I then realized that for much of history up until recently by the time a young man was 18 years old he was already a skilled craftsman at his craft to a large extant. The young man would've been training with his father at his craft from the time he was ten years old and so by the time he was 18 would be proficient in what he had to do.
I wonder then is part of the issue we face due to the fact that we spend so much time trying to instill a modern education into youth until they are adults that they have to spend an additional 4-8 years acquiring an actual skill in order to be able to provide value in the workforce?
Sadly, doing so also stripped dignity from vocational / blue-collar work - even when it pays (very) well, kids are told that a life in the trades is for the uneducated, ignorant swines.
Ironically, part of this development is led by emancipation of the lower classes themselves: "I break my back every day but my son will study and be a doctor". A sentiment we all admire, but ends up reinforcing the idea that the father's blue-collar work is crap - and that's not how it should be, all workers should have equal dignity and value.
Modern society and its trajectory seems a fundamentally unsustainable enterprise.
Assuming that value equals price, the only way everyone would have an equal price is if supply and demand were exactly equal across all occupations over a long period of time.
That is not a realistic expectation. And the only way for people (by and large) to be incentivized to do the things where supply is not meeting demand is to have a higher price where supply of labor is more needed than elsewhere.
That's a big assumption. There are lots of careers with social and financial values that diverge, ignoring that would I think miss the point OP is trying to make.
In other words your argument could works equally well for the father urging their kid to do something that on average won't pay better, but will bring them more respect and social standing.
If most plumbers started earning top 10% wages in the US, they would have similar social standing to doctors. Even doctors have probably moved down in relative status, where the new ones are basically W2 employees with metrics for a big company.
Hell, put a noble prize winner (or Olympic gold medallist, or astronaut, or you pick) in a room with a guy who made 50mm on property development. No contest, but chances are the developer is at least 10x as wealthy.
There are examples all around you; might not be why you respect people, but its' what people actually do. Trying to reduce this all to wealth just doesn't stand up to even a little scrutiny, though it's equally clear that wealth does contribute.
The fact is that money buys better health and familial outcomes. The parents want that for their kids. Manual labor, regardless of how well it pays takes a toll on your body and generally pays less than a lot of the highly sought after knowledge worker jobs.
I really think the rising cost of living is whats driving these kinds of ideas. The parents want their kids to make more money so they can have a better life - a reality in america. Others see this and assume that the blue collar job is bad or something.
If we had an adequate healthcare system that didn't favor the super rich with good outcomes, I would agree. Until then, my kids are going to be encouraged to go into a career where they can make lots of money sitting in an air conditioned office.
I've worked the blue collar tough as fuck jobs, and now I work in an air conditioned office making 15x as much. Objectively, which one is the better job?
I agree, not how it should be, but you gotta get yours.
Also, if you've ever worked in the trades you would know that a large portion of them are ignorant and uneducated. That stereotype exists for a reason. Its just a fact, and they have a tougher time navigating life because of it. I've lived it.
I agree with you there, I think there is a tendency to romanticize the life of a blue collar worker, and thing of them as the noble simple idealized "proletariat", when as you point out the stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason.
But I have to wonder is part of that because of the brain drain in the trades that resulted from everyone going to college and feeling they had to do white collar work. Before a smart, observant, hardworking young man could become an electrician and by virtue of being observant and quick witted could succeeded and excel and become an outstanding electrician that could bring about innovation and elevate his work team. Nowadays though the same hardworking intelligent young man is being told that the trades are for stupid people, and he is too smart for that and wouldn't it be much better to go get a college degree so he can get a "real job". Then twenty years and $50,000 of student debt later he finds himself as a project manager trapped in a standup meeting at 8:00 on a Wednesday morning, hating his life, drowning in unfulfilled despair and wondering what went wrong with his life.
I just think that part of the stereotypes about the trades has become a self fulfilling prophecy.
Two things I would comment on are:
1) the amount of debt, try 150-200k
2) in this example, how can you know that he wouldn't hate his life if he chose the trades?
[1]: https://www.credible.com/blog/statistics/average-student-loa...
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/stude...
There seems to be a bunch of variability here. In support of my original assertion of 150-200k, that site has multiple average debts for different fields in my stated range.
Actually, the article you linked confirms my original statement. Look at the "graduate loan debt" section.
From the article you linked: Average student loan debt for a professional degree from a private, nonprofit institution $243,300
I have no idea how they got 28k when most every number I see on that page is much larger.
All the other numbers you see that are higher are graduate degrees. Comparing a medical student debt (4+ years more of school beyond the 4 of undergrad, residency, perhaps a specialty on top) to only a 4 year degree is not representative of the vast majority of student debt.
This is already coming to pass in hot real-estate markets where it's almost impossible to get any sort of trade help. It feels like most of the skilled tradesmen (and women) have a plethora of job choices and they by far prefer to build new housing instead of dealing with nitpicky rich people for the same money.
