and feeling they had to do white collar work. Before a smart, observant, hardworking young man could become an electrician and by virtue of being observant and quick witted could succeeded and excel and become an outstanding electrician that could bring about innovation and elevate his work team. Nowadays though the same hardworking intelligent young man is being told that the trades are for stupid people, and he is too smart for that and wouldn't it be much better to go get a college degree so he can get a "real job". Then twenty years and $50,000 of student debt later he finds himself as a project manager trapped in a standup meeting at 8:00 on a Wednesday morning, hating his life, drowning in unfulfilled despair and wondering what went wrong with his life. I just think that part of the stereotypes about the trades has become a self fulfilling prophecy.
rhino369 5y ago
When I said unskilled, I meant to distinguish the OP's carpenter son from unskilled jobs. I don't think there has ever been a time before 1945 when the average man was a skilled laborer. A liner worker in a factory or farm-hand isn't skilled labor. For most of history, those people were exploited. Craftsman usually had a decent living because it took training and there was generally demand. But if you train twice as many electricians, its not like there will be twice as many electrician jobs created. So learning a craft or trade is a great personal strategy, but it not a solution we can universally apply. I do think we force way too many people into college-track for little benefit and quite a bit of harm.
- buscoquadnary 5y ago
  > But if you train twice as many electricians, its not like there will be twice as many electrician jobs created. So learning a craft or trade is a great personal strategy, but it not a solution we can universally apply. I don't know that I agree with that, right now at least on the data I have available and the anecdata I have observed there is a serious shortage of skilled blue color work, plumber, carpenter, electrician, etc. so there is definitely a shift that would be beneficial for society at large and individuals. But let's explore this idea a little bit more, right now we are used to the idea that there are X jobs for Y persons, especially in white color work. This seems to derive largely from the fact that white color work is focused not on production of goods and services but in the production of information (and to some extant bullsh*). For example there are only so many marketing jobs out there because there are only so much marketing a company needs done. Sure adding your first 3 marketers may increase your revenue by 50% but adding your 300th marketer probably isn't going to increase your income at all, in fact it's likely it might actually be a negative investment. The problem is the marketer doesn't actually add a resources to the world, they aren't producing marketing widgets, they merely identify and optimize existing distribution channels, and help others become aware of your company, and there is only so much you can do in that area, there is only so much inefficiency that can be optimized away. Contrast this instead with a plumber. You hire your first plumber he can do say 5 jobs a day, if you hire 3 more plumbers you can do 20 jobs a day now. Well let's suppose later on you hire another plumber he still adds the value to do 5 more jobs a day. Now you may say that there are only so many plumbing jobs out there, only so many people have their 3 year old push a bouncy ball down the toilet, but the plumber is also working on new housing and new business, the plumber isn't just optimizing the existing pie they are causing the overall size of the pie itself to increase. Now there does of course exist some sort of maximum to this, but after reading World War Z that explores this concept in quite a bit of depth (and has no similarity to the movie at all) I've realized that if society did collapse I as a software engineer have absolutely no real or applicable skills, whereas an electrician or a carpenter, they will be able to keep on doing their job as they were now, because they are creating actual wealth, not just optimizing existing wealth generation activities. My point being a society with an overabundance of electricians, carpenters and plumbers is probably better off than a society with an overabundance of project managers, paralegals, and risk analysts.

giantg2 5y ago

I largely agree. My grandfather grew up on a farm, graduated 8th grade, then continued to work the farm while mining coal with the other men in his family. That wasn't uncommon in his time.

toyg 5y ago

Yep. And we do it largely because we started from a schooling model built to shape factory workers, and then tried to develop it by aping what the upper classes did - regardless of whether their models could actually scale or were at all desirable in large numbers. Sadly, doing so also stripped dignity from vocational / blue-collar work - even when it pays (very) well, kids are told that a life in the trades is for the uneducated, ignorant swines. Ironically, part of this development is led by emancipation of the lower classes themselves: "I break my back every day but my son will study and be a doctor". A sentiment we all admire, but ends up reinforcing the idea that the father's blue-collar work is crap - and that's not how it should be, all workers should have equal dignity and value.

