Assuming he goes to university or somewhere. Because most people find it boring he should have chosen history, latin, or simply other humanities subjects. How does one even jump from tech to humanities anyways???
when you're the type of person who likes to question everything and who wants to build things to make the world a "better place", then switching to humanities with a tech foundation is a good option. It can be very dangerous though. One is at risk of undoing all the previous conditioning (which costed a lot of time and money) and bring oneself to realize that it takes more than just "an idea for an app", or VC funding to actually contribute to society in a lasting and non-fraudulent way. It also might anger your colleagues who will never admit that they've been conned, drank too much of the corporate/academic kool-aid, and besides nobody likes people swimming against the stream especially when the reward isn't monetary and has even got high potential of working against you in the short term financially. How dare those damn fools who want to be better engineers and also better humans by widening their world-view!
A big part of the rest is empty talk. It's easy to say that we value eg teachers or nurses or janitors. Doesn't make us pay them more.
Artists have far more sex than programmers do. It’s called natural selection.
No, not in the case of humanities (or almost any other field) in academia.
The problem with his first career choice, philosophy, is that jobs are incredibly scarce. It's not that they pay too low and no one wants to work as an academic. There are simply far too many candidates for not enough slots.
Are you sure about that? Perhaps society doesn't value them much? (I know I don't. The humanities make for great and fulfilling hobbies, sure. Doesn't mean we need to pay people for their hobbies.)
Well, you don't have to pay anyone for their hobbies.
The salaries for full professors in the humanities (or even STEM fields) can be anywhere from pathetic to half-decent. But that's not why people pursue a career as a professor. These are smart folks, they realize that the chances are slim for staying indefinitely in academia. Many try and many fail. They often to move on to other fields, just like physics and mathematics graduates. It's OK.
There are much more successful economic systems around than the US one.
America oddities like government mortgage guarantees, or federal deposit insurance, or licensing for interior designers are not necessary, and in fact not good for the economy. Neither are pervasive price controls.
The US would do better, if they moved to a more market based economy.
I mean general range of human experiments in how to structure society: monarchy, feudalism, religious state, empire, full socialism/communism, fascism, etc...
Giving federalism a serious try might be interesting. So that you actually have 50 different governments in the US to fuel experiments.
Why would that be impossible or shocking? Most people are able to learn multiple different things and have interest in multiple different things.
Universities typically allow you to take courses from different topics too.
But in America I don't think you can do that, some families don't have the privilege to spend so much money on somebody to get a bachelor in philosophy and then have no jobs afterwards.