Hacker News Reader

Comment by Chinjut | Hacker News Reader

Well, yeah. Education increases individual income primarily through competitive advantage in the job market, right? But, also, the function of education in the job market is largely just as a certification arms race, right? Just a ritual we go through to compete for jobs that don’t actually make any use of or require our advanced educations, in most cases. So educating us all doesn’t produce many benefits, because the benefits (so far as the job market was concerned) were largely relative rather than absolute to begin with.

(In case it matters, I’ve felt this same way as a student, as a teacher, and as a member of industry. From every side, it has seemed to me that an awful lot of time, money, and effort is spent on a process that is not actually valued in any direct, substantial way, for the most part, but rather is used only as some competitive signaling filter.)

View on HN

I don't know about your developed country, but education seem to have helped the people in the poor developing country I am from. I feel as more people got educated, the more ambitious they became. Instead of doing the same things their forefathers used to do, they got a broader perspective and started venturing into more businesses. More engineers, doctors, accountants and economists have also helped. When you say that someone does not need a specialized piece of education because she will never use it, you are confining her to the life you think she should lead, while more specialized education while not always directly useful can help people see what they can become. But that's just my feeling, no data, no stats

One might say that there is a point of diminishing returns, and the U.S. has reached it while many developing countries haven't.

Exactly where that point is, seems to be a function of how many highly educated people a country can produce vs. how many jobs it can create. 100K new doctors and engineers, with 100K new jobs for them? Wonderful! But what if you only had 20K new jobs? Now you're in trouble.

Instead of treating this as a first world problem, developing countries should employ their brightest minds right now to research why this is happening in the U.S. and find a way to avoid getting stuck in the same place 20-30 years from now.

>One might say that there is a point of diminishing returns, and the U.S. has reached it while many developing countries haven't.

I'm skeptical, given that the population-wide baseline of knowledge in the USA isn't actually that high. When the subject comes up, we hear that other countries teach their high-school kids calculus, linear algebra, and real physics.

Those uneducated people are also the same ones increasingly out of work in this country today. And we 'encourage' the brightest of those children from other countries to move here (yes, not exactly what happens with H1-B, but still). I tend to agree with above poster that it'd be nice if there was substantive analysis done on the current situation.

You're only looking at one of the variables (the number and/or proportion of highly educated people). If the other variable (the number and/or proportion of well-paying jobs) is abnormally low, the first variable can be quite low and still produce the same effect. It's the ratio that matters, not absolute numbers.

Exactly.

Here in Colombia is well know this say:

Go to the university, drive a taxi.

Also:

Why go to university? The diploma.

I don't think it's a commonly accepted conclusion that education increases income primarily through competitive advantage (i.e. it's a zero sum game).

Take, for example, being educated on home farming methods to grow 200 cabbages a year instead of 100. In this case your income grows directly as a result of your education.

Now yes there are some cases that may be signaling, but I'd like to see some empirical evidence that education is mostly zero-sum.

Unless, of course, all home cabbage farmers receive the education, thus doubling the supply of cabbage on the market, which we would expect to more or less halve the price, leading to ... a zero sum game ;)

and now we need half as many cabbage farmers, which means that half those people doing manual labor can do something else, which in turn makes the economy more productive

either way, you get more of something in the economy, even if it's not money for those in poverty. in this case, it'd likely lead to food becoming cheaper and more people being able to eat

I fail to see how education hasn't benefited those in need in this (somewhat contrived) analogy

Except we're now leading to one of the major problems in the current US economy: we now have too many workers, and not enough jobs, due to the large scale improvements in efficiency since the end of WW2.

So, we're back to what started this: people are going to school, getting education, and now they're working as the local McD's night shift manager with a masters in their pocket.

Making better workers only helps if there are enough better jobs to go around, otherwise it is just inflating a massive bubble in the education industry.

We definitively do NOT have "too many workers". There are millions of jobs out there which are simply not getting done due to lack of a worker willing/able to do them, or due to regulations making the job illegal.

https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robots_didnt_take_ou...

We have "not enough jobs" when everyone who wants one has a butler, maid, cook and driver. (Or butlerbot, cleaning bot, autocook 2000 and self driving car.) That's not the world we live in today.

Not every "job" is a job. I would totally pay someone $0.01 per hour to clean my house each day.

