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> for the government to lower the cost of high-quality education Devils advocate point, and one nobody wants to talk about: what if everyone can't be a high-sk
by api 2y ago
> for the government to lower the cost of high-quality education
Devils advocate point, and one nobody wants to talk about: what if everyone can't be a high-skill employee?
Imagine if the highest earning jobs required immense physical endurance and strength. Nobody would argue that everyone can do that. It would be obvious that only a subset of people are capable of doing those jobs. For some reason, with intellectual labor, we are able to pretend that there is no threshold and everyone can do it. It's an idea that makes people feel good but what if it's just not true? Can everyone be made above average in something with enough education?
If we're creating an economy where decent jobs only exist for people in the top ~20% of the ability curve, how do we handle that? How do we maintain a democracy? Sometimes people float the idea of UBI, but that could turn out extremely dystopian with a huge underclass of UBI-collecting people in a state of hopelessness and boredom. That doesn't work much better for democracy than a huge underclass of under-employed and unemployed people.
To make matters worse: the fact that our past strategy works so well for increasing GDP means it it tends to inflate assets, including things like housing prices. The end result is a country that looks, to more than half its inhabitants, like a vacation town where outside capital inflates the cost of everything way above what local wages can support. It might not be a coincidence that San Francisco, New York, and other capitals of high margin high skill industries have real estate prices that lock ordinary people out of even "starter homes."
I absolutely do not support Trump's execution here -- it's ham-fisted, reckless, and badly thought out. If we are exiting this neoliberal model, Trump's exit from it is a little bit like Biden's exit from Afghanistan. Still it is obvious to me that the current system is not working for more than half of Americans. It's fantastic for the top ~20% or so and leaves everyone else behind.
We can't keep doing that if we want a democracy. If we exclude 50-80% of the population from anything meaningful or any economic stability, we will get one of two things. Either we'll get the kind of totalitarian state that is required to maintain that kind of inequality in perpetuity, or we will get a string of revolutions or a failed state. People will not just sit around in hopelessness forever. Eventually they will be recruited by demagogues. Ironically Trump has been one of the most effective at this. I'm sure more will eventually show up though. There's a big market for them.
- ckemere 2y agoI’ve reflected that resource extraction jobs often end up in the high wage / low educational investment category, and I’ve wondered if that motivates the whole “annex Greenland” bit as much as “securing critical resources” does…
- nyarlathotep_ 2y ago> Devils advocate point, and one nobody wants to talk about: what if everyone can't be a high-skill employee? Agree with this. Also, what if there's just not a need for it? Even if "everyone" in some abstract sense is capable of "high-skill" jobs, how many are really needed? Look at software jobs alone and the onslaught that is the current labor market. I think there's nowhere near enough "work" ("real" or otherwise) to go around to maintain the level of employment necessary to support the population that we have at the costs that we have. I don't think any sort of "UBI" (assuming you mean direct cash payments) is a realistic solution, either. People need to "work" in some organized fashion to avoid the common negative outcomes associated with "welfare" scenarios. I legitimately, unironically, support the kinds of "fake" jobs that were prevalent in years' past (day in the life TikToks come to mind, Gov jobs where people send three emails a week, etc). I guess in another sense I do support "UBI", as long as it's paired with the illusion of "work." I understand this seems nonsensical, but just from practical experience it makes total sense to me. Here's an example. Years back I worked a software gig at a large non-"tech" F500 company. Much of the programming work there was extremely dull--occasional maintenance of large barely functional enterprise Java messes, writing a few SQL queries a week for wretched multi-table joins requiring all sorts of nasty casting and hacks as "normalization" was an alien concept to the original author and the like. Realistically, folks worked on this stuff perhaps 10 hours a week? Anyway, I know a few people hit with a layoff that worked there a long time (decade+) and now they're back in the Thunderdome looking for work as "developers". The people in question are nearing retirement but presumably not there, for one reason or another. Hows this going to work for them? I'm not denigrating them, but having worked with these folks, they're not going to be tearing into broken pipelines, adding React components, configuring Docker builds or whatever--there's a skill mismatch and the workload I've seen at roles lately is just so far beyond the pace, scope, and "scale" that there's no way they'd make it, if they can even get an interview at all. In this example, would it be best to give them "UBI" payments, or some other slow near-sinecure where they have dignity? Maybe I'm just soft.