In Towns Already Hit by Factory Closings, a New Casualty: Retail Jobs
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
They call this out in a couple of places but they never seem to completely connect the dots, there is "He renovated the first floor to attract customers from farther away, customers who might have more money to spend and more places to go than Johnstown." to pull money from towns further away, or "But fewer people can afford his products now that the good jobs are long gone, and Mr. Apryle has had to make adjustments."
It's not Amazon, its not 'big box' chains, its that the city no longer has a production base and so the fraction of GDP this space used to produce has gone away.
I disagree. In my opinion this development is very much related to Amazon and e-commerce in general. I'm living in a rural region that saw a lot of retail disappearing, yet I really don't see people cutting back or buying less. They just buy elsewhere. And who could blame them? Researching products online provides way more information than your small store around the corner could offer. Selection is vastly superior on the internet - not just on Amazon and big brand stores, but countless of stores catering to niche interests. Those have never been around here. However even general goods like clothing, mainstream tech, etc. - very often I know what I want and find myself just as certain that it's not available locally. Just the other day I needed a new vacuum and decided to get a specific Miele model. Before ordering I wanted to see if I could get it immediately in a 30 minute drive radius and contacted several stores that were featured on Miele's list of retailers. Poor websites all over the place. So I sent an e-mail to all of them, asking if could come by later and pick up the specific model if it's available. No store replied within the day, none of the stores had the model which I was looking for, which wasn't very niche either. Didn't matter - later that day I ordered from Amazon and had it delivered the next day via Prime.
I'm sorry, but when it comes to information, selection, availability and convenience there's simply no local competition for e-commerce.
I grew up in a rural mostly farming community. The farming part started dying when I was in school in the 90s. Now it's throughly dead. People are still surviving, but the "rich" folks are teachers, cops, and government workers who commute an hour to the state capital.
When you drive though you can see the decay -- unpainted house here, barn with a hole in the roof there, dollar general store popping up over here. It's the inner city replicated in the countryside. There's more misery than there was 20 years ago.
it makes me wonder if, really, that's the model that has always been the norm, historically.
i mean, when i think about the civil service jobs in the UK, or the true original civil service jobs in China going back centuries, i see a system where the brightest, most motivated minds compete for a limited number of government job posts - because those are the best jobs available.
occasionally in history, there are times when the private sector offers paths to affluence for the masses, but mostly, that's not what happens. mostly, we're trying to get a legally protected, high-benefit position in government. most of the time, historically, that's the most lucrative path.
But these towns are going to keep getting wiped out until we free up the concentration of capital that favors dense urban areas
What is this supposed to mean? Is "favor[ing] dense urban areas" somehow wrong? What dark force is driving this concentration of capital? What is necessary to free it?
There's no reason for large banks to lend money. They can print money via the Fed to get their assets and lend money to the highest quality borrowers or those with explicit government guarantees. The traditional regional banking model was much better for everyone.
That seems improbable to me, especially at a time when so much capital is looking for a decent return
Also, as I asked, what does this have to do with "dense urban areas" being "favored"?
I don't think that's how it works.
reminds me of the VC / startup landscape
See, for example: http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-lopez-dwp-cont...
Consumers are locally optimal buyers, we go for the cheapest goods on the market. Over time, international imports have been undercutting America-produced goods. At first, it was American companies that simply outsourced raw materials... then manufacturing, assembly, service centers, and now even R&D. All because consumers were chasing the locally optimal ROI.
Rational consumers were undercutting their employers, which in turn forced their employers to cut labor, wages, or automate. That steadily drives down the purchasing freedom of employees, like a frog in a slowly warming pot of water.
In turn, consumers are even more driven to seek out the cheapest goods, which are still international, and which continue the feedback loop that ultimately undercuts themselves. Eventually, we end up with an economy that cannot distribute wealth among the middle/lower classes due to large labor market inefficiencies (such as the difficulty adults face cross-training into/between knowledge-based fields)... All while the 1% and 0.1% continued building up tremendous wealth, buying a disproportionately loud voice in politics and public opinion.
