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Comment by CodeSheikh | Hacker News Reader

"To counter these trends, the U.S. must invest in raising the skills of the workers most likely to be affected by the disappearance of routine jobs..." Not sure how's that going to play out for example a welding machine operator can't become a mechanical engineer in a short span of time because those routine jobs are eventually going to be consumed by automated robots, per this study. Why not motivate people to look into alternative booming industries? Healthcare and therapists for example. With aging population, people would require more health therapists and similar service oriented jobs.

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elder-care cannot possibly be a solid basis for the economy. they are not in their working years and are not (on the average) contributing positive sums to GDP or tax revenue.

there is a humanitarian case to be made for improved quality of life for elderly people, but I can't imagine that there is a reasonable economic case to be made for it, unless you're arguing that the elder-care industry is just an elaborate substitution for more traditional methods (inheritance and taxation) of redistributing the accumulated wealth of the elderly. aside from that, it strikes me as spiritually corrosive to set up a society in which the young are caring for the old simply so they can pay their rent. this is a kind of gerontocracy.

It seems to me that what is needed is alternative industries that are booming because they create new economic opportunities in a generative fashion. an industry that is booming because the core economic and social dynamics of our society have gotten out-of-whack is not really much of a solid future for people facing job displacement.

I don't understand the reasoning here, like, at all. For decades now researchers have been pointing out the demographic issues of aging populations and the workforces required to care for them. I don't know the specific numbers, but they're doubtless enormous. Why wouldn't they be a significant part of the economy?

Not the above poster, but their point appears to be that caring for the elderly doesn't CONTRIBUTE to the economy (i.e. as a transaction it adds to GDP, but in terms of value-creation it's near zilch. So while a blue-collar worker might add value by creating a product, an elder care worker adds only humanitarian benefit. (And unlike a doctor that can help those blue collar workers continue to work, there isn't even much INDIRECT value-addition to elder care).

To continue my devil-advocacy, I'm sure the above poster wouldn't argue AGAINST elder care on humanitarian grounds, but is instead saying this is not where you want to redirect significant portions of your workforce, because you'll tank value-addition and harm everyone (including those elderly patients).

Personally, I find the argument a little repulsive, but also an important argument to refute. So I'm glad it was raised.

My rebuttal would be that with increased automation we're doing fine in value-addition, and the entire point of having positive wealth creation is to improve the overall well-being of a lot of people (I was going to say "as many as possible", but that might not be agreed to by some). If we skip the "reward" of a society's wealth-creation, why are we doing it again?

That was the "logic" I took from that comment too, but it still doesn't make any sense. We spend money on all sorts of things that don't "contribute" (in this weird, narrow sense) to the economy. But of course, most things we spend money on do in fact contribute to the economy: the money goes into the pockets of the people providing the service, who go on to buy things with that money and fuel the economy.

That's what I meant when I said I didn't understand the reasoning of the comment --- like, at all, even a little bit.

I'll ask you, then, to focus less on the GDP/value-add side of the argument and more on the "spiritually corrosive to individuals and society" side of the argument.

Are you conceding the economics? (You probably should, unless I'm missing some subtlety of your argument.) That's really all I care about here.

no, I'm not conceding the economics. I don't have any hidden subtlety here, it seems fairly obvious to me that elder-care is redistributive (money from old people to their servants) rather than productive. quite a lot of service jobs are like this, except in many other cases the redistribution is not from accumulated wealth from the past, but from newly produced wealth in the present.

that might be of some net economic benefit anyway, purely on the basis of freeing up money that would otherwise be stuck in sequestration from the rest of the economy. however, I'm not sure what "flaw" in my economic claim you're trying to point out. can you be more explicit?

I would ask you, however, to actually care more about the non-economic part of the argument. I believe that's the more important part.

This isn't even wrong. In market transactions, there's no dichotomy between "redistribution" and "productivity". There's "redistributive" tax and economic policies that governments enact, by political fiat. Those policies are almost the opposite of market transactions.

