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Comment by mind-blight | Hacker News Reader

I'm concerned that the majority of "should we fix college or should we circumvent college" conversations don't bring up one of the scariest parts of our current economy: STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom.

All of the conversations I've seen implicitly assume that this is good, and that the solution to farmer workers (or other low paid workers) escaping poverty is to train them as software developers.

We really need farm workers, and most of them live in poverty. I love having more engineers, scientists, and doctors, but we desperately need non-STEM work to be a viable option

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> STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom.

People repeat that but what is it based on? Most of the population, including most people who have economic stability and freedom, have not had STEM jobs and very likely will not have STEM jobs.

More importantly, college is about much more than job training. College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations.

> College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations.

As If you have to go to college to become an adult.

A lot of college programs seem like their purpose is for some very wealthy and sheltered children to become “cultured”, but that is completely unrelated to the skills needed to be a functioning adult or to take significant responsibilities in your life.

Without a well-informed populace, democracy cannot function. Contrary to what you have argued, becoming cultured (in other words, understanding the philosophy, ethics, history, and fundamental assumptions about how and why society functions) are essential skills for taking responsibility, and the lack of these skills is behind virtually every major deficiency in society.

College and university were never supposed to be about job training. They were supposed to teach one how to learn so you could become a lifelong learner and continue your own education in any field you chose to pursue and to use those skills to benefit the society at large so that everyone can benefit from an increasing understanding of the world.

Instead, what we have now, is an increasing focus on becoming a corporate employee, who devotes their life to marketing and selling products that society doesn’t need and are in fact increasingly destroying society and harming individual rights and lessening opportunity with each iteration. A higher education is increasingly designed for specialized corporate tasks that do not improve society and fail to solve the most pressing problems at hand.

> Without a well-informed populace, democracy cannot function. Contrary to what you have argued, becoming cultured (in other words, understanding the philosophy, ethics, history, and fundamental assumptions about how and why society functions)

Look at the marvels modern democracy has created with a population that mostly wasn’t college educated. Does democracy work better today, with vastly higher college graduation rates, than it did 30 years ago?

Also, I have two step siblings in college and they aren’t learning any of those things. They’re learning fantasies that make them less well-equipped to deal with reality than their parents and grandparents who didn’t go to college.

Also, viz. your remarks about Bangladeshis and college: http://archive.prothom-alo.com/detail/news/67517

That's what high school is for, you should already know a fair bit about government when you leave there. Likewise about lifelong learning.

"College and university were never supposed to be about job training. They were supposed to teach one how to learn so you could become a lifelong learner"

I see little benefit in discussing how things should be instead of what they are. There are clearly forces that pivoted universities towards what they are today, telling people what university should be isn't gonna fix anything.

More importantly, who decided university is the only place you could learn this, or that you could not become a life long learner long before going to university?

It seems that institutional education is precisely what gives people the impression that there is such a thing as "stop learning" aka graduation.

> I see little benefit in discussing how things should be instead of what they are. There are clearly forces that pivoted universities towards what they are today, telling people what university should be isn't gonna fix anything.

What makes you say they are that, and for everyone, and from everyone's perception? Because lots of people say it on HN? Because lots of people say it anywhere? Does that make it true?

And if it is true, it changed once, why can't it change again? Through these discussions is how society changes - and it will change, one way or another.

> who decided university is the only place you could learn this, or that you could not become a life long learner long before going to university?

It seems like universities are the best place to learn, given the obvious resources? If I want to learn about history, it would be good to have experts in history, books about history, other people studying history, etc.?

Universities that stifle dissenting opinions are the best place to learn? Interesting.

There are plenty of online resources these days with active communities where you can learn from peers without fear of being penalized by your peers or an ideologically captured professor who will fail you for not toeing the idealogical line.

Online communities don't penalize dissenting opinions? They are far worse than any university.

> ideologically captured professor who will fail you for not toeing the idealogical line

It's a baseless accusation against nobody.

> you can learn from peers

Peers are no substitue for experts. If I want to become a doctor, I need to learn from professors of medicine, not peers. Who would hire your 'peers' to teach a course in whatever you want to learn? Who would ask their advice?

> If I want to learn about history, it would be good to have experts in history, books about history, other people studying history, etc.?

That would be true prior to the internet and/or digitalization of resources.

Today, a kid in the 3rd world country can access those very same resources. Whats left is the value of the credential - accepted in the marketplace.