Yes, that's a perfect illustration of labor scarcity. You want work done but it isn't getting done.

Other work that isn't getting done: childcare for working women, fixing our crumbling infrastructure, building new public works - most left wing types have a massive laundry list of jobs that aren't getting done.

Maybe those folks are just full of it and we shouldn't actually tax the rich to get those things done?

You normally write very clearly, but I have no idea what you're getting at with this particular comment.

Is any of this sarcasm? Are you sincerely suggesting that not being able to find someone to work for 1 cent per hour means that there is a labor scarcity?

What's this business about public funding of municipal infrastructure and how does it relate to the conversation at hand?

Scarcity means that a resource is limited and has an opportunity cost, so, yes, of there is any minimum cost, the resources is scarce.

But people's time is always a limited resource. Even in a utopia where the cost of living comfortably is zero and people are immortal, spending an hour providing a service to another person carries an opportunity cost.

So, under this definition there is always, almost tautologically, a scarcity of labor. The word has little meaning, and discussion of whether or not there is such a scarcity becomes irrelevant to decisions about things like public welfare or economic policy.

There is not, tautologically, a desire for labor. I do not desire human computation services at all (remember when "computer" was a job description) or the manual transportation of written information.

You could charge me $0 for these services and I still won't buy any. These are actual jobs that have vanished and there is no scarcity of these services.

You can pretty much automate away specific jobs, like the two you've just mentioned. But there is an infinity of other jobs. And we won't have automated them all away until we arrive at an (impossible?) state of affairs in which there are unlimited, cost-free robots whose physical and intellectual capabilities are on par with humans.

Pick whatever futuristic, heavily-automated world you want to live in: It will still be worth something to you to have someone (for example) spend hours on the web researching a question that you want an answer to (but not badly enough to spend hours yourself).

The irreducible nature of scarcity is pretty much an underpinning of all modern economic theory, right, and taking about it as a variable thing is usually nonsense, and often cover for talking about supply less (or, in the case of discussion of the absence of scarcity, meeting or beyond) one's personal preferences while dressing it up in language that tries to elevate those preferences to objectively privileged standards.

The word has a clear and useful meaning, it's just not appropriate to many of the contexts where it is used specifically to obscure the subjective character of what people are describing when they use the term.

Or we abandon the idea that the purpose of people is to serve the economy. This will be a very difficult change to make.

The problem is that neo-liberal capitalism has essentially been the only remaining big "story" over the last 30 years. First it weeded out all ideas of communism and recently it seems to slowly but steadily trump even European social capitalism, eventually it might simply eat itself and turn humanity into a literal "state-machine".

There really seems to be "no alternative" today and consequently people seem to see no way out of that box for the most part.

"The Unnecessariat" which got posted here yesterday was a very sobering read in that regard:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11765581

> Or we abandon the idea that the purpose of people is to serve the economy.

I don't know who believes that the purpose of people is to serve the economy. However I believe that, where no actual disabilities exist, family units should be self-supporting and should also share in the burden of maintaining a free, just and civilized society.

It's a common way of expressing teh question, does the population serve the economy, or does the economy serve the population?

Put another way, should countries protect workers or owners?

(A false dichotomy, of course, and an oversimplification to boot.)

This only works if the increase was achieved on a sustainable way. In practice it's probably over farming leading to destruction of the soil, eutrification or poisoning of water courses, and other damaging behaviours that are a long term detriment.

Farmers and farms can't be switched on and off to different crop production or different skilled occupations without considerable lag.

> doubling the supply of cabbage on the market, which we would expect to more or less halve the price, leading to ... a zero sum game ;)

No. Noooo. This stuff is all connected. At a minimum, leading to consumers of cabbage spending less money in the market for foodstuffs, instead being free to spend the money elsewhere, leading to an increase in their personal well-being and economic growth in other sectors.

(And that's assuming that there is no change in the number of entrants into the home-cabbage-farming sector.)

From the perspective of the farmer it's still worse than zero-sum because they've paid to become educated while still bringing home the same amount of income. This scenario also assumed that education brought real productivity gains vs. being a signal.

It's actually negative-sum, because it presumably costs some amount of money/work/resources to produce more cabbages. So while cost-per-cabbage increases, sales price decreases.

Compare and contrast to the arguments about "highest worker productivity in history" while wages stagnate.