Using the definition you've proposed, it's hard to think of any service transaction, from doctors visits to architectural consults, that isn't somehow "redistributive".

I believe the general view is that 'non value producing' service jobs add value by saving the time of and thus amplifying the productiveness of individuals with 'value producing' jobs.

If you are comparing the economic effect of a growing industry of elder care to a society where no elder care occurs, then I can see how you might draw the conclusion that growth in this industry is a waste because these are not 'value producing' jobs.

In reality, a society where no elder care occurs is not the alternative as some form of elder care would be taking place. People who work doing elder care are amplifying the productiveness of the friends, family and neighbors who do have 'value producing' jobs.

Personally, I think our current styles of elder care and our ageist biases waste a lot of economic potential and social value by wasting the time of our elders. I think that finding ways to tap this potential while providing better care for our elders would be the OPPOSITE of spiritually corrosive. As it is, many find working in elder care quite rewarding, especially when that elder care happens in less institutional and dehumanizing settings.

"spiritually corrosive to individuals and society" seems less of a fact and more of a narrow personal opinion. I personally don't consider caring for the elderly as a corrosive/demeaning job.

a person who _wants_ to be an elder-care service provider will not find it spiritually corrosive. a person who is forced to re-train to work in elder care because the job they used to perform was automated/off-shored is much more likely to find it spiritually corrosive.

a young person seeking employment at the beginning of their career might find it deeply troubling as well (assuming there were not enough good alternatives to working in elder-care), as it represents an inversion of social and economic priority from the future (young people) to the past (the elderly).

Then what's "corrosive" is the loss of jobs. Please leave older people out of it.

No, I won't, and shouldn't leave older people out of it. This is absolutely central regardless of whether or not you acknowledge it.

Whether a society prioritizes its future or its past is an important social, economic, political, and moral decision. Suppose that demographic trends lead to a massive boom of elder-care jobs that is supported (in the short term anyway) economically and "solves" an employment crisis for the younger generation. Is that a solution worth doing?

I don't get the sense that you're really thinking through how economies work. The "massive boom of elder-care jobs" isn't a result of secular decline in manufacturing; it's due to increased demand for elder care as our population ages. That increase would occur even if no manufacturing job had ever left our shores in the last 70 years.

You're unhappy that people who were doing a job can no longer do that job, and putting yourself in their shoes when they confront the possibility that their economic best interests are in jobs they don't want to do. That's fine; that is in fact a real challenge in how societies engage with market economies. But it has nothing to do with older people; it has to do with the fact that not everyone can make a living doing the exact job they want to do.

once again you're arguing against a strawman. you've now completely abandoned trying to engage with what I've said and have instead favored the approach of trying to make me seem "stupid" with discredited rhetorical devices.

additionally, where do you get off acting as if you're an authority on economics? you're nothing special. stop acting as if you're automatically correct. you have something to say, then say it, argue your point and support it. simply phrasing things as if you're authoritative only makes you seem arrogant. it's not convincing.

finally, by choosing to deliberately ignore what I offered as the more important dimension of my position (the moral one, rather than the economic one) you have derailed the entire conversation into something nearly irrelevant.

in other words, you're not worth the time. we're done here.

An economy can be based around digging holes and moving the dirt between them, if that's what people wanted to happen.

We literally pulled an entire nation out of a depression in order to go to war. Fighting a war has to be the least "productive" activity imaginable for humans to engage in, yet we did it and it managed to do the opposite of break the nation's back.

The only criteria is that lots of people need it and are willing to pay for it. The second bit doesn't even have to be economic, a society could simply make it a matter of politics and allocate tax revenue towards it.

As an aside, fighting a war is actually one of the most productive things a society can do: it stimulates government spending and gambles that some of it will be offset by lasting post-war prosperity and the spoils of war.

You can potentially eliminate unfavorable competition, acquire more land or resources open for exploitation, raid materiel and intellectual patents, all the while reducing the size of the working class and its proportion to the wealth-owning classes.

