Go to Harvard and don’t drop out and get a good education. Drop out from Harvard and get a billion or so for your first startup.
And I suppose one defines a “top of the line” capitalist as one who despises workers, right? That way one can’t be wrong!
Alternatively… cite?
Think Mitt Romney and the bottom 47 percent, John.
Ugh. That doesn’t even prove your point for 1 capitalist, let alone “most”. That was a political and policy statement, not an economic one.
In case it wasn’t obvious, my request for a cite was rhetorical. There is no cite you are going to be able to produce to support that claim. Just pointing out that such statements have no place in reasoned debate.
There is nothing great about burgers, in fact, most top of the line chefs not-so-secretly despise people who eat burgers, especially at McDonald’s. It’s great to have food, though.
Just pointing up the essential banality and irrelevance of your statement. I suppose come the revolution, won’t be no money and we’ll all be swimming in burgers, or some such?
Direct insults are not permitted.
This is a Warning to refrain from that behavior.
[ /Moderating ]
The point about mixed economies I was making earlier may seem like hair splitting, but getting back to the OP, the prevalence of mixed economies is the reason that I think that there will not be a worker’s revolution.
I believe that because of mixed economies the redistribution of wealth and resources would prevent one group of robot or machine owners from monopolizing an amount of resources in the world that would impoverish the general population. We already have flexible systems in place that redistribute resources much more broadly than a purely capitalist system would. I don’t know if this point was made earlier by anyone, I sort of only skimmed a couple of the really long posts.
I also do not believe there is an upper class that wants to destroy the lower class. It is my belief that there is an upper class that wants to stay socially superior, however I think it is their best interest to not allow the standard of living for the general population to fall to revolution sparking levels. The increase in the ability of technology creates an abundance of resources - revolutions come from a lack of resources.
A certain way of life will disappear I believe. The simple, quiet, hardworking man or woman that existed in my dad’s day and was a respected person in the community will not thrive in the new system. Outside of high tech, the new technology will create service economies that tend to favor soft skills and political savvy. Do you find this to be a reasonable conclusion?
Absolutely wrong. They may not be any majority - whether they ever were or we imagined they were - but they will not vanish and will not even become rare.
It may be difficult for you to follow, given the absolutist tech-geek viewpoint predominant here and in most online discussions, but the entire country is not Silicon Valley and is not becoming one. Comments from those in tech-centric areas and industries tend to be so vanishingly narrow as to be irrelevant, and the quote above is a frame-worthy example.
Those who have ever gotten off a campus - college or tech - know this. Those who went from their high-school robotics club to a STEM degree to a major-name tech company are probably reaching for UrbanDictionary to try and figure out what the hell I’m talking about.
Forgive me, but I’m not sure I follow - but I think you may be making a good point, I am not able to pinpoint exactly what you are finding narrow minded. By simple I mean manual labor, I am referring to the ability to earn a respectable living through manual labor, I think perhaps that was not clear.
Several decades ago it is my understanding that the country was 40% agrarian, and factory jobs had much more stability and higher pay. A blue collar job where one works with their hands was more respected and could earn a stable living; my grandfathers on both sides made respectable livings with there hands. My father left the farm and got an advanced education because family farms were no longer economically sustainable. The culture that developed, the attitudes and personality necessary to thrive in those environments seems very different to me than what is more commonly middle class today, but for the sake of brevity I won’t go into it now.
And I am about as low tech as they come; most of my work experience is performing unskilled and semi-skilled manual labor, I have about as little experience with anything high tech as it is possible to have. Over the last 20 years I have seen changes to the employment landscape in regards the manual labor type of work of which I am speaking.
Nice writing, but not a word of it addresses your original sentence. “Simple hardworking people” are not confined to factory laborers and farmers. I’ve worked with “simple, hardworking” programmers and chip designers.
Your overall thesis in that post read quite differently than what you say just above.
The great thing about work is that it’s the way that most people get a share of the economic engine’s output. The whole point of this thread is that eliminate work and we’re not really sure what all those people will do. The answers suggested so far are new technologies will produce new work, “soft” work like producing art will expand, a huge new welfare class will arise, or even that the majority of the population will become surplus and “dealt with” somehow.
Fair enough. But my suggestion to you is that if someone’s post appears dismissive or their argument seems poorly thought out, maybe you might ask them to clarify or expound on the details, rather than go into a long sarcastic and condescending response.
If we appear to not understand each other, than it is probably because we come from different professional backgrounds and are making different assumptions about the other’s understanding.
Going back to your original post:
Now I can’t speak for every tech company, obviously. Anecdotal examples aside, most tech companies still recruit through the following channels:
Networking and employee referral
Headhunters
Campus recruiting
External job boards
Corporate recruiting site
In some extreme cases, a larger company might acquire a smaller one just for their engineers.