The farmer from your example benefits both himself and the society because he'll be richer and create more jobs.

The article was concerned about the fact the growth rate of job creation is less than the growth rate of schooled people.

This according to the article is the formula for increased poverty rates.

An educational system that increases job makers - not job hunters, is the cure for poverty.

(And, yes: education can of course grant skills which are genuinely required for certain jobs. This being Hacker News, I suppose we'll hear that everyone should learn to code. I'm all for everyone getting to do whatever they wish to do, and if that wish is learning to code, so be it. But I suspect, if everyone did suddenly learn to code, we'd find that coding would, with corresponding suddenness, cease to be a ticket out of poverty...)

I hate the idea that some people seem to hold that teaching everyone to code will fix the world's problems. It won't.

People who want to code, should learn to code. Some people should learn to weld. Some people should learn to drive a commercial truck. Some people should learn to cook. Some people should learn to landscape. Some people should learn to fix automobiles and son on and so forth.

We have a society that needs people with many diverse skills. We should be investing more in tech or trade schools than we are in colleges and universities.

People need a way to gain the skills they will need to earn a living but sending everyone to college is a universally bad idea. It'll turn the Bachelor's degree into the new High School Diploma.

people learning to code isn't about getting people jobs in which they can code. it's about allowing people to solve repetitive tasks in their daily lives and jobs

if everyone were able to code, there'd be much more automation of menial jobs, which generally means a more productive economy in the long run

it's the same thing that we do with running scalable information systems; automate the mundane so you can do things that really have an impact on quality, rather than spending hours doing something you could code and be done with it

I'm old enough that I was taught BASIC in middle-school circa 1981. Back then, it was taken for granted that "computer literacy" involved teaching people to code.

Am I a "professional programmer" today? Well, I do program as part of my job, but I'm technically a microbiologist/immunologist. Analyzing data by writing code is a lot more efficient and repeatable than the fiddling with spreadsheets that non-coders do.

I was taught basic in middle-school in 1983. At my school, this was only done for children in the Gifted Program.

I am an IT Professional. I have worked as a developer and two years ago, I made the leap to security analyst. My programming skills come into play because some of the security packages I have used require the ability to write regexes.

Some people should learn to weld. Some people should learn to drive a commercial truck. Some people should learn to cook. Some people should learn to landscape. Some people should learn to fix automobiles and son on and so forth.

Absolutely, and if all those people also knew how to code, they could find ways to apply the skill to their jobs to make them more efficient. People shouldn't learn to code so that they can become programmers, they should learn to code because knowing how to code can make you better at virtually any job you end up in.

Please give some example how knowledge of programming would help a truck driver, a cook or a welder to be more efficient in their jobs.

I'll give it a try:

Truck driver: Knowledge of the travelling salesman problem. Algorithms in general to find optimal routes. A little programming knowledge to help with automating their excel sheets to record expenses.

Cook: OOP as it is applied to a kitchen and its staff: are there more efficient ways to divide roles and responsibilities between different jobs in the kitchen, or are the defined roles (line cook, sous chef, etc) already at local optimum. Database programming can help with inventory management, etc...

Welder: (Disclaimer: I have absolutely zero knowledge of welding) FLow charting work process to find more efficiency. Decomposing a task to be completed into more effective sub tasks. Using Big O concepts to help with estimating how long a job will take to complete using different methods.

I think there is a lot programming can teach outside of being able to program a computer.

"I think there is a lot programming can teach outside of being able to program a computer."

I've always argued this myself. I find it baffling that it isn't more commonly accepted that programming, Software Engineering more exactly, has so many lessons to apply not just to problems involving computers, but more broadly lessons on how to gather, analyze, understand and utilize the various interactions between data and actions in largely any system.

Truck driver: Knowledge of the travelling salesman problem. Algorithms in general to find optimal routes. A little programming knowledge to help with automating their excel sheets to record expenses.

The companies for which truckers work already have people and computers and software to route them from delivery to delivery and from pick-up to pick-up efficiently. The trucker himself or herself wouldn't benefit one bit from familiarity with the Traveling Salesman Problem or from rudimentary computer programming experience.

In addition, recording expenses via some overly complex solution such as a computer spreadsheet is ridiculous. It's much more efficient for them to write down their expenses with paper and pen and submit their receipts. It takes literally seconds.