Only in the country-vs-country zero-sum-game sense. In the grow-the-pie global-economy sense, war is a broken window fallacy.

If the holes are being put to productive use by the people demanding them, then sure. Given how little HN likely understands about agriculture, I'd be wary of trying to use "hole digging" as a kind of absurd example.

But this also illustrates how dumb it is to single out elder care as somehow economically unproductive. We pay for elder care because we desperately want our elder family members to be comfortable. If there were labor shortages in this sector, we'd be taking on the work ourselves, at substantial opportunity cost. It's one of the great things about market economies that this work can instead be done by people who have chosen to specialize in it --- they do the work more effectively, at lower cost, and derive more personal satisfaction from doing it.

There is a really weird undercurrent to this subthread that I find unsettling. The availability of elder care services in the marketplace doesn't constitute a "gerontocracy".

> The availability of elder care services in the marketplace doesn't constitute a "gerontocracy".

that's not what I said and you're now arguing against a strawman.

I said that retraining of displaced laborers to be elder-care service providers is moving in the direction of gerontracracy, and that if the trend is extrapolated enough (perhaps to the point of absurdity, but I was making a speculative point, not a comment about the current state of things) then it is easy to imagine funneling young people into that industry as alternative job opportunities are less and less available. that would be gerontocracy.

Wider availability of services for older people as a response to market pressures does not "move us in the direction of gerontocracy". The market "funnels people" towards elder care services by increasing the relative compensation for the field, and by making the jobs easier to obtain, which makes the jobs more attractive.

>> Why wouldn't they be a significant part of the economy?

Because they don't have any money. Retired people either don't have a lot of money to spend or they tend to be very conservative in their spending since they don't have a regular income. If you want to increase the amount of money they have, you're looking at increased government handouts which come from taxes, which come from the people who are working. BTW I don't consider social security in the US to be a handout, but it does theoretically come from taxes on a persons previous income.

They in fact do have money, as do their families. When we note that senior care is an increasingly important part of the economy, we're not saying that's because we're allocating more government funds to them; it's simply because there are more seniors to care for.

If those 'elders' lives can be meanginfdly improved with care, than the resulting GDP from their payment to service providers is as 'productive' to society than anything else.

What the hell is the economy for otherwise?

Most of the economy is not based things that grow the pie massively like 'new energy forms' and 'more powerful computers' etc..

Consider even more traditional methods of elder care such as apprenticeships and village elders.

It is rather mysterious how we take kids in prime physical shape and mush for brains and lock them into ignorant echo chambers for years while we take wise and skilled old people with worn out bodies and brains full of very expensive experience and lock them into lonely old folks homes next door and then make sure they never mix. Its almost like our culture is so stupidly designed someone is trying to sabotage it.

You'd have to expand the concept of apprenticeship beyond current restrictive beliefs and expand the idea of teachers aide quite a bit. If all some old duffer does is make sure the kids don't tip over an unchained acetylene bottle in shop class, its still worth it if all he does is sip coffee the rest of the semester. Three old duffers stand at the table saw all day doing nothing but safety and technique critique.

Advanced disciplinary procedures are interesting to contemplate. Not so much the return of corporal punishment but you'd be surprised how well kids wanting attention can react to being assigned to work with a team of five old people. You will do your math homework alone or with the five grandmas ...

Note that this is a fair trade unlike your gerontocracy because the kids derive considerable value from the old people.

Where it gets weird is when you mix unemployed people in. Say due to ageism I'll never get paid to write code again because I'd be too expensive or unwilling to work 60 hour weeks. If welfare paid my bills would it be that bad if I did nothing but volunteer computer lab tech all day?

I don't understand how we continue to dignify the premise that elder care in our existing marketplace isn't a fair trade. We want our elderly family members to be comfortable. If nobody was available to perform these services, we'd do them ourselves, at great personal cost. Instead, we exchange money for the services of specialists. Everybody comes out ahead.