Amazon and Walmart are centralized manifestations of this issue, but no one person is to blame. This problem has been building for decades as America has refused to publicly invest in itself.
As I see it, we need significant public investment in order to get back on track:
* Infrastructure (water, energy, transportation esp. light rail), creating short-term jobs that improve regional economic competitiveness and reduce consumer debt
* Higher education + adult cross training, restoring an efficient free labor market and voter literacy
* Advanced R&D (incl. but not limited to space+energy), researching and commercializing new fields of industry to replace automated/exported ones
We don't need to raise taxes. Start by cutting back excessive military funding.
For perspective, we just spent ~$17.5 billion/10 years on one ship - the USS Gerald Ford supercarrier. Its defense ROI is questionable; counter-terror operations and force-projection against lesser states does not warrant a supercarrier (renovated carriers / allied regional airbases are sufficient), and potential threats punching at our level (China, Russia) would employee asymmetric warfare that makes carriers irrelevant (think: smart missile barrage, fast attack submarines, or maybe just propaganda).
$17,500,000,000 could put 523,000 Americans through a 4 year private education or 1,750,000 through public state colleges. This sum is also equivalent to 30 years of fusion research funding, tripling the Seattle Link network, and 8x the the BART expansion to Santa Clara.
Perhaps you have better examples, but these already offer better ROI than a war ship. There's plenty of fat that can be trimmed or reallocated from our $598,000,000,000 / year federal military budget.
Every human cannot be a knowledge worker. Some will be bad at knowledge work.
Just slapping a college degree on someone who used to work in a factory can often be totally useless. Obviously there are some that can benefit. But many cannot.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1x9xpb/were_no...
The answer isn't a blanket grant, but part of the answer is more funding for higher education.
That's not a criticism, simply an observation.
I'm increasingly cognisant of the opportunities, and limits, of education. It's not a free pass or magic. It costs some resources, though we might well consider if overprovisioning is better than under. What is taught, and to whom, is also a major element.
Slightly more:
https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/JLDZdteu...
Redirecting to education will lower barriers of entry to high-skill labor, eg helping welders cross-train into software. This is not a proposal for free education for everyone to study anything... i said public investment, not donations
From what I've seen, software engineers cross-training into welding would have a better ROI. What's a welder who can program's hourly rate look like? Better than a programmer who can weld.
Putting a web-developer who barely knows what a screwdriver is in front of giant lathe isn't going to have a good ROI either.
No, but they might make more money.
I'm pessimistic that the federal or even state governments have the will to do anything about it -in terms of policy to effect change.
Not that top down change always works (Japan for example, has made many, many half-hearted but ill-conceived attempts at restarting their growth engine) but smaller nimbler economies have been able to manoeuver economic obstacles (like Taiwan, Singapore and S. Korea) whereas others have stumbled and fumbled (Malaysia, Mexico).
That said, we need to try something. Trump tapped into this angst but does not look like he (or the party) will deliver in the least. Never the less, the issue is not going away and will only become more pronounced. Someone will have to do _something_ about it. People will get upset and more radical elements will be elected till someone begins to take notice and does something substantial about the economic decline of the part of the middle class which got by on medium skills.
Most of those small rural towns -- and I grew up in one -- have zero reason to exist besides inertia. There's fewer skilled workers there every day, a combination of:
* stupid, uneducated people / skilled people moving to population and manufacturing centers
* devastation of unions which, whether you like their politics or not (I do!) often ran comprehensive training programs
* the deskilling of the blue-collar workforce in America in order to boost corporate profits by outsourcing manufacturing
* a decline in infrastructure, including a reasonably educated workforce, teachers + schools (see eg in WI Scott Walker cut many teachers salaries by north of $10k/year. Totes weird they keep losing skilled teachers, eh?) but also roads, power, etc
Even if we were to fix the deliberate policies pushing outsourcing of manufacturing, I still see no reason it would return to places like rural Wisconsin. It would end up, rather, eg on the outskirts of Chicago, because of the same reason tech employees concentrate: you go to where there are skilled employees. Plus networks of supporting manufacturing businesses are close, good transportation and infrastructure, etc. And unlike tech, which may or may not eventually get serious about remote work, manufacturing can't do that.