> Today, a kid in the 3rd world country can access those very same resources.

They cannot access the experts to mentor them and teach them, they can't access much of scholarly work, which is in expensive books and research papers.

I'm not a child and not in a 3rd world country; I've been through higher education, and seriously studying anything is inefficient and impossible - I simply can't catch up with the expertise of professors in selecting the media and understanding it.

> why can't it change again?

who said it can't? It will be changed by looking into the mirror and fix the incentives or whatever that corrupted higher education. Not by preaching people how they should invest their time and efforts. Preaching only works in churchs.

Why is my point of view "preaching", but yours is something else or something better? One way things certainly won't get better is if we dismiss each other's points of views.

Yours is telling students to fix their thinking because nothing is wrong with universities. A non preaching talking point would be to recognize that there are problems to be fixed and it's not people "thinking wrong"

Without a well-informed populace, democracy cannot function.

College campuses have gone through severe idealogical capture, so the idea that going through a 4-year degree leads to a well informed populace is laughable.

I would argue that a 4-year peace corps posting in an improvised country would lead to a better informed population than any liberal arts education.

> College campuses have gone through severe idealogical capture

Reactionaries repeat that over and over, which is their most common tactic for any issue. But reptition is not truth, as we have learned well in the Internet age, though that hasn't stopped people from repeating it. Also, the reactionaries main objection seems to be that their own ideology isn't taught (including things like denial of climate change and racism); they insist they are a non-ideological norm and everything else is ideology, again through repetition. Academia requires proof; it's not a place of equity for bad ideas. It's also a place that disrespects the current establishment; again, no ideas get special treatment.

>Academia requires proof; it's not a place of equity for bad ideas.

Tell that to Judith Butler.

> As If you have to go to college to become an adult.

It's sad that so many comments like this are dismissive, and therefore not much reason or argument is put behind them, making them very thin.

You can be an adult with no education or training at all, and for most of human history, that's what happened. Is that our standard? Just 'be' an adult? Why have any schooling?

> College prepares people to be adults in every way…

People repeat that but what is it based on?

Most of the adult population have not gone to college but somehow manage to become functioning adults.

Maybe that there was a stronger tie to college helping with being "well rounded" years ago, when most of the authority figures in your life up until college were politically conservative? So college might be your first experience where there were more politically liberal authority figures?

That is an interesting point. My dad entered college having grown up in some pretty fundamentalist, anti-evolution church, and became a doctor and an cosmopolitan sort of intellectual. He switched to a liberal church and learned about Darwin, and all sorts of stuff. But I took Attic Greek and Old English and weird English literary theory and Russian history and medieval history. I don’t directly use that stuff, but it does seem like it made me a better person, more aware of a bigger scene outside of my little track of software.

Right now, some knowledge of Russian history and 19th century European history is very useful. Because we're in a war that looks like a 19th century war. Like the many wars involving the British Empire, the Imperial State of Germany, the Prussian Empire, the Austria-Hungarian Empire, and France. The era of the Great Powers, engaged in power grabs for reasons people thought were good at the time.

That's what we're seeing now. Understanding where that led last time is useful.

In the 19th century, nobody had that all much firepower. Battles were local. When that changed, the routine minor wars of the 19th century turned into World War One.

Also, knowledge of international relations, international law, military command and control in the age of smart munitions, the behavior of autocrats (esp in Russia), 20th century history of Ukraine, Russia's prior invasion of Afganistan (similar in its initial plans) and war in Chechnya, the strengths and weaknesses of military alliances and NATO in particular, Poland's experiences with Russia in WWII and the Cold War, geopolitics particularly in the Black Sea, Russian naval power, politics of American war support, nuclear weapons diplomacy and tactics, modern Russian nuclear weapons tactics ("escalate to de-escalate"), propaganda campaigns, etc. etc. etc.

> In the 19th century, nobody had that all much firepower. Battles were local.

Knowing some history of Napoleon, for example, would help too. :) But yes, your general point is taken. And then 25 years later, WWII ...

> Most of the adult population have not gone to college but somehow manage to become functioning adults.

We can't do better? Functioning is our only standard? We could go back to the Middle Ages, or be hunter-gatherers, where for 95% of homo sapien history probably most adults were 'functioning'.

You made a very dubious claim that college provides some magic that makes people who go to it betters "adults".

You don't define what adult means. You don't say or imply what ways college would help you become a better one.

