So I've been studying Unger for about four years now through my political activism. He is verbose in his language but once you get used to it you can see his brilliance. His core arguments on the KE are as follows: - It is creating a schism in the American workforce, and those on the outside lack access to the necessary educational institutions to ever catch up. - Our IP laws are stagnating our economic development b…
> It is creating a schism in the American workforce, and those on the outside lack access to the necessary educational institutions to ever catch up. The implicit idea of offering a transition to knowledge work as a means for people who have been economically shut out to catch up is a misreading of the situation. An economy must consist of more than just knowledge workers. If a guy who's stuck stocking shelves in a s…
I agree with this premise. In essence, to argue that education is a sufficient (necessary and widespread as it should be) support is to argue that the only people who matter are those with the ability to be trained (and retrained, and retrained as the economy shifts.) And that the only thing that matters about people is their ability to learn, not their need for food, shelter, plumbing, health care, etc. It splits the brain from the body, traditionally a bleak end.