NB: This isn't the answer I would prefer, but it does have the benefit of being the truth. Also, while Democrats have not been a shining light in terms of supporting good jobs for people without a college degree, voting for Republicans is a pretty astoundingly stupid response.
They are forgotten because they no longer have much value to people outside the towns. The town itself exists as a conduit through which people channel their energies together to bring value into their lives. If the conduit collapses, if the factories and the mills go, how can the people survive? The raison d'être of the communities has long passed away, but the community itself hasn't. Put them out of their misery, please!
It is only by some miracle that these towns begin to bring value to the economy again (and not simply by the unsustainable method of spending and consuming), but until that happens they will continue to rot. Their minds can exist in the global hive-mind that is the internet, but their physical bodies need physical maintenance. And yet they exist too far away and too isolated to make it economically viable to do so.
The major cities appear to have monopolized the exercise of human labour for value. Whereas early homo sapiens have loosely organized communities that work to maintain a loosely comfortable life, modern cities have concentrated human effort like a parabolic reflector in order to generate luxuries beyond the reach of mere casual cooperation. These small towns, without the buttress of a major industrial mill or any economic output at all, captures none of the benefits of living in a modern world.
The consolation to the community that hopes to see the itself continue is that these towns are surprisingly hardy, producing generation after generation of brain-addled drug addicts. My sympathies are not with them.
Capital accumulates, and if you let it, it will suck everything out from the country and suburban areas and concentrate it in the major cities. The decline of rural America has everything to do with the flows of capital and not a lot to do with whether small towns are sustainable.
this is not a central planned economy. people organize where they want to organize and it turns out large cities are increasingly where people want to do that. people - the ones who choose neither to move to rural communities nor to bring custom - and not capital, are the systematic destroyer of local communities.
mergers, like large cities, are just another symptom of humanity's unsatisfiable desire for efficiency. competition good, cooperation better.
The lack of demand snowballs and branches out to impact many other things the exact same way that a strong increase in demand spreads out to impact other things.
With a predominantly consumer driven economy, eventually all of this will catch up and be a significant drag on GDP at best, though it'd be easy to argue we're already at exactly that point.
So, what happens next and what do we do about it? If only we had some sort of large team of people who were elected to solve this kind of problem, and if only they had some sort of historical periods of widespread prosperity to reference and model policy on....
Isn't the problem that no one can agree what historical prosperity looked like especially when thinking about the consequences of the policies that lead to the prosperity.
Was it the 1920's, 1950's, or 1980's? 2000's? Or the age of the Robber Barron's Or some other time?
Personally I think a bigger issue is the failure of our elected officials to deal with the things holding prosperity back - housing/healthcare/education/childcare rising more rapidly than people can sustain.
The world population was also less than 1/2 what it is today which had other benefits.
I have suspicions that policy changes to allow banks to compete on a national basis didn't do a lot of flyover country any good. Before the loans from the central bank flowed down a tree, each node ending up at some local bank. Which had to loan out money locally. Now it's a couple of large banks chasing best safe returns. And gouging consumers as much as they can.
In the UK we had many communities thrown on the scrapheap with mines, steel and much else manufacturing gone. Initially people invest their redundancy money in things such as a new dog-grooming business, a cafe, a shop, perhaps a tattoo parlour, depending on what 'follow your passion' leads to. So these businesses go okay for a while, eventually the redundancy money runs out, or, in rare instances, the 'follow the passion' business actually meets a genuine need and a success story happens.
