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Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

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Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#201

Post by EpicEng »

moorhosj wrote: post #29
Bucephalus355 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make very good points above. I really enjoyed college, especially my liberal arts classes. That being said, with AWS Certs going for between $75-$300 how long do colleges think they can survive? If you were a 22 yr old who studied from zero-level computing knowledge for 12 months and got the AWS Solutions Architect Pro cert (somewhat possible assuming 2 hours / day) I can already guarantee you’d receive a written…

==I really enjoyed college, especially my liberal arts classes.== I think this highlights the true question. Do colleges exist to promote education and intellectual curiosity or to train workers? According to PEW, Americans believe colleges are for work training: "Americans are split on the main purpose of college, with 47% saying it is to teach work-related skills and 39% saying it is to help a student grow personal…

Does it matter in practice? College is ridiculously expensive, forcing many (most?) people to go into massive debt in order to get a degree. If you come out with a master's in art history you're going to be feeling the economic pain for quite some time, and that's not good for society. Until costs come down, college needs to be about job training (which is a shame; I think many aspects of the system need to change.)

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#202

Post by ihalip »

fastball wrote: post #134
wonderwonder wrote: post #12

The top 1% of American's own more wealth than the bottom 90% and this concentration is only increasing. Soon no cities regardless of size will deliver for low skilled workers as there will simply not be enough of the proverbial pie to go around. As wealth is concentrated and rents and property values rise the vast majority of this country will (does?) live paycheck to paycheck. This is unsustainable and will either n…

Repeat after me: Wealth is not a zero sum game. Wealth is not a zero sum game. Wealth is not a zero sum game.

Repeating something 3 times doesn't make it true.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#203

Post by graeme »

njarboe wrote: post #137
graeme wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the lump of labour fallacy. Rest assured that life will be harder for young people if a sizeable portion of the population is old, out of the labour force, and needs to be supported by a rising share of taxes from a small number of young workers. We should hope that older works stay in jobs as long as they're able. The coming demographic bulge isn't pretty.

The old people in America now own the majority of the assets. If they transfer those assets to the young in exchange for work, things will get better. If the old are split into those that have a huge amount of money and spend a little percent of it in retirement, passing the rest onto their heirs, and a large number of old people that need to keep working just to survive, locking out the young people from moving up,…

At a global scale, ownership of assets isn't really savings.

Imagine an island society, with a bunch of 40 year old workers. You own the company that gets all the profit from their labour. So, you have a real resource, which you could trade with other places.

Now of course this island has no children. How do you feel about your investment once the workers reach age 80. It wouldn't produce very much. In fact you'd need to put resources in just to keep your island ex-employees alive.

But that's an extreme example. Let's suppose that 20% of the population is only 20 instead of 40. When the current 40 year olds hit 65 and retire, the younger generation will be 35 and can support them. What happens to your profits?

They will probably still either collapse or near collapse. You had 100% of people in the labour force, now you have 20%. This poor 20% not only has to support themselves, they must support the 80% idle old. And that's before any surplus is generated for your profit as owner.

So, your savings in the form of ownership of the island weren't very useful. It just dies out.

Could you saved otherwise? Not really. To a limited extent you could store the outputs of the island. We do this currently with grain reserves, oil stockpiles, etc.

But most of the stuff we consume are produced in the same year. You can't save real goods, only ownership of entities.

So if the entities all have a shrinking labour force, they aren't worth as much. The old people in the us won't have meaningful assets with which to pay for their care.

(The one exception is a small old country that owns rights to part of the output of other countries which are younger. There's also an exception for automation, if the companies owned by the old are massively more productive per worker by the time the demographic bulge retires)

You're making the mistake of those who think that money itself as wealth, as opposed to a medium to exchange for wealth. Money is mostly fungible, but in edge cases it just can't buy certain things.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#204

Post by ken »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #28
collyw wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not for the unskilled workers out of a job.

In the short term yes, but in the long term it will benefit them too. If there is less work to be done in the world, then everyone will work less on average. I firmly believe that one of two things will eventually happen: • We will find new industries which replace the old jobs. Companies in these industries will by necessity find ways to fill positions, either by paying enough that (even) more people can afford coll…

But now (i.e., the short term) is when we're all living. I don't pay my rent based on the long term benefits of the elimination of my job.

By using "them" to generically refer to all workers, past present and future, it sounds like you're saying "Today's workers are screwed, but the next generation of non-rich people will be fine".