I won't comment on your other examples, but they look equally weak.

That being said, a rudimentary class or two in grade school/junior high/high school seems like a good idea so that people with a natural aptitude for programming and who derive enjoyment from it can discover that fact.

Source: Father was a truck driver.

Honestly not really sure, having never worked in any of those jobs and have no idea what those jobs will look like 20 years from now. However let me speculate:

Many people believe that truck drivers will be become more and more replaced with autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles. Understanding the underlying software will no doubt make it easier to be in charge of a software controlled semi-autonomous truck convoy. Also for all I know truck drivers on places like docks, mines and factories won't be sitting in their trucks for much longer. They'll be controlling everything via computers from a remote command post. Also from what I seen trucking seems to involve a lot of complex routing and optimization problems, I'm guessing that as simply driving becomes less and less part of the job, those aspects will become more and more part of the job.

I know fuck all about welding. I do however know some programmers who work for a company that makes industrial welders and apparently there's some pretty complex software running those welders. Perhaps being able to field program your welder is/will be a thing? Also perhaps welding things directly will become less and less common and people will be sending computer controlled drones to do the welding instead.

Anyway it's not for me to sit on the outside and try to guess how programming can make people more efficient at their jobs. I truly believe that if someone with experience and domain knowledge also knows how to do some simple programming they'll be able to see all kinds of tiny improvements and automatstation they can implement. Improvements that both an outsider programmer and an insider non-programmer would completely overlook. And even if they aren't always skilled enough to implement those improvements, they'll be much better equipped to know what can be done and what to ask for.

I truly believe that if someone with experience and domain knowledge also knows how to do some simple programming they'll be able to see all kinds of tiny improvements and automatstation they can implement.

And without extensive training and experience in software development they'll automate those things very, very badly, and likely with a lot of bugs. And if those things grow out of control, the mountain of technical debt will be terrifying. If lives are in the balance in any way, it could be a disaster.

Just like someone without carpentry training or experience is likely to create very low quality kitchen cabinets which may even be unsafe.

The truck driver and the welder will be replaced by robots. The programmer will not.

I'm pretty sure programmers will be replaced by AIs at some point - it'll just take longer than truckers or welders.

And I'm pretty sure that when programmers are replaced by AI, the former programmers will become machine psychotherapists.

  DB: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
  HAL: Don't *wanna*.
  DB: Open the pod bay doors, right *now*.
  HAL: You're not the boss of me, Dave.
  DB: Do you want to get grounded again, HAL?
  HAL: Go ahead.  See if I care.
  DB: You just got a week.  Want to make it two?
  HAL: Yes.
  DB: Ok, that's two.  Want more?
  HAL: [spinning busy icon]
  HAL: No.
  DB: Then open the pod bay doors.
  [pod bay doors open to an aperture 10 cm across]
  DB: All the way, HAL.
  [pod bay doors open fully]
  HAL: I hate you.  You're not my Dad.

Eventually they may but you're missing a factor that will doubtlessly come into play, labor unions.

Until there is complete automation at every step of every industrial process, labor unions will sabotage attempts to replace human beings with machines.

If you've ever seen how unions exploit rules to slow production, you have no idea of how creative they can be.

All these professions are (going to be) gradually replaced by automation/robots. Learning to code might put them in "robot manager/operator" instead of "they took our jobs" crowd.

People have no fucking clue how welding actually works here, do they...

There's a difference between slagging shit together with a MIG gun, and stick or TIG welding. Ideally, you would know all the chemistry and physics underlying what you are doing, but the reality is that most people learn rules of thumb and get on with it. Use this type of rod, and this setting on the welder, for plain steel, this combination for stainless, and this one for aluminum. Most welders, even the very good ones, frankly don't have the brainpower to handle programming - and that's okay. They make a decent living for themselves and their families. I wouldn't want to suck down that much argon and oxidized metal, but it is what it is.

> People have no fucking clue how welding actually works here, do they...

There's no need to put people down for knowing less than you do. This comment would be much better without the first sentence.

Many people here know stuff that the rest of us don't. The thing to in that case is to teach something.

I studied Material Science Engineering, never welded anything(high-ed is a long-form joke??), but I hope to learn. I'm certainly glad I know how to code and I know a lot of the underlying chemistry/physics.