For what I would define as "adult", which is understanding the realities of life outside the shelter of their family infrastructure, I would argue most colleges don't really further a student's self-reliance in that way.

If anything, they create another, different reality bubble which is again popped when they are dropped into to the actual real world, often with a mountain of debt. This is the point at which, in my opinion, where someone learns to become an adult.

Does learning new information and skills help one become a better functioning adults? Of course. But college doesn't have a monopoly on being the way to acquire information and skills.

As the price of education in the US continues to increase (for no good reason, other than people can get loans to pay it), college will increasingly fail the cost/benefit analysis for a lot occupations.

As an aside, your attitude seems to imply that you think people who have not gone to college are lesser in some way. I would apply some critical analysis to that.

It's based on the entry level salary for California tech workers being six figures whereas the wage for farm workers is an exception to laws such that they can be paid below minimum wage.

> farm workers is an exception to laws such that they can be paid below minimum wage.

I’m all for setting the minimum wage for farm workers at $25/hr. Within 2-3 years every manual farm worker will be replaced by a machine, and we’ll all be better off for it.

Well, not the manual workers, temporarily. But then we’ll have to deal with the problem of unemployment honestly rather than leaving make-work jobs around.

Somebody has to build and maintain the machines.

Unemployment for migrant workers means they won't come so that isn't a problem.

The real problem is machines can't replace those jobs or they would have. 25/h would mean very high prices for local food so everything will come via imports.

> Unemployment for migrant workers means they won't come so that isn't a problem.

It is a problem for them. They wouldn't come if it weren't economically advantageous to do so. Losing those jobs leaves them worse off, at least in the short term.

Minimum wage in Australia is ~$25/hour... and has been for > 10 years... still no new machines.

> I’m all for setting the minimum wage for farm workers at $25/hr. Within 2-3 years every manual farm worker will be replaced by a machine, and we’ll all be better off for it.

Oh yeah you think the only thing between us and a fully automated robot-run future is labor market conditions? The perfect robot slaves will not be forthcoming for quite awhile. We will have to settle for human slaves, or in modern times, immigrants totally reliant on their employer and without the normal rights afforded citizens for our low prices. I sympathize with libertarian and capitalist ideals but I find it disturbing that the agricultural and energy base of the US economy is anything but free market.

The thing about minimum wage is that it is not a maximum wage. These days you're not going to find much farm help unless you're up into the $20 per hour range already anyway. Being able to theoretically pay less doesn't mean much when nobody shows up.

> More importantly, college is about much more than job training. College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations

The "preparing to be an adult" value decayed exponentially for me. The first year staying in halls with my peers was extremely valuable. The rest of the years were not so valuable.

Also, this value was 95% social. There was very little that uni itself taught me about being an adult.

What did you study?

I learned so much, I cannot imagine having only the knowledge and intellectual skills that I had from high school.

I studied mechanical engineering and a bit of CS, though I didn't complete the degree. I work as a SWE now.

Regarding knowledge and intellectual skills, the vast majority of my knowledge gained in the last ~5 years has been from self-teaching or exploring things I found interesting and I think I developed far more intellectual skills from doing that than going to university.

University felt extremely intellectually restrictive to me. You were given a ton of material that you needed to learn at a surface level to pass tests. There was little room for exploration and deep understanding within courses.

Most of the material did not seem like it was going to be useful for me. I don't like learning for the sake of it, I prefer to try and focus on usefulness.

Why do I need to learn about how to draw structures in isometric and oblique or understand CPU registers when I have absolutely zero interest in those things and never want to do that kind of work?

Because "foundational knowledge" or something, even though the vast majority of people will never use the vast majority of the knowledge they learn. I've asked my friends who completed degrees how much of the information from their degree they use at work and it's practically nothing.

This is precisely why I'm glad I was able to choose (Management) Information Systems instead of Computer Science for my major. There are key courses in CS that I missed, but I feel like I also avoided a good number of courses (deeper math, specifically) that I ultimately never needed to establish my career in Web development. I've picked up the rest learning as I go.

Being able to get 1.5 years' experience in paid internships when I was at Drexel was also hugely valuable towards kick-starting my post-college career without adding additional classes.

I wonder if that's a difference between STEM and the humanities - and I wonder how much of the perception of college on HN is based on that experience.

In the humanities, learning in depth (to express it superficially), exploration, and learning the skills of how to learn in those ways, is fundamental; it's the point. Try a humanities program - you would love it!