It's just like most programmers preferring to work on greenfield projects rather than maintenance.
Not everyone can work an information sector job.
In many places a skilled plumber or electrician earns more than an office worker or even junior engineer. A skilled highway construction worker earns more than the country average. A crane operator makes more than the average software developer. There are many surprises when it comes to blue collar job payment.
Take the electrician for example. Minimum 4 years of work as an apprentice, then you have to do a year of schooling, pay for it out of pocket, take a test and your making about as much as a entry level developer who only needed to spend 1 year studying in their free time, spent $400 on a laptop, got all their learning for free online, and isn't doing back breaking, more dangerous work. And from there the tech worker's salary is going to go to 150k+ in 3-5 years. You don't even need college to do that anymore.
Same thing with the crane operator. Starting salary for tech is more, requires less time to get started, and the tech worker's salary goes up quick after starting. You don't start out on the path to being a crane operator at 50k+ a year. You start helping doing rigging and spotting for $12 an hour.
I lived both sides of it, trust me. I see where your coming from, some blue collar jobs pay more than you'd think, but in reality there's just no comparison.
> if you've ever worked in the trades you would know that a large portion of them are ignorant and uneducated
Yes, and that's why there used to be a view that adult education was to be promoted and encouraged.
My point is that at some point, we just stopped aspiring to a better tomorrow and accepted we're all doomed to live in hell. Which, inevitably, condemned us to a life of pain.
Craftsman usually had a decent living because it took training and there was generally demand. But if you train twice as many electricians, its not like there will be twice as many electrician jobs created. So learning a craft or trade is a great personal strategy, but it not a solution we can universally apply.
I do think we force way too many people into college-track for little benefit and quite a bit of harm.
I don't know that I agree with that, right now at least on the data I have available and the anecdata I have observed there is a serious shortage of skilled blue color work, plumber, carpenter, electrician, etc. so there is definitely a shift that would be beneficial for society at large and individuals.
But let's explore this idea a little bit more, right now we are used to the idea that there are X jobs for Y persons, especially in white color work. This seems to derive largely from the fact that white color work is focused not on production of goods and services but in the production of information (and to some extant bullsh*). For example there are only so many marketing jobs out there because there are only so much marketing a company needs done. Sure adding your first 3 marketers may increase your revenue by 50% but adding your 300th marketer probably isn't going to increase your income at all, in fact it's likely it might actually be a negative investment. The problem is the marketer doesn't actually add a resources to the world, they aren't producing marketing widgets, they merely identify and optimize existing distribution channels, and help others become aware of your company, and there is only so much you can do in that area, there is only so much inefficiency that can be optimized away.
Contrast this instead with a plumber. You hire your first plumber he can do say 5 jobs a day, if you hire 3 more plumbers you can do 20 jobs a day now. Well let's suppose later on you hire another plumber he still adds the value to do 5 more jobs a day. Now you may say that there are only so many plumbing jobs out there, only so many people have their 3 year old push a bouncy ball down the toilet, but the plumber is also working on new housing and new business, the plumber isn't just optimizing the existing pie they are causing the overall size of the pie itself to increase. Now there does of course exist some sort of maximum to this, but after reading World War Z that explores this concept in quite a bit of depth (and has no similarity to the movie at all) I've realized that if society did collapse I as a software engineer have absolutely no real or applicable skills, whereas an electrician or a carpenter, they will be able to keep on doing their job as they were now, because they are creating actual wealth, not just optimizing existing wealth generation activities.
My point being a society with an overabundance of electricians, carpenters and plumbers is probably better off than a society with an overabundance of project managers, paralegals, and risk analysts.
I think this is the root of a lot of people's frustrations around housing, and adulthood. For most our history it was expected that you would have multiple generations sharing a household. The idea that you move out of your family's house the second you turn 18 or finish college is a relatively new idea. As parent commenter points out, this was really only the norm for two generations, suggesting that that, and not our current situation, is the historical outlier.
Living with your family for a while allows you to save money and help your parents out after they spent the better part of two decades raising you.
We have a lot of choices in this life, but whether I get brought into it isn't one.
I have no expectations of what my son will or will not help me with in the future and will try as hard as possible to set him up well - because he didn't have a choice in his circumstance, I and solely I did.
Wow. This is wild to me. My grandfather was an orphan, most likely because his parents weren't married(if he were alive today, he'd be well over 100).
I am absolutely grateful that my parents have done their best to raise me to be the intelligent, caring person I am, and to take care not to perpetuate the misdeeds of their parents(which, being Boomers, were numerous). As both someone who suffers from depression and identifies as a materialist, it is probably the single thing I am most grateful for, and certainly the most profound intangible in my life. The feeling that I owe them is honestly one of the fundamental things that keeps me going.
If your parents are decent to you and showed care with how you were raised I absolutely think that you owe them. Having a functional, caring family is one of the greatest privileges one can have in life. You know who I don't owe anything too? The people who put my grandfather up for adoption.