Around the time of this general decline my sister was trying to raise money to go somewhere fancy with her group of friends. Being skint she decided to raise some money by making things - things with beads, jewellery, that sort of stuff. These items sold 'well' but only to her friends whom she was going to be travelling with. There was no 'external market'. So rather than go on the big trip to the festival they missed out on that and spent what little money they had on beads etc. to make stuff to sell to each other. A lesson in economics was learned the hard way.
To some extent any town/city/country that does not have manufacturing and external markets will be a variant of my sister's schooldays model of capitalism. If manufacturing (or mining) jobs go and retail comes along to 'fill the gap', then it cannot last forever. Tourism can't come to the rescue either.
First they came for the farmers. Once over half the workforce, now 1.4% and dropping. Then they came for the miners, now 0.6%. Then they came for the factory workers, once 40% of the workforce, now 8.1%. Now retail, still at 10.2% and dropping. Coming up next, transportation and warehousing.[1] What's growing? Health care and social assistance, for an aging population.
This is killing small-town America, because many small towns now have no function. They were once support for surrounding farms, or had some manufacturing, but that's gone.
In the early days of the Internet, it was thought that location wouldn't matter for many jobs. Early ads for Google Fiber made such claims. With enough bandwidth, your town could prosper again. It hasn't worked out that way. If everything you do goes in and out over a wire, automation of most of your job is probably not far off.
Nobody seems to have a way out of this. Education doesn't help that much; about half of new college graduates take jobs which don't require a college education.
It's so sad, we will have robots growing our food and building our houses and people will still complain about "jobs" when it's really just about distributing the benefits of automation.
Why would it?
I do hope over time society will adapt favorably to a post-scarcity economy, but I'm not holding my breath either.
Wishing for those towns to continue existing is not sufficient if there's no economic reason for them to exist at that place in that form and if spare income of the 'wishers' isn't sufficient to sustain the place as a hobby.
Trying to "save" (i.e., prolong the agony of) these towns may be actually harmful to their inhabitants - since staying there isn't a long term option in any case, and the later they move, the harder it will be with more competition from people moving off of other eliminated towns.
And sure this is not fully a tech/biz problem, this is also about culture, just notice how the most poverished means of communications, textual messages, became so common in our daily life, even instead of something like video conferencing.
But here's an experiment: take a few beautiful rural towns, with cheap land and fast internet. offer trustful connectivity(maybe packaged in a container form) to a few major metropolitans, and try to see if you can entice companies to participate and some knowledge workers to migrate to rural towns.
That creates the illusion of trust. Any successful con man, politician, or salesperson knows this.
Also the expensive telepresence you are talking about is technology and technology is continually falling in price.
As for telepresence falling in price, I remember expensive telepresence room we're advertised as "being there" and there was specific design for eye contact and body language, but I haven't seen that yet in those cheaper "telepresence" systems.
For salespeople figuring you out is part of the job. Knowing how to push your buttons to upsell pays well.
I can also build trust on a website. It's by selling quality stuff, in a timely manner, replacing it when needed be, etc. Actual service. That's actual trust, not being buddy buddy with a salesperson.
But if we're talking about work mates, that emotional trust and that human connection does carry value.
Technology doesn't erase differences, it amplifies them. If not alwaays, then frequently enough that the distinction is meaningless.
Question is, what made factory work so exceptional, in terms of generating high pay and stability? And what's changed?
(I've some thoughts, but I'm interested in others' too.)
Then came the lawyers, then came the rules...
It was not so much in search of the cheapest labor, rather avoidance of the most expensive labor which was in this part of the US at the time. Almost anywhere else could provide a significant cost advantage in an increasingly competitive market.
OTOH, during the decades when the high wages were prevailing in the area, this was a unique opportunity to build a certain amount of local wealth while it lasted.
It is not from some form of strength that "retail jobs came to predominate", instead retail was all that remained after the actual wealth-creating engine had left the area.
All retail could do was extract the remaing local wealth which had been generated during the times of better-paying employment with actual wealth-generating industries.
Now that this remaining wealth is dwindling too, these jobs are becoming more unnecessary as the long tail of the middle class continues to be absorbed, their resources from above and their numbers from below.