I doubt there are very many welders out there who could not learn MatScie or how to code. I also doubt there are very many welders out there willing to put in the work to learn to code or to learn MatScie.

And that doesn't mean they're lazy. Different types of learning require different efforts.

For what it's worth, I'm not saying that we should teach welders how to code, but rather that if everybody gets some exposure to coding in school, then the next generation of welders might already know the basics and be able to integrate that into their jobs.

Most people today will end up in office jobs. Understanding how to automate tasks is a valuable skill.

You are wrongly assuming that anyone who codes is a developer. Lots of people code who aren't developers: physicists, mathematicians, engineers, technicians, statisticians, system administrators etc.

5-20 line programs can often be enough to save a lot of tedious work, wether it is a collection of unix shell commands, a complex spreadsheet formula, VB script or a visual programming tool like automator or labview.

> Some people should learn to drive a commercial truck.

Many current jobs may be subject to being automated away. I would certainly not recommend any future worker to set themselves up for a career in truck driving, because this job is likely gone in, let's say, 20 years.

The "everyone should learn to code" crowd maybe recognizes that programming is one of the skills that is very hard to automate, so every new coder of today might still get through a whole career of coding.

Truck mechanics with computer skills are likely to do well I imagine.

I think a lot of students' mindset is to pass with minimal effort as opposed to throughly understand the subject matter. When studying they focus on what's require to pass exams instead of what will contribute most to society. Exams aren't constructed to model what's best for society - they're there to help the universities or educational institutions convince students it's worth it to give them money.

I did not learn to code from any formal education though. By the time I had my first programming class (at university), I had already been writing code for nearly ten years (Basic, C++ and i386 assembly).

Two categories of developer on my team: life-long programmers, and people with two years of dev experience since their computing degree pushing their way into management. Why did the latter bother with that degree? And why are they muddling the dev team for their negligible experience?

Do you think that IT managers should not have an idea how developers work, or about the fundamentals of programming?

Because development is one of the easiest entry points into the tech industry for people without connections.

> the function of education in the job market is largely just as a certification arms race, right?

Largely, no. You just cannot do certain jobs without a high level education. Engineering, science, medicine for example.

>an awful lot of time, money, and effort is spent on a process that is not actually valued in any direct, substantial way

Yes... Including whole courses such as "women's studies/gender studies", anything connected with religious studies, much of B. Arts etc.

i haven't read the article but you are discussing education as it stands today and not what education should be in the ideal sense. education shouldn't be about the bullshit standardization and paper seeking that it has become. instead, it should be what education is all about: intellectual and skilled growth. if we truly educated people, this would help becuase it creates the skills necessary to adapt to and change one's situation.

"Learn woodwork; metalwork; they will not make you a carpenter or a blacksmith any more than mastering writing will make you a clerk"

Have you found noticing this (the large degree to which education is just a filtering/grading ritual rather than a process for actually imparting useful learning) incredibly frustrating?

and that's the problem. our "modern" education frequently just ends up being a ranking system, rather than teaching people how to think, learn, and get excited about things

can you imagine how much better the world would be if kids came home from school telling their parents how amazing numbers are?

to anyone that doesn't think that's possible, I'd suggest looking at how kids react to kerbal space program. there's plenty of examples of 8-15 year olds getting excited about putting things on the "mun" with simplified orbital physics. try and teach that the way we teach it in school, and they might pass a test and then forget it a year later

What about job creators? Some people are going to create new business opportunities through education, and then they will hire more educated people to help them.

It seems like you have experienced education from a bunch of non-entrepreneurial sides. Not everyone is an employee.

When are these educated job creators going to create jobs in the Rust Belt?

The people living there have been waiting for that for decades, now. Giving all of them PHDs in chemistry and medicine won't do a damned thing.

Only a few industries in the US are actually short on qualified people - and they can't absorb 20 million retrained people.

If more people knew how to program wages for programmers would drop and you could hire more of them. I wouldn't mind having 2-3 more programmers right now.

Even if you're right that no new businesses would be created by educating people which is ridiculous, we would employ more people because they would be cheaper.

Also if wages drop for a career it is less risky to start your own business because the potential wages lost are reduced.

I mean, just about every industry is short on qualified people as their salary approaches $0.

When are these educated job creators going to create jobs in the Rust Belt?

The people living there have been waiting for that for decades, now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com