We don't need "the kids to derive considerable value from the old people" to justify these economic transactions.

> It is rather mysterious how we take kids in prime physical shape and mush for brains and lock them into ignorant echo chambers for years while we take wise and skilled old people with worn out bodies and brains full of very expensive experience and lock them into lonely old folks homes next door and then make sure they never mix. Its almost like our culture is so stupidly designed someone is trying to sabotage it.

It's really a failure to think holistically. When you break a problem down and over-specialize, you can turn a solution into two or more problems. I'm reminded of something I read about farming: traditionally livestock production and farming were done on the same farm. The livestock ate healthier and could be of higher quality, and their manure fertilized the soil for the crops. They were separated in the name of specialization and efficiency, and that created problems of agricultural mono-cultures, unhealthy livestock, fertilizer runoff, and the disposal of concentrated livestock waste from factory farms.

>but I can't imagine that there is a reasonable economic case to be made for it

Median net worth of a retiree is $210,000. Many have saved for care in retirement and therefore will be able to 'demand' it in the market. And I don't believe that includes income from Social Security (which is just a forced savings plan).

>It seems to me that what is needed is alternative industries that are booming because they create new economic opportunities in a generative fashion.

This is word soup.

word soup would be a sentence that doesn't even parse. you're misusing the term in an effort to beat me down with the force of your snark. cut it out.

do I actually need to explain it to you? I will anyway, in word sandwiches, since you might prefer that instead of soup.

Re-training assembly line workers to be barristas, mall parking lot attendants, and elder-care nurses is not an acceptable outcome. There is increased demand for positions like that in our economy but that is indicative of economic dysfunction, not economic health. Some industries are declining (in terms of labor force participation) because of off-shoring and automation. Those industries are benefiting in profitability from the reduction of their labor costs but the laborers being displaced are not receiving those benefits. New industries that can offer work for displaced laborers are needed. Ideally, those industries are _generative_. That means they are primarily involved in production (of raw materials, of manufactured goods, of energy).

>word soup would be a sentence that doesn't even parse

I use it to describe sentences where I can jumble up all the adjectives and get the same meaning - a meaning which is so vague that people can just interpret the sentence as something that conveniently agrees with their prior convictions

>Ideally, those industries are _generative_. That means they are primarily involved in production (of raw materials, of manufactured goods, of energy).

Your prior conviction is that new stuff is needed and intrinsically good. I am not so bold as to hold such a conviction. Maybe people simply need to be enabled to do more with less.

And for a welding operator to become a physical therapist is an even larger leap.

Also, there's also a lot of resistance (and prejudice) in going from blue-collar to pink-collar, partly because care and health services are seem as feminine jobs(except doctors, of course).

Hard to have much sympathy for someone who's strangling themselves with their own gender stereotypes.

Often times it's not the worker that strangle themselves. I remember reading some years ago (can't remember where) about the struggles that male nurses have. Male patients often refuse male nurses as they don't want another male to see their bodies, and female patients will refuse male nurses out of modesty. And, according to the same source the problem only intensifies as the male nurse gets older.

Universalize that statement and apply it to X demographic not choosing a STEM degree and you'll find yourself in a struggle session.

So alter my statement and get a different meaning and outcome? Right-o.

it may be hard but you should do it. everyone is hurt by misogyny, not just women, and often it's through a narrowing what is seen as possible.

Are there any programs to help get men into nursing and similar professions? That seems like a great idea.

My brother recently finished nursing school. The number of times he got the question, "you're gonna be a male nurse?" ... He had a number of cute responses.

The prejudice and stereotyping here is ridiculous, but honestly, I think something that needs to happen (for a variety of reasons) is for the term "nurse" to be retired, and replaced with something like "medical associate".

The nursing profession is extraordinarily important, and we underutilize it in this country. Most of us should be talking to "nurses" much more frequently than we do, and much more often than we talk to doctors.