Finding the candidates is less of a problem than assessing whether they would be a good “fit” or have the right technical and problem solving skills. To solve for this, companies are turning to predictive analytics, but that’s a challenge for many reasons. Tech companies are also turning to unorthodox interview styles:
To work at a startup I had take a 10 page technical exam (which I solved in a day and yet MIT and Ivy League grads still seemed to struggle with), in addition to interviewing with the CEO, the CTO, the VP of Delivery, some other founder, and two of the developer/analysts I would be managing.
IBM’s consulting arm interviews by putting all the candidates into teams of 5-6 and then have us prepare and present a business case to the group.
The consulting firm I used to work for in the 90s made me an offer to return after I had to do a similar business case presentation. When I used to work for them as a developer, they were big on solving programming problems in the interview.
Another startup I read about has candidates come in and work with the team for a day. That way they can see what they can actually do. Although that does seem time consuming and expensive.
It’s still not entirely clear to me why you singled out the Ivy League, other than maybe they aren’t as engineering focused as MIT or Carnegie Mellon.
Given that there are only around 1000 billionaires in the US, that seems like a really bad idea. In fact, I remember right before the dot-com crash where my business school alums would show up as guest speakers, talking about how we might want to decide whether we wanted to finish our MBA or go do a startup. Well, a year later, those same alums were back, telling us cautionary tales about how they underestimated things like cash reserves or market penetration or whatever.
Not to mention, dropping out of college to form a startup only makes sense if you have been studying programming and computers on your own. Also, part of the reason for going to college (particularly a good one) is to actually LEARN the skills you’ll need to do those things.
A good friend of mine never went to college. He was hired as an independent contractor at my old company and was eventually converted to full-time employee where he now enjoys a fairly senior management position due to his technical aptitude and social skills. But he basically did it the hard way and not without a lot of challenges and fortuitous events. And he might have a hard time if he gets laid off or wants to move in a field flooded with Ivy League, engineers and comp scis, MBAs, JDs, masters and PhDs.
Um, well, yeah… I guess. Everything after ‘that’ is true in an extremely narrow sense, but I wouldn’t consider that the ‘great thing’ about it.
Honestly, if you’re working “to get your share of the economic engine’s output” and think that’s great, I’d say you’ve missed the entire point of why you get out of bed in the morning. Maybe two points.
All of the above are true and avoidable only if we drastically reduce Earth’s population; we are past the point where a non-working population is theoretical. But the solutions lie in a realm about as far from your opening statement as it’s possible to get. If “work” is just a way to squeeze a paycheck out of the system, a substantial percentage of people have no future - literally, no future. Not only do they have no “work” to “get their share,” but supporting them will mean “taxing” “workers,” who of course will resent to the point of revolution the “parasites” taking “their share” away from them.
So I hope you’ll leave the solutions to those who have a broader idea of what work is and how it fits into the overall social, national, economic and human dynamic. 
Do you happen to have a more detailed explanation about how our difference in professional background is making it difficult for us to understand each other? I have had disagreements and misunderstandings with others on this board, and never has professional background been mentioned as a reason for misunderstanding. To me this seems to be very little improvement over the previous exchanges we have had in this thread. Is there some specific way my professional background can actually be tied to our misunderstanding? Otherwise it seems as if you are continuing to substitute commentary regarding me personally in place of intelligent or relevant discourse in regards to the issues being discussed in this thread.
The notion that manual and semi-skilled labor is going away is not true. Or rather, it’s not true for any jobs that require mobility, a modicum of judgment, or generalized skills.
If anything, the trades and service sectors are hurting for workers. The problem is that we’re sending too many kids to college to take worthless degrees, and those kids are coming out expecting to find white collar jobs that pay a good salary. The unemployment rate among young people is not a problem of automation - it’s a problem of mismatch between what we’re training people to do and the real needs of the economy.
Assembly line workers are an obvious target for automation - anyone who does a repetitive job that requires no judgment and which is done in a controlled environment where all motion can be defined is a target for automation. But many of those jobs have already been automated.
However, no automation is about to replace the armies of carpenters, plumbers, surveyers, contractors, carpet layers, electricians, insulators, and other skilled and semi-skilled trades that build our infrastructure.
Automation is not going to replace mechanics, technicians, small warehouse workers and managers, heavy equipment operators, or other skilled and semi-skilled trades that keep our infrastructure working.
Automation is not going to replace doctors, nurses, health aides, and other people working in health care. If anything, employment in these fields is going to skyrocket as the population ages and we develop more treatments.