zozbot234 5y ago
Modern factory work is going to need a lot of that "upper-level" knowledge too, due to technical change. Pure "blue-collar" work where one could neglect education altogether is either gone or fast disappearing.
- throwaway6532 5y ago
  That's going to be severely problematic for those in the bottom 15% of the intelligence distribution when there comes a point that there is nothing in society they could do that wouldn't be actively counter productive. Modern society and its trajectory seems a fundamentally unsustainable enterprise.
  - Aloha 5y ago
    Bottom 30% even - we must have a somewhat equitable distribution of opportunity, otherwise you end up with unrest.
    - throwaway6532 5y ago
      The funny thing is... I would say for about a couple of hundred thousands years before the Neolithic Revolution, we did.
      - Aloha 5y ago
        The spread between rich and poor was a whole hell of a lot smaller - industrialization broke alot of our carefully evolved social structures.
        throwaway6532 5y ago
        social media then amplified all of their flaws
lotsofpulp 5y ago
> A sentiment we all admire, but ends up reinforcing the idea that the father's blue-collar work is crap - and that's not how it should be, all workers should have equal dignity and value. Assuming that value equals price, the only way everyone would have an equal price is if supply and demand were exactly equal across all occupations over a long period of time. That is not a realistic expectation. And the only way for people (by and large) to be incentivized to do the things where supply is not meeting demand is to have a higher price where supply of labor is more needed than elsewhere.
- ska 5y ago
  > Assuming that value equals price That's a big assumption. There are lots of careers with social and financial values that diverge, ignoring that would I think miss the point OP is trying to make.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    My point is everyone can never have equal “value”. The blue collar father urging their kid to be a doctor is not doing it because he thinks he is inherently less “valuable” than a doctor. The father is urging their kid because the father has experience on the type of quality of life a blue collar father can provide versus a doctor father can provide, which is a function of the price that they can sell their labor at.
    - ska 5y ago
      You are still being reductive in a way that I think misses the point grandparent was trying to make. It may be true that not everyone's career can have the same value, but it's hopeless to try and define that by paychecks alone - that's just not how society values things. In other words your argument could works equally well for the father urging their kid to do something that on average won't pay better, but will bring them more respect and social standing.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
tragictrash 5y ago
I'm all for equal dignity and value, but I think you are misunderstanding the situation here. The fact is that money buys better health and familial outcomes. The parents want that for their kids. Manual labor, regardless of how well it pays takes a toll on your body and generally pays less than a lot of the highly sought after knowledge worker jobs. I really think the rising cost of living is whats driving these kinds of ideas. The parents want their kids to make more money so they can have a better life - a reality in america. Others see this and assume that the blue collar job is bad or something. If we had an adequate healthcare system that didn't favor the super rich with good outcomes, I would agree. Until then, my kids are going to be encouraged to go into a career where they can make lots of money sitting in an air conditioned office. I've worked the blue collar tough as fuck jobs, and now I work in an air conditioned office making 15x as much. Objectively, which one is the better job? I agree, not how it should be, but you gotta get yours. Also, if you've ever worked in the trades you would know that a large portion of them are ignorant and uneducated. That stereotype exists for a reason. Its just a fact, and they have a tougher time navigating life because of it. I've lived it.
- buscoquadnary 5y ago
  > Also, if you've ever worked in the trades you would know that a large portion of them are ignorant and uneducated. That stereotype exists for a reason. Its just a fact, and they have a tougher time navigating life because of it. I've lived it. I agree with you there, I think there is a tendency to romanticize the life of a blue collar worker, and thing of them as the noble simple idealized "proletariat", when as you point out the stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason. But I have to wonder is part of that because of the brain drain in the trades that resulted from everyone going to college and feeling they had to do white collar work. Before a smart, observant, hardworking young man could become an electrician and by virtue of being observant and quick witted could succeeded and excel and become an outstanding electrician that could bring about innovation and elevate his work team. Nowadays though the same hardworking intelligent young man is being told that the trades are for stupid people, and he is too smart for that and wouldn't it be much better to go get a college degree so he can get a "real job". Then twenty years and $50,000 of student debt later he finds himself as a project manager trapped in a standup meeting at 8:00 on a Wednesday morning, hating his life, drowning in unfulfilled despair and wondering what went wrong with his life. I just think that part of the stereotypes about the trades has become a self fulfilling prophecy.

rhino369 5y ago

When I said unskilled, I meant to distinguish the OP's carpenter son from unskilled jobs. I don't think there has ever been a time before 1945 when the average man was a skilled laborer. A liner worker in a factory or farm-hand isn't skilled labor. For most of history, those people were exploited. Craftsman usually had a decent living because it took training and there was generally demand. But if you train twice as many electricians, its not like there will be twice as many electrician jobs created. So learning a craft or trade is a great personal strategy, but it not a solution we can universally apply. I do think we force way too many people into college-track for little benefit and quite a bit of harm.

buscoquadnary 5y ago
> But if you train twice as many electricians, its not like there will be twice as many electrician jobs created. So learning a craft or trade is a great personal strategy, but it not a solution we can universally apply. I don't know that I agree with that, right now at least on the data I have available and the anecdata I have observed there is a serious shortage of skilled blue color work, plumber, carpenter, electrician, etc. so there is definitely a shift that would be beneficial for society at large and individuals. But let's explore this idea a little bit more, right now we are used to the idea that there are X jobs for Y persons, especially in white color work. This seems to derive largely from the fact that white color work is focused not on production of goods and services but in the production of information (and to some extant bullsh*). For example there are only so many marketing jobs out there because there are only so much marketing a company needs done. Sure adding your first 3 marketers may increase your revenue by 50% but adding your 300th marketer probably isn't going to increase your income at all, in fact it's likely it might actually be a negative investment. The problem is the marketer doesn't actually add a resources to the world, they aren't producing marketing widgets, they merely identify and optimize existing distribution channels, and help others become aware of your company, and there is only so much you can do in that area, there is only so much inefficiency that can be optimized away. Contrast this instead with a plumber. You hire your first plumber he can do say 5 jobs a day, if you hire 3 more plumbers you can do 20 jobs a day now. Well let's suppose later on you hire another plumber he still adds the value to do 5 more jobs a day. Now you may say that there are only so many plumbing jobs out there, only so many people have their 3 year old push a bouncy ball down the toilet, but the plumber is also working on new housing and new business, the plumber isn't just optimizing the existing pie they are causing the overall size of the pie itself to increase. Now there does of course exist some sort of maximum to this, but after reading World War Z that explores this concept in quite a bit of depth (and has no similarity to the movie at all) I've realized that if society did collapse I as a software engineer have absolutely no real or applicable skills, whereas an electrician or a carpenter, they will be able to keep on doing their job as they were now, because they are creating actual wealth, not just optimizing existing wealth generation activities. My point being a society with an overabundance of electricians, carpenters and plumbers is probably better off than a society with an overabundance of project managers, paralegals, and risk analysts.