71–80 of 129 posts
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a shortage that's not reflected in the wages for skilled jobs (outside of powerful unions)
I know that in Israel there's shortage in those professions, but the pay isn't good. So maybe it's more complex that simple supply vs demand ?
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a shortage that's not reflected in the wages for skilled jobs (outside of powerful unions)
In some places it has been. Man I sometimes wished I had a valid mechanicans or electricians certification during the oil boom here ;-)
in the uk, the plumbers/electricians are lucky to make £20/hr.
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Well, that would depend on what you mean by "the world." Professors have first hand knowledge of a very particular set of social practices and institutions. These tend to be very important practices and institutions, but they are only directly experienced by a small group of people. Someone working at Burger King will typically have participated in a quite different set of practices and institutions. And there are a…
But if what the professor is theorizing about is, say, labor conditions for the less-educated and less-well-off worker, then the Burger King worker knows in a way that the professor doesn't, no matter how many statistics the professor looks at.
Interesting, but without any real suggestion of why being statistically rarer than the average somehow makes people blind to broader realities. It's just slipped in there, around the middle that intellectuals, "...tend to be both biased and unaware of their own bias." Well sure, everyone is, that's not a helpful or insightful statement, it's just an incredibly safe bet.
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There are a few well-read would-be intellectuals stuck working at a fast food joint simply due to not knowing how to do otherwise.
The existence of some very smart KFC workers doesn't mean that on average McDonald's workers are as intelligent as professors.
I've worked at some of the biggest names in the tech industry. I've also literally beaten iron with a hammer in a dirty factory. I've lived in some of the most advanced democracies in the world. I've also lived under true-blue communist dictatorship. I've seen the life of some pretty fancy, posh suburbs in the Silicon Valley. I've also seen the life of the traditional Eastern Bloc peasant. I know it's hard to believe, but with a broad experience comes the understanding that intelligence and scholarly education alone don't automatically provide all answers, nor do they grant you the Always Right card. No matter how smart or polished you are, if you don't walk into the humble folks' shoes for a while, your understanding of what their lives truly are will be necessarily incomplete and warped.
I'm not trying to convince you of anything. A neural network that wasn't provided with the necessary training set will not "see" the right answers no matter what. All I want to do is plant the seed of "what if". Perhaps it will grow into a broader understanding, later. But that can only come with experience.
Interesting, but without any real suggestion of why being statistically rarer than the average somehow makes people blind to broader realities. It's just slipped in there, around the middle that intellectuals, "...tend to be both biased and unaware of their own bias." Well sure, everyone is, that's not a helpful or insightful statement, it's just an incredibly safe bet.
But intellectuals are supposed to be above that. They're supposed to be objective, or at least able to honestly see their bias. And they're failing at that. By the way, if I understand correctly, this was the death blow to logical positivism. Michael Polanyi pointed out that logical positivism required objective observers, and all we had were human beings, who were never really objective.
Really, no, absolutely not. The bias is assumed, that's why double-blind is the gold standard too. I'd argue that at its best, intellectualism is all about building a deeper awareness of our limitations and foibles, while developing systems to compensate for them.
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In some places it has been. Man I sometimes wished I had a valid mechanicans or electricians certification during the oil boom here ;-)
and now you wouldn't have a job. in the uk, the plumbers/electricians are lucky to make £20/hr.
It depends where they work - London and the SE pay a lot better than the run down cities in the North - and how good their network is.
I used to know someone with a well-paid City job who retrained as a plumber. He earns almost as much as he did and is considerably less stressed. The only downside is occasional snobbery.
>For generations, populists of various kinds have argued that intellectuals are unworldly individuals out of touch with the experiences and values of most of their fellow citizens. While anti-intellectual populists have often been wrong about the gold standard or the single tax or other issues, by and large they have been right about intellectuals. So... intellectuals were right about the issues that they were focuse…
Those were two cherry-picked examples of things intelligentsia got right. It was not a claim that they get everything or almost everything right. I generally share the author's opinions about intellectuals as a category, and the gold standard was, in my opinion, a particularly good choice of an example that intellectuals get right where the common man is often quite wrong. The same concrete connection to the real wor…
1) It's ridiculous to conflate modern science and Stalin. It's worse than ridiculous.
2) Even if you can somehow convince yourself that it's reasonable to treat Stalin and modern scientists as a homogenous pool, Stalin's actions worked out quite well for Stalin. Which was pretty obviously his goal.
3) Your core argument is 'some systematic approaches to understanding have failed; so we should give up'. That's defeatist nonsense.
4) Your secondary argument is the intellectuals are actually good (and you pretend to respect them), but some aren't, therefore intellectuals are bad. That's not even an argument.
Please down vote me if you are an extremist ideologue.
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Working class wants to work.
> Working class wants to work. One of the principal selling points for UBI as a replacement for existing means tested social benefit programs is that it eliminates the perverse incentives created by means tested programs in which benefits are reduced by outside income (especially from work), at a rate that, in aggregate across the programs a person may be eligible for, may even exceed the after-tax income from work.…
Currently, many social benefit programs give people less money the more they work. If a person is eligible for enough of these programs, they can even make less money by working than they would by not working.
UBI (universal basic income) doesn't have this problem because it pays people the same amount regardless of weather they work. Thus, it is arguably more in line with "working class wants to work" than the status quo is.
EDIT: Made translation more precise.