Automation is not going to replace police officers, firemen, soldiers (the bulk of them, anyway), EMTs, ambulance drivers, and other first responders.
We could go down the list of occupations today, and you’ll see that entire categories of them are not at risk of being replaced by computers and robots for decades, if ever. And of course, when workers ARE laid off due to automation, their labor becomes available for other jobs. That’s why we didn’t have 40% unemployment when we mechanized agriculture.
Understand that the only reason we automate something is to increase productivity - i.e to make more stuff that society needs for the same effort. This makes us wealthier. And that in turn creates opportunities for new types of jobs that don’t even exist yet. Perhaps “Virtual Reality Environment Manager” will be a new job in the future. Or “household automation installer” will be a big growth field. We don’t know, because the future can’t be predicted.
But what we do know is that the nature of work in society has transformed many times in the past, and those transformations have always cause mass dislocations of current jobs. And yet, none of them have led to mass permanent unemployment. That’s just not the way it works. Yes, I know - this time it’s different. But you know what? That’s what the Luddites say every time.
As God is my witness, this actually happened to me last year.
I’m a quality auditor, so I visit many, many companies. I was visiting a customer in southern Ontario and the quality rep was complaining that his son was stuck working in a clothing store despite having just gotten his Master’s degree. I do get around quite a lot and like to help people find jobs so I asked what his degree was in. “Political Science” was the reply.
I was honestly flabbergasted. How much politics needs sciencing nowadays? I was Class of 1994 and even back then if you told someone your major was PoliSci the standard response was “so, are you gonna work at McDonald’s or Burger King?”
Not two days later another customer told me his daughter had gotten her master’s degree. It was in radiology. She had sent out five resumes… and got eight job offers. Huge, fat job offers; come work for us, here’s a bag of money. What you take in school matters.
I find it absolutely stunning how wide the disconnect is between what guidance counselors are guiding students into and what the workforce actually needs. As I am fond of pointing out, with four weeks of training you can get a commercial truck license and START at a thousand bucks a week around here. The trucking companies put up signs everywhere that basically say “show up with a pulse and a license and we’ll give you money.” Trades are even better for long term prospects (and tend to generate entrepreneurs.) But just a few months ago the Toronto Star ran an article about how young people cannot find jobs because some kid from UofT couldn’t find a job with her degree in “communications.” Well, yeah, because when things need to be built, they don’t go looking for a “communications” major.
(Of course, this is not to say people should not take polisci, communications, and the like, but at least do it with your eyes open. My sister got her degree in Drama, but knew damned well, was absolutely crystal clear, that the road after that would be very hard, and would require incredibly hard work and a willingness to wait some tables, and she did, and she’s made a go of it.)
The Ivy League is collegiate athletic conference. All of the schools in the Ivy League are fairly old, and through tradition and long established networks as well as marketing have established themselves in the minds of many as the most prestigious institutions of higher learning. And indeed, the student body as well as the faculty is generally of the very highest caliber. However, there are differences between the Ivy League schools and other very good schools in that they have a certain status conferred upon them by being in the Ivy League. I think you may not have read some of the lead up discussion to the thread. Part of the desirability of any Ivy League education is the actual education one receives, the other is the social status that the recipient of an Ivy League education receives.
The thought expressed boils down to actual ability vs. perceived ability and is the Ivy League graduate really that much more capable in the workforce. I believe it is plausible that increased scrutiny will trump the tradition, or as I put it “pomp and circumstance” of an Ivy league education in the nearer term rather than the longer term, and new measurements of ability will surpass older methods of evaluation.
I’ll just give some examples here about what I am referring to - but this subject could be debated ad nauseum and go on for pages in all probability. As it stands now, there still exists a halo effect for Harvard graduates due to the Harvard name. And Harvard is a very good school, however, Stanford in recent years has sometimes surpassed Harvard as the most desirable school to attend in polls of high school parents. Of course, the accuracy all polls such as these could be called into question and whatnot, but this sort of thing would have been hard to conceive 30 years ago - back then Stanford was broadly considered only a safety school. The reason Stanford is becoming much more desirable is the heavy technology and engineering focus of the school. We can also talk about MIT in the same vein, due to the vocational nature of a subject such as accounting, Harvard students who wish to take accounting often take those classes at MIT, which does not not eschew such subjects but probably has a more limited selection of classes in 18th century women’s literature - are you catchin my drift? A very different focus about what type of education is most important.
And what does this have to do with the OP? I admit it is somewhat tangential, however it does follow the broader thought about the disruptive nature of new technologies. With new industries and new companies (such as high tech and Google) gaining importance, the old traditional markers of status may no longer prove as useful and the new abilities needed for success as well as differences in assessing ability will change the landscape of education. So, hopefully, I have added sufficient clarity to answer your question:).