You can't have a consumer economy without an equal or greater amount of surplus wealth in the hands of consumers, even then it is completely unsustainable unless there is an ongoing source of new value being created for consumers in excess of value being permanently consumed by both producers & consumers combined.
If producers are not a bigger part of the equation than consumers, you can not balance the equation.
It can, but unless your location is amazing, compared to the number of people that it must sustain (Hawaii, Whistler), it won't.
But tourism dollars only signify wealth that was created elsewhere and merely used for consumption at the resort.
If you want to work, you should look for what people need rather than whatever you did for a job 20 years ago. For example, we'll always need energy and food, but we won't always need cowboys and coal miners. Instead of trying to be a coal miner, try to be an energy worker.
Cowboys are part of the food sector. Ranching to be specific. Herding cattle, fixing fences, and doing all the other choirs on a ranch will probably be a while down the automation trail. Making some bad decisions like not moving the cattle from the summer grazing area to the winter grazing area quick enough can cost a lot of money.
Herding cows with a drone.[1]
I ride, and I know people who work cattle from horseback, but the number of people still doing that is small.
Drones are becoming incredibly useful in the industries where somebody has to check on things over a large area. From farming to power line inspection, it's become far easier to look at hard-to-reach areas.
Cowboys have been using ATVs for years. The definition of cowboy is not that limited.
If everything is manufactured overseas or by robots, retail is largely locked up the a handful of giant corporations who can bankrupt competitors, in many places the former middle class spends all their disposable income on housing and can't afford new services, and the 1% largely don't spend their money. And on top of it, the utopia promised by diversity is actual splitting societies, right when we most need cooperation and unity.
To me this is start to look like an near unsolvable problem.
(The implication is that war and violence has a very high cost and so alternativas should be considered)
Fine. Then leave. But then you don't get to participate in the market.
This isn't that hard a problem. If you make the money in the US, you get taxed in the US. If you leave the US, you don't get to take the money made in the US with you.
The problem is the lack of political will to close those loopholes that allow otherwise to occur.
Even if they do leave, someone still owns it.
Most wealth (not GDP) is indeed in real assets... and these assets are obviously owned. They're typically owned by companies, not by individuals (directly), which is why in the response I gave below I mention foreign shareholders. If somehow you mange to exclude them you have dozens of other loopholes and contractual mechanisms to contend with, the most obvious being leasing by the property company of a real asset owned by a bank, wherein the lessee in turn sublets the asset out.
If you get past that you have to deal with the fact that in a very real sense these assets constitute the bulk of wealth because their prices are high, and that if you make it extremely difficult (or undesirable) to own them the price will plunge as current owners try to sell off their assets and get cash to take out, and nobody with the relevant criteria to own them has enough funds to buy them. That in turn would wipe trillions off wealth, hundreds of billions off GDP, and send the banking system into a new systemic cardiac arrest demanding of bailouts in because the assets underlying their outstanding loans no longer cover the risk they're exposed to.
Now there is not much of a middle class remaining. Many bills are due, and this is the end of the line — both for the 1% and everybody else.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_in_the_United_States#We...
Robots change all this. For the first time in history, we are nearing a system where the rich don't need the poor. Whether it's producing food and other goods or even fighting their wars, the rich will soon be able to rely solely on automation to feed, clothe and protect them. Automation could create a system that doesn't have to collapse, no matter how top heavy it becomes.
Every first world nation can afford to unconditionally give basic food, basic shelter and basic entertainment to every one of their (not global, though) poor people without asking work or anything else in return. Implementing something like this would be a major political and organizational problem, but economics-wise there's nothing preventing it; the industries that cover those needs for everyone take up a significant but still small percentage of the total GDP.
Education and basic healthcare is already provided by many societies (USA is a bit of an exception, as it is in most things). Those parts doesn't even need any major changes or restructuring to provide for everyone, I was quite literal when stating food, shelter and entertainment as the core needs of unemployed/unemployable that would need such a change.
