It is time for Universal Basic Income. https://www.yang2020.com/
That's always the easy answer, isn't it?
It is not easy, but it is something I believe we need to try as part of the solution to the problems facing our species on this planet.
Millions of educated, experienced workers are tossed aside by a strong economy
81–90 of 125 posts
Re: Millions of educated, experienced workers are tossed aside by a strong economy
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Financed with debt" is another way to say "Can't afford". You can finance an enterprise with debt because it may produce income, and the debt will be repaid. But financing consumption with increasing debt is... dangerous at best.
As someone else said in the thread [1], just existing in America is very expensive. It’s easy to conflate consumption vs necessary expenses needing to be financed, but you do what you have to do. It takes 20 years of nothing going wrong to escape poverty [2]. Imagine how easy it is to get back there. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17594826 [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/economi...
"Consumption" is just something that does not produce an income. It's not about some excessive consumption.
I mean, if you buy your 100" TV with debt, it's that not great, but if you buy your daily bread with debt, you're in a big trouble.
Re: Millions of educated, experienced workers are tossed aside by a strong economy
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone else said in the thread [1], just existing in America is very expensive. It’s easy to conflate consumption vs necessary expenses needing to be financed, but you do what you have to do. It takes 20 years of nothing going wrong to escape poverty [2]. Imagine how easy it is to get back there. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17594826 [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/economi...
"Consumption" is just something that does not produce an income. It's not about some excessive consumption. I mean, if you buy your 100" TV with debt, it's that not great, but if you buy your daily bread with debt, you're in a big trouble.
> but if you buy your daily bread with debt, you're in a big trouble.
That's the problem. People are funding survival on credit.
How do you fix that? Raise wages. How do you raise wages outside of macro supply/demand factors (interest rates, employment slack)? Politics.
Re: Millions of educated, experienced workers are tossed aside by a strong economy
#84The economy and the education system are out of sync. We are turning out a TON of degrees for a few jobs and expecting people to be able to just succeed based on a 4 year degree program. All the while the economy does expect a 4 year degree for some jobs that really shouldn't. So you're expected to waste money on a degree you don't need to work a job that won't help you pay back your degree because they aren't paying…
I'm not super convinced that the economic hardships many Americans experience is mainly because of what major they chose in college. I would think a larger factor is that many people can't afford a degree at all. Most Americans never get one. And a lot of people that do go to college start their adult life with tons of student debt. Shouldn't we focus on those things rather than potentially regulating what major people choose?
Re: Millions of educated, experienced workers are tossed aside by a strong economy
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Again, I don't know the solution. Regulate the number of graduates within a certain degree field? Stop providing loan guarantees for all students regardless of the marketability of the degree they've chosen?
And make loans dischargeable like any other loan.
Exactly. If the burden of collecting the debt is on the loaner, they will do a better job of enforcing who gets a loan (which is traditionally the job of the loaner anyway). Student loans get handed out like candy and now we have a continuously-compounding problem of growing tuitions and debt.
If bankruptcy could fix student loans, then the ones giving out loans would be a lot more careful, schools would stop wasting hundreds of millions on new buildings that that are 80% empty, and we wouldn't have a large segment of the middle class population in indentured servitude.
Seems pretty simple to me.
Re: Millions of educated, experienced workers are tossed aside by a strong economy
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
>How do you go from director at 59 to filing bankruptcy in fewer than two year after losing your job? Fiscal irresponsibility This is a very entitled and selfish statement. The act of simply existing is very expensive in the USA, and if you have children or have unexpected medical bills that can be tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands, you can easily eat through all of your savings very quickly and not be…
>The act of simply existing is very expensive in the USA Someone who lives a lifestyle one typically associates with someone who's employment can be describes as "own office, secretaries and assistants, along with titles like “director” that spoke to her decades of experience" will become impoverished if they lose and do not quickly replace that job on any continent. It's not just a US thing.
But it's a choice to live that lifestyle. Doing so is implicitly assuming that you will always have that income level - which is rather unwise to assume.
Re: Millions of educated, experienced workers are tossed aside by a strong economy
#87The economy and the education system are out of sync. We are turning out a TON of degrees for a few jobs and expecting people to be able to just succeed based on a 4 year degree program. All the while the economy does expect a 4 year degree for some jobs that really shouldn't. So you're expected to waste money on a degree you don't need to work a job that won't help you pay back your degree because they aren't paying…
The solution is to cut K-12 to K-8, and teach modern college courses in 9-12 instead of wasting time there to "prepare." Dual-track 9-12 so that one track is the equivalent of full college, and another is the equivalent of vocational school/community college. College can be what graduate school is now, and graduate school can go back to being genuinely faculty-track.
As a student who SUFFERED through K-12, was an awful C-D student, I agree 100% with this overall idea.
I went from a D high school to a straight A student in college. I found the freedom to choose to study what I am interested in ( Computer Science ) extremely liberating. I found the respect shown by the faculty to the students refreshing compared to my high-school. I found that being able to leave, take a nap, and then come back for my next class much more tolerable. I found that not being locked in a building for 9 hours a day freed up time to actually study and get your homework done.
Basically, I discovered what everyone else already knew: Current schooling is intended to keep kids in child-jail while their parents are working. Most schools do not have the resources to cater to bored gifted students, so we are cast aside with the understanding that "we'll be fine" while sitting through remedial classes where we have to read out loud because some of the students in the classroom are illiterate.
People claim college is a waste of time? HA. HIGH SCHOOL is four years of my life WASTED that I will never get back.
Let students set their own pace for education. Have them take responsibility for their own lives and future at a younger age. Let the children out of child jail.
Re: Millions of educated, experienced workers are tossed aside by a strong economy
#88Re: Millions of educated, experienced workers are tossed aside by a strong economy
#89The waste of human potential is staggering. The purpose of the economy should be to enable making full use of it. Instead we focus on profit.
Here's a radical idea: get rid of the stock market and public ownership of stock.
The only way to become an owner of a company is by being an employee. Essentially, all companies become co-ops. Investment of capital would happen through long-term relationships with banks, not through selling pieces of the company off to creeps who want outrageous returns at the expense of the employees/customers.
Instead of short-term gains, people now focus on 10, 20, and 50-year plans. Employees can democratically elect their leadership (or any other internal system can be set up).
The stock market and public ownership in general seems like an incredible waste of resources and focus.
Re: Millions of educated, experienced workers are tossed aside by a strong economy
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Teacher friends of mine talk to me about how their job is next to impossible. The curriculum in the schools is basically perpetually 12 years behind, students today are just now being taught stuff that the market is now responding to but the fundamentals that are needed for those skills should have been introduced years prior. Educators are effectively trying to project 12 years out and try and guess what the market…
This sounds like a gross exaggeration. Twelve years out? Are first-graders being taught the latest framework or something? Except that maybe it shouldn't stretch out for twelve years, pre-college education is learning the fundamentals that do not depend on the job market. The fundamentals haven't changed in hundreds of years.
> pre-college education is learning the fundamentals that do not depend on the job market.
That's the problem, though. Some companies, and many parents and students, no longer see it as that. They see secondary school as a place to train their future employees. And, because parents so often have to work multiple jobs, kids often come out knowing nothing about finance, so they complain about having to take classes like Algebra II.
To be honest, I feel like a lot of the problem could be solved if companies would actually go back to investing in employees. They want their employees to come fully-trained nowadays, and then don't really care about keeping them or their development. It pushes everything off onto the schools, which is also why so many feel like they have to attend university.