It is my opinion but I believe this is going to be much harder to fix than just teaching new skills. Specifically for those individuals I described above. We need to fix how we as a country approach education and how our population views it before we can move ahead with teaching those already out of the system, and jaded by it, new skills.
That depends on if you live in a society that believes people should be free to pursue their 'dreams' or in one that uses work as a measure of a persons worth.
The US is the latter.
People pay lip service to letting people expand their horizons and bettering themselves right before they tell you to get back to work.
Simply because I said the US is an example of one way does not mean other country is an example of the other, which is what the OP I was responding to was talking about. The US is just one of the worst examples of your worth being tied to your work.
Away from the coasts nobody is looked down on for joining the military for a couple years or the peace corps or going for missionary or volunteer work. Go find yourself, go work off some energy, come back calm and ready to settle down. On the coasts, people who do stuff like that are hated, reviled, made fun of.
Hell, I'm looked down at by my in-laws because IT isn't 'real work.'
Choose to try to learn how to play an instrument, or some other artistic endeavor and the first thing everyone will ask you is 'how do you plan to make money with that?' You'll get a lot of 'that's nice dear, but how do you intend to live.' You will be met with nothing but condescension because you are not perusing work. Stick with not working and you'll be 'that weirdo down the street.'
> ready to settle down
And work like an adult because you're not an adult and worthy of being treated like one until you work.
No ones, but they also want to eat, have a home, and provide for their offspring
> As mentioned, take these "prime aged workers" teach them skills, and suddenly we have a spike in actually valuable labor instead of a middle class of unfulfilled office drones stuck in a stupor.
What about the people that can not be taught "skills", what about when the machines take over their skills? What about ... 100 other scenarios I can come up with
>the framing should be look at this amazing business opportunity to onboard high value workers, not cautionary doom.
To do what, exactly? No job is safe from automation. To deny the potential for this new wave of automation to create massive poverty is to deny reality.
We have ti adjust how society functions, how we look at labor, and honestly how we look at human rights.
If we do not, if we hold to the same Social Structure of 40 hours a week with minimum amount of pay as possible all that will be is suffering for the majority, because even in this "utopia" where you can take 100% of the lower skilled worker and magically impart upon them more skills all you have done is flood the market with a greater supply of workers for those higher skilled jobs while no increasing the demand for them. Economics 101 tells up that results in a reduction in the price of that labor, so what was once "valuable labor" is no longer valuable.
Someone who wants to provide for their families, not worry too much about work, and be able to enjoy their weekend?
" IMO, the framing should be look at this amazing business opportunity to onboard high value workers, not cautionary doom."
How?
Manufacturing used to be a solid living for those who were none-too-bright but capable of semi-skilled drudge work for 8-12 hours a day. More and more, those people are getting left out in the cold. I feel badly for them, but I don't know what the answer is. I was smart enough to go to college and get a degree in something technical, find a job and make good money. Most of my high school classmates would be ecstatic if the old jobs in the paper mills and the shoe shops and the sawmills that their parents and grandparents had were still available.
You starve people enough, hunger drives some interesting responses. If keeping your iphone means watching your kid die, lots of people will totally go for some kind of neo-Amish 1950s revival. Or just go full on Amish. Currently the Amish standard of living is somewhat higher than the general population and that is only going to increase in the future as the median standard of living continues to decline with technological "progress" and environmental change, while the Amish hold relatively constant, which is going to drive lots of recruitment.
If you give a choice of living under a bridge while starving in iphone-land or being a successful carpenter in Amish-land, well, kinda a no brainer choice there...
Plus you still have a huge mass of unemployed people who ended up in those jobs because they lacked either the aptitude of temperament to gain skills in the first place, or are too old, poor or poorly situated to take advantage of the opportunity now.
Soon, due to the dearth of people employed, and the shrinking wages of the minority who are, there is no longer enough people left with money to buy most goods and services. As a result, businesses start to shut down, exacerbating unemployment and sending the economy into a contractionary death spiral.
Yes, in a healthy job market, people will gradually retrain and relocate in order to fill demand. But what we're talking about here is a total breakdown in the jobs market, to the point where it becomes non-functional.
It's the difference between supply problems causing the prices of a few foodstuffs to rise, and an unending drought that destroys harvests year after year. The market can cope with the first, but not the second. The result will be famine and mass starvation.
This stuff has been and is tried all the time and doesn't typically work out. It needs a major rethink if we're to invest substantially in them.
"As mentioned, take these "prime aged workers" teach them skills, and suddenly we have a spike in actually valuable labour."
Note this is how finance has been hiring line engineers for years.
It's the flip side of why high minimum wages cause more unemployment. Some work activities are just not worth $15/hr.
There might be a very local substitute effect where in a small enough area part of a large enough system, almost any arbitrary value can be applied and it'll be filled, as long as its a small enough area and a large enough system. Along the lines of 10000000 monkeys on typewriters might not produce Shakespeare anytime soon but you can expect the occasional short English language word in that stream fairly often.
And if they are not already doing it, how do you 'start with' them?