Apart from the fact where you're killing people for no reason, it's not very capitalist at all.
The cultural and economic future of the nation is being legislated by the current victor. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
This is a powerful phrase that hopefully finds common usage. Perhaps we'd all have less contempt towards opposing views if we are reminded that violence occurs when contempt levels get too high.
[1] http://takimag.com/article/the_cold_civil_war_grinds_on_john...
http://williamgibsonblog.blogspot.com.au/2006_01_01_archive....
(Via a friend on Mastodon -- I very much liked your usage of this term.)
At the same time, it's the rural and urban electorates being played off one another.
That's a long con.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6i3lj3/the_urb...
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6i2h0e/ahm_jon...
So the people that really control things would have you think. In reality, it is being legislated by the same people that have been in control for decades now. Who that might exactly be I do not know.
Just like the US housing bubble & crash, it is like a train wreck in slow motion that after the impact, everyone will be claiming no one could have seen coming.
The economic repercussions of increased local manufacturing (you don't outsource weapons manufacturing to your enemies) combined with increased demand for workforce are pretty well understood.
Which also kind of explains why right-wingers tend to be disproportionally warmongers. War's good for business, after all.
Still the level of web-developer who has little more skill than using Excel for pivot tables is also the web developer who can do little more than make static websites, which is plenty enough to be a webdev in 95 or even in 2005, but unlikely to be enough in 2017. I have just made different orders from two different websites today (cables and clothing) and both websites made decent usage of javascript, search, etc.
Besides that, many factories had thousands of employees; even a modest store may have ten - but watchapp needed just 50 programmers to be sold for a double digit billion dollar sum.
EDIT: almost forgot the corporate controlled mass media to tell the population everything is mostly fine and nothing can be done to improve anything.
Thats why I was asking about nk.
More people can be web developers until the labor market balances out supply and demand and web developers make median income.
Pretty sure i can command value over either.
Knowledge work is not ditch digging. A body is not a body.
It won't help. About half of new college graduates are doing jobs that don't require a college education. Those are the ones heavily in debt, with a negative return on investment for college.
http://www.byui.edu/online/degrees-and-programs
Reviewing the degree requirements and courses, and having studied CS at BYU myself, I'm betting the quality is very high. In fact I wish, as a web developer currently, that I could have taken some of these courses instead of courses like advanced algorithms; though fascinating, I'll bet I would have enjoyed a basic security course or a vector graphics course much more.
Politicians can talk about 'jobs' all they want, but the real key is education. Because jobs of the future will ALL require some highly technical skill.
The fact that high school graduation rates went from 6% at the beginning of the century to almost 80% at the end, means that humans are capable of learning a wide variety subjects ..inherent ability is overrated.
EVEN if it were the case that college is a filtering mechanism my point still stands because tuition free education increases the availablity of education to those with the ability. And we won't waste our countries intellectual capital. This improves the individuals lives and the economy as a whole
Education is absolutely an "enrichment mechanism". With the exception of upper level math or particle physics is attainable by anyone.
This is not the case. If my thesis is correct, which I think it is, you could replace college for the vast majority of people with 1 standardized test for thousands of times less cost. Don't you think its odd that the college boom started just after IQ tests for employment became illegal?
When IQ tests were outlawed for use in employment, with the exception of the military and universities (a hilarious irony), it became uneconomical for employers who needed well-above-average people to train their own employees, as they could not filter for intelligence first. Before Griggs vs Duke Power it was common for an uneducated person to score well on an IQ test, get promoted, learn on the job and work their way up to the top. Now that same person is forced to go to college, waste thousands of dollars and years of wages to do the same thing, giving a cut to the professors and the administrators (most of whom have conveniently propounded IQ denialism until just recently when the science has become so blatant that it is embarrassing to do so). This system vastly decreases the probability of someone improving their lot.
Maybe it would be nice if everyone were equally intelligent.