I get where you're coming from, but at this point I'm highly skeptical of university's value-add.

From my perspective most faculty add very little value, so in terms of learning and exploration there's not much point in paying boatloads of money to attend when I could go through the material (Or similar) myself if I'm interested.

Just a suggestion: Try one class with a good professor and see what the difference is. Expert mentoring is a thing, outside academia too. How do you even know what books to read?

> I'm highly skeptical of university's value-add

This new social trend - which suits the reactionary movement very well (which doesn't mean you are a reactionary - is really tragic. We are just destroying so much in instututions and potential, so many years and resources lost, and mostly just to destroy things. It's not hard to grasp that knowledge and learning move us forward, and it's better with experts.

I know how valuable mentoring is, but a large part of the problem is that finding a "good" professor or mentor is difficult.

With people online you can at least vet them well and have access to their knowledge and advice. Even though it's not the same as a mentor I think learning from an expert online is better than having a mediocre mentor.

> It's not hard to grasp that knowledge and learning move us forward, and it's better with experts

I agree knowledge and learning are important, but I no longer feel like university is the primary place for that unless you want to go into academia. Internet communities feel like better environments than university at this point.

This doesn't feel like a purposeful destruction of university through a social trend though. The institutions are destroying themselves.

I think that 95% social is pretty important. I know it was for me. If I knew everything I know now about software after high school I could have gotten a good job, but coming out of high school I was socially completely inept. College accelerated me so much in that regard that I honestly can’t imagine my life without it today.

Yeah absolutely. If it wasn't clear, that social value was extremely helpful for me as well.

Do you think Americans were less adult in, say, 1930s, when only small fraction of them went to college?

What do you mean by "less adult"? Do you think people were less adult before we had universal eduction? Are there benefits to their adulthood from it?

My point is that you claim that college prepares people to be adults “in every way”, so I wonder in what way today’s college graduates are more prepared to be adults than, say, overwhelming majority of adults were in 1930s, who didn’t have any college experience.

In the 1930s, you weren't expected to have 5 years of experience for an entry level job, and they had actual on-the-job training, which no company wants to invest in anymore.

With as bad as some of Ford's practices were, he did have a couple decent ones. If I recall correctly, Ford essentially had his own internal engineering school where some line workers could get accepted into, become engineers and work for the company as an engineer.

I haven’t heard that one before about Ford. GM supported / took over a school and renamed it the GM Institute of Technology in its earlier years, now it’s Kettering University [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettering_University

I don't have links at hand. I learned about it my History of Engineering class. But from my understanding, employees in the program worked during the day and then essentially attended classes taught at Ford facilities during the evening.

That's great, but they only did it for white men. If you're skin color happened to be black, you couldn't advance past janitor (IIRC). It was affirmative action for white men.

Well thats a given. This program took place during segregation when people had messed up ideas in to how the color of one's skin determines the character of that person. But we can still highlight the merits of the program and bring something similar into the modern age where people are not rejected based on skin color.

Even worst than than that. Ford was a huge anti-Semite and one of his papers had major influence over Hitler who then went on to genocide millions of Jews. Dude was for sure an asshole. He also fired workers who drank or gambled during their off time and had company men who raided homes of his workers.

For the kinds of jobs that were available in 1930s, the employers today will in fact hire just about anyone, as the labor shortage is enormous. The sort of jobs you are thinking about, employers do typically require a college degree, but that’s just a self-licking ice cream cone: if only few people had college degrees, employers couldn’t really require them from all candidates.

> My point is that you claim that college prepares people to be adults “in every way”, so I wonder in what way today’s college graduates are more prepared to be adults than, say, overwhelming majority of adults were in 1930s, who didn’t have any college experience.

Yes, generally speaking. And they were better prepared than people from the 1840s, who mostly were illiterate (no universal education), lost most of their kids at a young age, etc. If you spend zero years preparing for something and I spend four (or 12 and 16 years), I'm going to be better prepared most likely. There are diminishing marginal returns at some point, but college is qualitatively very different than high school.

This question comes up many times, as if it's a personal insult to people without college degrees. Let's imagine it does insult them (which I don't think it does); should we reject all progress for ourselves because others don't have access to it and might be offended? You have access to the Interet and I don't - are you saying you are better than me? The Internet is useless! And now we don't want to offend people in the 1930s? There are things other people have done that benefitted their lives, and that I missed out on - good for them!

