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The real income inequality has nothing to do with skills, the inequality is between those who work and those who own. Top few percent vs everyone else.

If you think skilled jobs are automation / off-shoring proof, I'll see you in the bread lines in 10-20yrs.

Heh I didn't say that. Automation just means available jobs will get increasingly higher skilled.

It's with mixed-feelings that I anticipate the day when people "work" by by solving sub-problems for weak AI.

For example, being flashed security-images while wearing a skullcap so that a machine "reads" whether (in your judgement) the picture contained something suspicious.

Not that many people don't work as interchangeable parts in machines today, we just call them companies.

Or we'll just find new jobs that were previously impossible, or at least unfeasible to do without the aid of AI. Just like how film photographers complained about digital cameras and related technology like Photoshop. Photographers haven't been put out of business (not even by everyone wielding a camera phone). The people that have been put out of business were those who couldn't figure out how to add value to what machines could now do. There are plenty of photographers doing just fine still, but they all realized they need to offer something that machines can't do, like high quality image manipulation.

The major value photographers add to what the machine can do is social status. People like an identical photograph more if they know it was taken by a famous photographer. Social status is a positional good. It's not possible to have high social status unless others have low social status, and those with low social status are in the majority. They cannot be successful photographers, no matter how good their skills, because technical advances have made skills much less important than status. This kind of change limits social mobility and is bad for society.

I see your point, but I think this kind of meritocratic status increases mobility, at least for talented people. Instead of having say someone give me $50,000 to open a store front studio, I can buy camera equipment for a couple thousand bucks, open a website and start advertising in Instagram, FB whatever (side note, I do some photography on the side, and book most of my paid work from organic marketing there) and be in business. Creative enterprises in particular are fields where talent, not inherited social status, determine ones success.

And yes there are OK photographers (Annie Leibowitz comes to mind) who just cash in on their brand. But I knew one guy who worked as a florist, and built a high-end wedding photography bussines. He was not rich, but had artistic talent and marketing savvy, and now has people working for him.

I would suggest that the growing gap you describe is a symptom of continued application of neoliberal policies. It is not that there was a status quo for the last 40 years, it is that the last 40 years has seen accelerating erosion of the conditions/social contract established in western countries in the post depression/WW2 era.

Placing the rights of capital above all others, particularly giving capital a level of mobility that is not afforded labour, combined with an unquestioning embrace of trade liberalisation results in a race to the bottom for labour.

It is only due to the stranglehold of neoliberal thinking on modern economic thought that globalisation is considered inevitable.

I would suggest that the growing gap comes because government steals from the poor and gives to the rich through inflation.

One ought to have seen a dividend for the working guy due to lowered prices from increased efficiency brought about by technology, but instead the Fed has chosen to favor "stable prices" which is done by lowering interest rates (I.e. making it easier for rich people to access capital)

Deflation, not inflation, steals from the poor and gives to the rich. Deflation depresses wages and increases the value of assets (including outstanding debts! rich people use debt, poor people have debt.)

I'd argue both hurt poor people. Wage growth typically lags behind inflation.

poor people either aren't in debt (because no one will lend to them), or have debt on such short timescales or high interest rates that inflation has a negligible effect on the real value of their indebtedness.

Now there's an interesting thought experiment: what does a country with high internal labor mobility look like?

> These are social consequences of the growing gap between highly skilled and low-skilled workers. The former are more and more important to the economy even as the latter become less so with technological progress and globalization

The thing is though, janitors aren't any less important or in demand than they were a 50 years ago, or retail workers, burger flippers, waiters. Less of the low skill work has been offshored than the high skill frankly because it's all service industry, it requires locality.

But their careers have been cut short by their employers becoming international conglomerates that simply don't promote from the ranks. You start on the shop floor, you die on the shop floor; and wage compression does the rest. The exceptions are very rare (mcdonalds and a few others).

I'm not so sure of that ... what's the upward mobility of a small 20 person factory that's probably owned by a family that has the top three jobs in the company? Vs a large company with 3000 employees?

> "The thing is though, janitors aren't any less important or in demand than they were a 50 years ago, or retail workers, burger flippers, waiters."

I think you might be underestimating the shift towards automation that is occurring in many services industries, and will only accelerate as robotics and other technologies improve [1].

As soon as companies can automate a robot (or outsource remote control of a non-autonomous one to a cheaper country), they will unless they position themselves on the quality of their human-based customer care, which is an increasingly rare thing.

[1] http://www.salon.com/2015/05/10/robots_are_coming_for_your_j...

It doesn't help that not only does the US not adopt free college and other educational programs to ensure its workforce is prepared for the 21st century going forward (as an investment into the country's future, not a "freebie" - just like infrastructure spending), but it actually gives everyone large amounts of life-long debt through the broken tuition loan system it has put in place.

Then, they export all low-skill (or even higher skill) jobs abroad.

So the low-skilled masses are getting screwed from all sides.

Why you believe that a workforce prepared for the 21 century requires at minimum 16 years of education?