You can't just tell people that a machine eliminated their job starting next month therefore they should be happy. It's going to get a lot rougher for a lot of people before UBI is implemented.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#205

Post by marcosdumay »

nightski wrote: post #132
marcosdumay wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't "education and intellectual curiosity" a way to increase people's productivity? (Not even a way, wans't it supposed to be the best way?) Because that's the reason colleges are funded by the government. There's something very broken with our modern society.

I always thought that college was not to increase your typical office worker's productivity by X% but instead to be a long term bet on massive gains for society through academic research.

If that's the true, we should make colleges more intellectually elitist and put most of the funding on places that provide that better worker's productivity, or simply cut funding if there is no better option.

We also should make it easier for those academics to bring those massive gains, because academia isn't organized for that.

I still think this is not the real goal, but maybe it was at some time. (Is there more than one goal? The system appears to not be optimized for any reasonable goal.)

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#206

Post by pitaj »

peisistratos wrote: post #167
alkibiades wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“not enough money to go around” Where do people get this strange idea that if someone else makes money it somehow precludes others from doing it? Bill Gates got rich with an invention that also generated probably a trillion dollars in economic growth for everyone. Including most people on this sites income.

> if someone else makes money it somehow precludes others from doing it? There is an easy way to see that and it is if the median inflation-adjusted hourly wage has risen in the US since the early 1970s. Or if inflation-adjusted weekly earnings have risen. They have not, with GDP growth, both have fallen . That this even has to be discussed shows the deep control those heirs who expropriate surplus labor time from wo…

I'll never get tired of hearing "wage slavery", "exploitation", "surplus labor value" etc from idiots who are still clinging to the labor theory of value.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#207

Post by pnw_hazor »

dantheman wrote: post #66
moorhosj wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

==I really enjoyed college, especially my liberal arts classes.== I think this highlights the true question. Do colleges exist to promote education and intellectual curiosity or to train workers? According to PEW, Americans believe colleges are for work training: "Americans are split on the main purpose of college, with 47% saying it is to teach work-related skills and 39% saying it is to help a student grow personal…

It'd be hard to justify the costs - both actual college costs and opportunity costs if it was purely for intellectual curiosity.

Especially since intellectual curiosity can be easily satisfied in other ways these days.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#208

Post by gdubs »

wutbrodo wrote: post #198
irrational wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"That being said, with AWS Certs going for between $75-$300 how long do colleges think they can survive?" Colleges shouldn't be in the business of training people for jobs - that is what tech schools are for. If you just want to get a job, go to a tech school, don't go to college. College is (or should be) about expanding your mind, your horizons. It should be about exposing you to new ideas and thoughts you hadn't b…

I fully agree that you can't ignore the broader education that college provides, even when that diverges from marketability. But then you have to be clear-eyed about what we're talking about here: from the perspective of a college student, is it worth paying 1-200k[1] to become more worldly, with some auxiliary benefits to their income potential? I would probably still send my (future) kids to such a place, but then…

Today it’s hard to make an economic case for a well-rounded liberal arts education — but I’d bet that in ten years, computers will be pretty good at everything except the stuff you get from a good liberal arts education.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#209

Post by djtriptych »

tzs wrote: post #197
irrational wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"That being said, with AWS Certs going for between $75-$300 how long do colleges think they can survive?" Colleges shouldn't be in the business of training people for jobs - that is what tech schools are for. If you just want to get a job, go to a tech school, don't go to college. College is (or should be) about expanding your mind, your horizons. It should be about exposing you to new ideas and thoughts you hadn't b…

Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 1780-05-12: > I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.

This.

If we're doing our job as a generation we are moving the focus of human education from the gross to the subtle.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#210

Post by randcraw »

alkibiades wrote: post #121
wonderwonder wrote: post #12

The top 1% of American's own more wealth than the bottom 90% and this concentration is only increasing. Soon no cities regardless of size will deliver for low skilled workers as there will simply not be enough of the proverbial pie to go around. As wealth is concentrated and rents and property values rise the vast majority of this country will (does?) live paycheck to paycheck. This is unsustainable and will either n…

“not enough money to go around” Where do people get this strange idea that if someone else makes money it somehow precludes others from doing it? Bill Gates got rich with an invention that also generated probably a trillion dollars in economic growth for everyone. Including most people on this sites income.

Gates succeeded by creating a 40 year monopoly which established and largely controlled the heartbeat of the computer revolution. That's about as exclusive as it gets.

Any monopoly tilts the playing field so 90% of the business sector's profits pour into the pockets of a tiny few, leaving others high and dry. And virtually all the notable tech successes of the past 20 years arose and thrived via monopoly.

So it's little wonder why VCs like unicorns so much. The profits involved aren't shared with others.

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