I agree with the idea that utilizing highly-trained physicians for basic health care is a misallocation of resources. Nurse practitioners and physician associates [0] should and have been receiving more autonomy in providing basic care. They have enough training to do so, and should be capable of recognizing when a referral is required.

[0] Also known as "physician assistant", which is a terrible name when making a case for autonomy...

What's wrong with nurse? It has a quite specific meaning. Changing it medical associate just makes it less precise. What's needed is for sexism to be eradicated everywhere; changing the names is not going to do that.

i agree that sexism needs to be eradicated everywhere, and i don't honestly believe shuffling terminology is a very significant move, but to be fair the word nurse is a gendered one: besides meaning to care for someone, it also refers to the same general concept in a more specific circumstance, that is, breastfeeding.

The gendering of the term is a small problem. The big problem is that it connotes things that are no longer true of the role. For instance: nurse-practitioners are first-line health care professionals whose job isn't to assist doctors (as most nurses do), but rather to prevent people from needing to see them in the first case, even when they're ill.

The market as a whole needs to come to the understanding that we (a) need a kind of "doctor-lite" for people to go see, and (b) that we have them already: we call them nurses, but should call them something else.

Not many people feel they can switch careers in mid-life to become a doctor. But people routinely go to nursing school for a career switch. It would be good if more people did this, specifically to get NP status.

The term "physician assistant" seems pretty gender neutral and appropriate.

They have similar education requirements to a nurse and perform (in practice) similar functions.

No, because they're not physicians assistants. They can see patients independently and prescribe drugs without ever interacting with a doctor. The NP practices at places like Walgreens don't even have doctors on staff.

> No, because they're not physicians assistants. They can see patients independently and prescribe drugs without ever interacting with a doctor.

In a minority of jurisdictions in the US, NPs can practice without the supervision of a physician, whereas PAs, in all jurisdictions, must be in a relationship with a supervising physician. But both PAs and NPs, generally, can see patients and prescribe medications, within state-specified limits, without interacting with a physician in the course of performing that function.

> For instance: nurse-practitioners are first-line health care professionals whose job isn't to assist doctors (as most nurses do)

I don't think "assisting doctors" is actually what most nurses do; most nurses work under the clinical supervision of a physician (and that's also true of NPs in a majority of US jurisdictions; there are 20 states where they have "full practice authority".)

In any case, since NPs are RNs with additional qualifications (they are actually a name for some specialities of advance practice registered nurses), it makes sense that they are called nurses.

> Not many people feel they can switch careers in mid-life to become a doctor. But people routinely go to nursing school for a career switch. It would be good if more people did this, specifically to get NP status.

NP status (or APRN more generally, regardless of specialty) takes substantially more education than RN, and a lot of the people who go back to school for nursing don't even get to the RN level, just LVN/LPN. Changing the name isn't going to change that.

Anyway, the non-nurse physician-lite you are talking about isn't the NP, it's the Physician Assistant. While the scope of practice is somewhat similar, the latter is abbreviated training of the type provided to physicians, the latter is advanced training of the type provided to nurses; they are different models. An NP or other APRN is a nurse with advanced training and certification which allows them to do some things without supervision of a physician, a physician assistant is a reduced-qualification physician with a correspondingly narrowed scope of practice. You seem to be interested in the latter, but think that the former is the same thing with a poorly chosen name rather than a distinct and different thing with some overlap in role.

I think you're right that we need a doctor-lite but we'll have to fight the AMA tooth and nail for every extra privilege we want to give NPs.

There is no reason someone needs to spend $200,000 and 13 years of his life to say "Oh you're feeling depressed how about an SSRI? Or oh your cholesterol levels are high, how about some Lipitor?"

> I think something that needs to happen (for a variety of reasons) is for the term "nurse" to be retired, and replaced with something like "medical associate".

Nursing has its own tradition and model of education , training, and care that is quite distinct from that of medicine. Nurses aren't medical associates. (And there already is a profession called, depending on jurisdiction, physician associate or physician assistant -- which follows the medical rather than nursing model -- which would be confusing if nurses were renamed medical associates.)