Stanford was a safety school in 1984?
For people interested in Harvard, Princeton Yale it was, at least where I am from - It was considered a very good school back then, but now it is considered on par with all those schools; I am using it as an example of how a school aligning itself with silicon valley and high tech has gained in prominence, and continues to do so - AFAIK it currently has the most selective admissions policy that it ever had, and is substantially more selective than it was 30 years ago; like I said in my post the minutia of this kind of debate could go on and on and on, and is only tangential to the OP.
As I pointed out up higher in the thread, the degrees in Canada with the worst prospects for employment are psychology and humanities. The faculties with the largest growth in Canada? Psychology and the humanities. In the meantime, the STEM fields that are heavily in demand are actually shrinking in size. There is something very screwed up about that.
For years we’ve been telling kids that it’s important to go to college, but what they take in college isn’t important. Or that they should ‘follow their hearts’, or use college to ‘find themselves’.
That’s all well and good if you’re a kid from a wealthy family who can afford to spend $100,000 to help you ‘find yourself’. It’s also fine if you’re extremely smart and can get a scholarship or will find a way to land on your feet regardless of your degree because you’re a smart person. But when we extend that to the poor and people who are better suited for other work, we do them a huge disservice.
A liberal arts education is a luxury, just like traveling to see the great museums of the world or touring Europe to learn other cultures. Poor people can’t afford it. So what do we do? We give them student loans, tell them that they don’t have to be paid back for years and years, and convince them to go deep into debt to attain a degree that is of little practical use. This huge glut of borrowed money then drives up tuition and forces middle class kids into the same situation.
I grew up poor. I worked my way through college and finished with a very small amount of debt. If I were growing up today, I don’t think that would be possible any more. I’d be forced to mortgage my future to get a degree. But at least I studied something useful and in demand.
But don’t you know? A college education prepares you for citizenship! It turns out enlightened thinkers who are an asset to society! It broadens your knowledge and makes you a better person! It’s all about the intangibles. Small comfort perhaps when you’re living in your parent’s basement.
In the meantime, the graduates from humanities I’m seeing these days seem more indoctrinated than educated. They’re not more open-minded - they’re simply convinced that they’re right about everything. Humanities programs may once have been a place for open inquiry and free speech, but today they seem to be more like boot camp for culture warriors. Your ‘free speech’ is confined to a ‘free speech zone’ over by the back of the cafeteria, and the largest growth area in the college is administration and the ‘diversity’ racket.
This should be patently obvious to everyone, but apparently not. The notion that humanities are the way to go starts early in school these days. Very few teachers are scientists or engineers. Most of them studied humanities in college, and that’s what they know and approve of. My kid has been actively and repeatedly told NOT to go into science and engineering (unless it’s environmental science). Instead, the good kids are supposed to study philosophy, or psychology, or gender studies, or medicine, or environmental management, and then go out into the world and ‘help people’. As if learning how to build things or maintain our infrastructure doesn’t help anyone.
Guess what my kid’s guidance counselor told him he should go into? If you guessed ‘psychology’, you win a prize.
I used to see a pickup truck driving around the city with a big sign on it saying, “Carpenters needed. No experience necessary. Will train.” With a great big phone number below it.
Trades also can’t be outsourced to China, they’re resistent to automation replacement, and our infrastructure is aging. There will be an increased demand for tradesmen in the future, but enrollment in the trades is declining. It’s crazy.
Around here, an apprentice in any number of trades will start at a salary of at least $20/hr. A journeyman will make $35 and up. In the meantime, the majority of graduates with a degree in psychology make below the median income.
When did she get her degree? Would you advocate that she study drama if tuition was $20,000 per year and she would have to borrow the money?
Coming out of college with $100,000 - $200,000 in debt makes it hard to find a spouse, it makes it nearly impossible to buy a house until the debt is mostly paid down, and makes it hard to start a family. It is a huge burden on a young person that can ruin their life. I had about $15,000 in debt, and it felt like an anvil around my neck when I was getting started and being paid entry level wages. A philosophy major with $150,000 in debt earning $30,000/yr will have their life’s decisions dominated by that debt for a decade or more - the very years when young people should be starting families, buying their first home, and getting a good head start on life.
In the meantime, by the time that person graduates with a humanities degree another person who goes into the trades will be debt-free, have 2-4 years of job experience, be making a very good salary and may be ready to buy a house and start a family. We forget that the other cost of going to college is the opportunity cost of spending four or more of your best years outside of the work force.
College is a wonderful thing, but if you have to go into debt to go there, you had better damn well make sure it pays off.