This over application of degrees for jobs that should not need a degree at all is one of the problems. Vocational Training should be the path the vast majority of people take, and should be all that is required for the vast majority of even 21 century jobs.

We do not need government provided schools, we need to restructure our very idea of what education is, and employers need to stop over valuing a degree.

No! Honestly, I think it is the exact opposite. You need more than 16 years of education for the jobs of the future. Vocational teaching cannot teach you statistics and linear algebra required for machine learning, which itself again, cannot be taught in vocational training. For each of these you need all the math prerequisites up to and including freshman undergrad!

Hmmm, how about tradies? eg plumbers

They're not unskilled at all, but they also don't go to "college" for the majority of their on-the-job learning.

Regular people do not need to learn machine learning. Vocational training sounds great for all the ambiguous and hard to specify tasks required for essentially every industry.

These fruits of all our machine learning labors will take some time to materialize.

What do you do with the people who are too dumb to go to college?

Serious question; one that seems to get left out among the college educated who are running the place. It's like basketball players assuming everyone is over 6 feet tall and athletic.

Simple: you dumb college down.

If college is the new high school, then college becomes a default path that is more valued for its socialization experience than for academic knowledge imparted. And like AP classes in high school, you have hard majors where the "life of mind" is taught, and push the smart kids to go into those.

Don't know if you're serious, but there's a problem here: an enormous rent, in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, is now being extracted from the students sent in for "socialization" -- both in direct costs to the college, and indirectly in the reduction of their earning potential during those years. Furthermore, it is being extracted specifically from a class of people who probably have a hard time laying their hands on that money, and being paid to already upper-class people. We managed to socialize ourselves in the past just fine without doing this.

"Free" college, by the way, does not solve this problem; all it does is slightly improve the lot of the poor by instead spreading the rent over the class of all taxpayers, while making the payouts to an unproductive administrative class even bigger. I suspect the second part explains the popularity of this idea among the administrative class, though.

I'm confused about calling student loans "socializing". This seems like an essence of American capitalism. Elsewhere, in more "socialized" parts of the world, college is free and total costs are nowhere near that of the US, because it's much less profitable for rent-seekers to set up shop where there isn't much money flowing.

Different kind of socializing, I imagine. The sort of training-wheels for life as a real adult that college tends to be. With all the "networking", which usually manifests as getting blackout drunk on cheap alcohol and bad weed three or four nights a week.

OK, put it a different way: if society requires you have an IQ of 115 to make a decent living, what are you going to do with the people with IQ scores below 115? It's pretty much the same statement as above, minus the apparently confusing mention of college.

College is already dumbed down.

IMO, what people with a 100 IQ can do, and what people with 115 can do isn't that significant. 100 IQ people can be better at some things than people with 115 IQ.

We've kind of made a fetish of IQ without really understanding intelligence to begin with.

You just wind up giving dumb people a degree. The better solution is to make it illegal for employers to ask about college/post college education, except for perhaps certain fields like law or medicine (though the relevant licenses should really suffice in those cases).

Colleges will never make dumb people into smart people who can solve problems independently. People who can solve problems and innovate are the only ones who will succeed in the new economy. I know CS grads with shiny new graduate-level degrees who can't even solve problems, they need to be told exactly what to do from a technical perspective to solve a business problem (e.g. if the boss is asking you for data on X, you'll need to write a SQL query into Y and Z databases (which they already knew existed), and then put the results into a graph in Excel).

How would this work in practice? Job seekers would still be allowed to advertise their education, and surely nearly all would. Wouldn't employers just pass over candidates who didn't?

That's a fair point. My knee jerk reaction is to say well, prohibit discussion of education then... Kind of like how parental status, race and in some places criminal history, can only be discussed after a certain stage of the hiring process.

On the other hand maybe it'll weed out things like QSR managers who were asking for degrees at the peek of the recession just because they could.

Of course...

I think everyone should have to spend the first 40 years of their life in some kind of government run institution being learned....

Only then can they be true productive members of society...

This is an insane answer, I know.

When we're at a point in the super far future when automation does everything that a below average intelligence human can do, maybe we could raise the average. Maybe through genetic engineering offspring.

How insane is that I wonder?

First, I'd question the use of the word 'dumb'. That said, I think the question is worth some thought. My thought on the matter is that there are plenty of vital roles that don't depend on college, e.g. plumbers, fire fighters, and many kinds of heath care and service sector roles. College might be best suited for those who deal in abstractions... but there are plenty of necessary concrete jobs as well.

>but there are plenty of necessary concrete jobs as well.

Fewer and fewer of them unfortunately. Just wait until self-driving trucks put 5 million truck drivers out of work...

Very. Long. Wait.

There will have to be more of them than college jobs, as there are more people with "less than college" smarts. Those jobs don't seem to have materialized.

The libertarian worldview obviously exists, but it exists to inform the traditional oppression-based (left) or barbarism-based (right) fear-sets.

It doesn't seem sustainable as a politics. Liberty as a value is not a thing competitive with fear. There are generally much (many?) fewer narratives that illustrate why liberty is important than why oppression or barbarism is. But there will be synthesis of libertarian concepts into those ideas.