And, given the idea that nurses are increasingly the dominant point of contact, it would make more sense (were we to decide to erase the distinction) to rename physicians "nursing supervisors" rather than the other way around. Of course, confusion with names of existing roles would again be a problem.

There's a lot of hand wringing comments about the demand side but don't forget the supply side.

Jobs come with a lot of baggage. Could I make a good doctor in an abstract sense? Hell yes, I thrive at diagnosing complicated technical systems under pressure working closely with people. However I am sensitive to lack of sleep and when I inevitably kill someone during my training hazing when you have to work 36 straight hours without sleep, I'd... react rather poorly to having killed them over basically being too much of a coward to say F that hazing tradition. So I can't become a doctor. The problem would be the hazing but the firing paperwork would be some BS like culture fit, and I'm smart enough to predict the whole thing so I'm not even gonna try. A pity, I'd be a hell of a good doc.

Likewise we've loaded the psychology of nursing with certain baggage that only a fraction of the population is going to tolerate. The reason the supply of nurses is limited is not because we lack for the technical ability to learn to give sponge baths or ability to follow surgeons orders to assist them. I think we pretty much have all the people nursing who can fit the precise psychological cookie cutter of stereotypical nurse and folks who don't fit that cutter will have their money taken in classrooms but they'll get weeded out of the field. Leading to "how we gonna retrain these excess unemployable nurses?" and maybe we'll torture them with some other field requiring a unique unusual personality, like psychologist or chef, and when they fail that, we'll collect tuition retraining all of them to be ...

We're only allowed culturally to talk about changing employees never changing the employer or the workplace itself. Which is unfortunately the thing most needing changing now.

So its a forbidden thought to consider that the problem is we need to accept drill sgt like nurses and construction dude like nurses not just nurse like nurses. Or its a forbidden thought that I could become an ER doc without the required lack of sleep hazing. But if you want to actually fix broken systems sometimes you need to at least think about forbidden thoughts.

A world where its safe to question why a nurse can't tell a patient to F themselves when they need to be told to F themselves or where its safe to question why a new doc needs to go thru hazing at the cost of patient lives is a better world. Its not exclusively about convincing students to enter fields where everyone knows they're not gonna fit and then shrugging shoulders when they inevitably don't fit and wash out. Sometimes fields suck and need fixing.

You are exactly right. Who is going to take care of all these people as they age? (Huge problem in Japan right now. They are basically paying people to have kids because they know they'll be needing population to fill that role). People taking care of other people is going to be harder to automate than shipping and logistics. But still there is going to be cost/wage differences between companions vs light nursing (shower, etc.) vs full nursing .... You can't pay a high school graduate the same as a CPRN, and they have different skills/applications.

The middle class is based on a mostly unskilled workers making a great wage because they are producing things that people will pay even more for. Automation has killed that future dream and is rapidly killing what remains of it.

I agree that it makes no sense to turn a welder into a mechanical engineer. The best we can do in the short term is turn them into robot mechanics but that is just buying time (although maybe a long time). Eventually, we have to re-evaluate what life is, can be or should be. I find this future fascinating and terrifying.

Wow didnt know japan is paying people to have kids in an age where robots are taking jobs seems like bad long term idea. Maybe robots taking jobs should lead to a natural population decline.

Healthcare is not immune from Automation either.

there is huge efforts underway to replace Doctors, Nurses, etc with AI.

The current demand for healthcare is just phenomenal, with the supply barely meeting it in developed countries, and not so much in developing countries. Automation will most likely make it possible to have better skill division. e.g. a heart surgeon from the US could operate on a patient in Gambia, remotely. It seems unlikely that AI/automation would replace the surgeon altogether, at least in the next couple of decades (perhaps in the next 100 years, if we don't manage to kill of our species).

