Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

The issue here is just like how when a country gets older and wealthier, everything starts to cost more. It's not surprising.

We created a country where education started to be widely available and financially supported for a large fraction of the people. What do you expect would happen as more people get educated then? Companies wouldn't use a commonly available criterion to weed out who they want? Or develop technology that takes advantage of large numbers of educated workers?

In the evolution of our demography and economic history too, this is no surprise. We're no longer in a post-war growth phase where any warm body was suitable for filling the basic jobs necessary to fuel our growing economy. Other countries are in that phase, we are not. We have low growth, and for someone to stand out and get hired is now a higher bar. Our labor is expensive, so complicated equipment and automation gets used. And there's an educated workforce to operate it.

What company wouldn't use some available criterion to choose people of with more productive/reliable attributes? College degree is available, it's a not unreasonable proxy.

It's inevitable.

You're only addressing a few variables in a complex equation here. One of the big problems is the economic model that demands constant growth. A part of the problem with this model is that it requires constant population growth, especially to support the retirement of the baby boomers. This population growth comes at a cost to the proletariat. More competition for jobs means downward pressure on wage growth. More consumers means upwards pressure on cost of living. This creates a general movement of wealth in an upward direction. Sure the whole economy would collapse if we tried to move off this model, but perhaps this is what needs to happen. It's an unhealthy unsustainable model anyway.

Another issue is that employees jump around companies these days making companies less likely to invest in employees. People used to be lifetime employees and thus companies were more willing to invest in them with training and education.

> Another issue is that employees jump around companies these days making companies less likely to invest in employees.

Alvin and Heidi Toffler predicted this with profound accuracy in their 1970 book Future Shock. I highly recommend reading the chapter on Adhocracy, or for a TLDR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adhocracy

> This population growth comes at a cost to the proletariat. More competition for jobs means downward pressure on wage growth. More consumers means upwards pressure on cost of living.

This is only true if the population growth accelerates (as in: the per-year percentage goes up every year. So 3% this year, 4% the next, 5% the next, and so on). If population growth is stable at a given percentage, then so too will be the proportion of the old to the young.

To give an exaggerated illustration, consider a population that doubles every day. Every day, half of the population is one day old, a quarter is two days old, an eighth is three days old, and so on. While I admit I may misunderstand the statistics, a quick look at the median age suggests that exactly the opposite is happening: The median age has been steadily rising since the 60s.

While constant growth is indeed unsustainable, an overpopulation of youth does not appear to be a part of that unsustainability.

(edit: formatting)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com