Maybe it would be nice if everyone were equally tall.
But this isn't the case, and if you base policy on the supposition you get the waste and rent seeking that is emblematic of the education system at all levels.
Measuring height is an objective biological measurement. IQ is a measure of a state of consciousness with so many different confounding factors.
This is a Nature vs Nurture question and you're going 100% all in on the Nature side of the argument....some sort of inherent genetic IQ predisposition.
Saying one has a permanant IQ is equivalent to saying mexicans inherently like to steal hubcabs.
When it comes to measures of IQ and other states of consciousness environment plays a massive role.
Google "labeling theory" and "Motivation theory".
IQ tests are proven to have so many counfounding factors that they're not taken seriously.
For example: 1> Groups exposed to abstract reasoning problems during school or prep courses do way better on IQ tests...
2> IQ is also shown to increase as people get older....
3>Not to mention going to university is shown to INCREASE one's score on IQ tests....
So how accurate of a test is that?
The reason it's outlawed is because it's essentially stereotyping.
It's a bullshit oversimplified view of how the brain works, and factually incorrect and Nazi-ish.
We can have an oversimplified filtering system, a single test that determines peoples futures.......or we can put people in an environment like university where education and learning is encouraged...and see if they meet their genetic potential.
I think the second way is less insane.
Hence the entire nature vs nurture debate.
Consciouness is too complex to be summed up by any single test and any person remotely knowledgable about the subject will agree with me. But it's been interesting talking with you.
Like centuries of social science research haven't thought of that?
Like you had a suddenly original idea that tens of thousands of people who have dedicated their lives to this field, gotten M.Ds and PhD's, hadn't thought of?
And if twin studies were conclusive wouldn't it have answered the debate of nature vs nurture that we're having, once and for all?
You're trying to summarize human consciousness, which is extremely unpredictable, and no one understand fully... into one test...It's extremely dumb and pretty much everyone but you agrees...and for good reasons...
Maybe your educational environment is lacking..
It is the case that social science post 1950s largely failed to address the idea that cognitive ability is heritable (and the heritability of most mental traits). I agree, the situation is absurd and embarrassing for these fields. But this is what happened.
I would like to say again, please do read the book. There were times when I was outraged by a position, to the point where I insult a person who is writing in good faith (as you have just done); this is usually a sign that I am reasoning backwards and am defending a position out of emotional attachment rather than trying to understand what is true. I would suggest this may be happening to you now.
One thing to keep in mind is just because something is true doesn't make it good. You can preserve your moral outrage even as your descriptive beliefs change.
Apprenticeship would work particularly well in computer science.
There also community colleges and other lower technical tracks that people could do for the less motivated.
The point is the option is still available which benefits,the individual, our economy and the human race. It's like a no brainer win win situation for everyone.
People get a longer education => Jobs get more selective about education and require longer studies => People have to get a longer education to get a job => Jobs get even more selective => etc...
Cheaper education will create more educated people, unfortunately that doesn't create new job prospects.
The difference is, with everyone educated, now you have a highly knowledgeable populace who are capable of solving harder problems, starting business to solve these problems, etc. I would rather have 1000 people working on Cancer research than at the DMV pushing paper or laying brick. Things machines can do.
We would have a net improvement in people's lives and the human race.
It's like a win win for everyone.
Similar things will happen to small towns along trucking routes if tractor-trailer driving becomes automated. You will have less need for restaurants, small hotels, truck-stops, etc. if an automated truck is passing through at 3am.
I don't see solutions to this other than people leaving these towns or learning new skills.
I can't imagine calling retail "middle class" since it pays so little.
Rural counties and small metropolitan areas account for about 23 percent of traditional American retail employment, but they are home to just 13 percent of e-commerce positions.
Almost all customer fulfillment centers run by the online shopping behemoth Amazon are in metropolitan areas with more than 250,000 people — close to the bulk of its customers
“I’m thinking about what’s next,” he said. “We’re essentially thinking of Johnstown as an economic development laboratory.”