Surgeons are but one small and very specialized part of the Health Industry, just because Surgeons may not be replaced soon (even that I can debate) does not mean the other jobs in Healthcare are as immune, GP's, Nurses, Lab Techs, etc are all targets.

the comment I replied to was wanting to take People in Job A, and retrain them for Job B in healthcare as a second career do to Job A being automated. You are not likly to be a Surgeon as a Second Career unless you are already a non-surgical doctor. You are not going to take a welder and make them a Surgeon as a second career most likely.

As such it was implied that Healthcare was a "safe" industry for people seeking refuge from having their jobs automated away. I was pointing out it is not.

> Surgeons may not be replaced soon (even that I can debate)

Which part would you like to debate?

Is it the "soon" part or do you believe the Surgeon role will be gone entirely?

Even with significant AI advances I'd argue that a Surgeon will still retain at least a guiding role (i.e. what to cut and what to do in case of complications) to the machine.

wavefront lasik is mostly automated already.

Engineering and Medecine seem to be the only safe places atm.

Traditional elite jobs such as sales, banking (not trading), and management seem to have also resisted automation for the time being.

Assuming massive automation, and accompanying decreased employment and people-with-money, who is going to the bank, who is a prospective customer and who needs managed? Given sufficient layoffs the demand for these middleman jobs will also decline.

I mean, a workplace run by people needs a manager for about every five people. A workplace that runs robots needs a manager.

Salespeople only matter if there is someone with money to sell to. I suspect the direction we're going as far as they are concerned are automated goods warehouses that people buy from with self-checkout and a bored troubleshooter/security drone standing by the door. No more shoe salespeople. That leaves enterprise sales, which is a comparatively small footprint, in terms of jobs.

As to bankers, sure they'll be around, but I don't see traditional bankers to be exactly a growing field and they aren't really dying for new employees.

Nope, we're all headed towards serfdom, no two ways about it

When I shopped for hardware at Circuit City I had commissioned salespeople hovering over me who knew nothing about electronics, computers, or hardware but wanted to sell me extended maintenance plans.

Then I shopped for hardware at Best Buy and Comp USA and they had sales clerks who shoved boxes on the shelves matching the UPC code, but they didn't even pretend to know anything. It was somewhat less annoying than Circuit City.

Now I shop for hardware at Amazon because I'm addicted to the free shipping and if its not significantly cheaper at tigerdirect or whatever in another browser tab, well, I'm not going to make a special order. Amazon doesn't have salespeople. I've never talked to a human at Amazon and probably never will. Its even less annoying than Best Buy!

Similar experience with banking. I'm old old old compared to the stereotypical HN demographic and when I was a young graduate I would take my physical paper check to an old fashioned local bank (long since merged into international megacorp) and a friend of mine's roommate was my cashier and I'd deposit that paper check into my account and get a paper receipt. Around the most recent financial crash I moved to a credit union and with direct deposits and ATMs I haven't been inside the building in the decade since... If you assume your average bank user will only spend an hour every decade moving to a new bank/CU, then America doesn't need many bankers, does it?

None of those jobs are categorically elite - they have a small fraction of elite positions. One plausible scenario is that in a lot of areas the "elite" positions will stay somewhat stable, but there will be a huge drop in demand for 2nd tier and below.

Also note that this could have a deep effect in itself though. Consider that for every biglaw partner there are what, 1000s of other lawyers? But every one of those partners came up in a cohort of at least dozens if not hundreds who dropped out along the way. And those are just the ones that made it through the first filters. Without the work to support and train on a pyramid like this, they'll have to find a new scheme to decide who rises to the top.

I don't know about that. Among my peers that went into engineering there are concerns of a shrinking job market for specific specialties like civil engineering or chemical engineering...

Can you elaborate why that's the case?

I am in a degree for bio-medical engineering (best of both, or worst?). Job prospects are about equal to many of my peers in non-engineering and non-medical fields: MS (or MD) or bust, and then you have to know who is hiring, when, and how they like their mochas.

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