> Yes, generally speaking.

This is not an answer to a “in what way” question. I will grant you that elementary school teaching people to read, write and basic arithmetics, does indeed inculcate skills very important in adult life, but from there to argue that a marginal year of education gives you some marginal amount of human capital, only shows how weak your argument is: it’s completely useless without trying to quantify the actual learning. What if a year of college actually reduces a day’s worth of useful stuff? What a waste of time it would be, and yet totally compatible with your argument.

And, it might be of interest to you, that the last month of 12th year of education, and last month of 16th year “teaches” a lot more useful stuff than the previous 4 years in terms of how it translates to increased success in adult life, as studies show. This is actually obvious to everyone, that obtaining diploma is worth more than 4 years worth of learning, but the point is that education is not about learning.

You're really questioning the value of education past 5th grade?

> it’s completely useless without trying to quantify the actual learning

Most things in life can't be quantified, yet aren't useless.

> the last month of 12th year of education, and last month of 16th year “teaches” a lot more useful stuff than the previous 4 years in terms of how it translates to increased success in adult life, as studies show

What studies?

> You're really questioning the value of education past 5th grade?

No, I just raised this as a response to your comment claiming people in 1840 America were "mostly illiterate"[1]: I was talking about reading and writing, because you were talking about literacy, and I do agree that it is valuable to teach people basic literacy and numeracy. In no way my comment above implies that I question the value of education past 5th grade.

That said, I do in fact question value of state-organized mass education past 5th grade as it currently exist, yes. To be clear, I'm not questioning the value of learning things past 5th grade, but rather the way we pretend people learn things today.

> Most things in life can't be quantified, yet aren't useless.

If you decompose the syntax of the sentence you're referring to, you'll find that the "useless" in it does not refer to "education", but rather to your argument: it is useless to argue that "X is good for you, so extra 4-8 years doing X is worth it", unless you can quantify exactly how good X in fact is for you, and how good extra 4-8 years of doing X would be.

Say, imagine X to be "learning to play a musical instrument": it's probably worthwhile for everyone to spend some time doing that, but the idea that everyone needs to spend at least 12 years of their lifes, and most people should spend 4 on top of that, is rather ludicrous. How do you know that regular schooling is not exactly liked that, without trying to quantify it? You don't.

> What studies?

The Google Scholar keyword for you to familiarize yourself with the rather substantial literature on the topic is "sheepskin effect".

[1] - you are very much wrong that Americans in 1840 were mostly illiterate, by the way: literacy in US was historically always very high, and by mid 1800s, large majority was already literate, despite lack of federally-mandated government schooling. This is a legacy of English heritage, where majority of male Englishmen were already literate in mid 1600s. They did not get there through top-down state-organized schooling, it was mostly a bottom-up effort, where local Church played huge role.

I mean, they looked more adult. If you look at a high school year book from decades ago the seniors look like they're in their 30s. Maybe this means time is speeding up, or that life was harder then which aged them, like how outdoor cats often look all haggard. Then again was life really that much harder in the 1960s?

I suspect that what you’re seeing is that they were less overweight, which appears to us as “older” in young people.

That is true, and diet could be a factor. Also I read men's testosterone levels have been dropping which could lead to them starting to shave later.

Are you sure it's not just that their hair and fashion styles are those of a previous decade and that that triggers the "this person is old" neurons in your brain?

In the 1930s, I'm sure the majority of children worked hard lives on farms and other jobs so they were well on their way to realizing the troubles of adulthood.

US was already majority urban by 1930, though not by much. But yes, you are correct that life was harder back then, which made people tougher.

> life was harder back then, which made people tougher

Unintuitively, harder lives don't make people tougher. Intuitively, they make people more exhausted and traumatized. Look at how functional people were back then when they were elderly (though that could be due to other aspects of health). Look at anyone who has had a hard life; they wear down.

Similarly, children, contrary to some pop politico-psychology, generally grow stronger if they feel safer. Unsafe kids are scared to face the world and often never develop an inner sense of security. Trauma leaves wounds that sometimes never heal. Safe kids feel like they can brave the world, and they internalize that sense of safety that their parents model and give them.

From my experience of growing up around people who lived through war and then repressive regime and poverty, what you describe above is very much opposite to what I have seen.

Well, we did have to take away the alcohol for a while. ;)

> College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations.

Only 2% of Bangladeshis go to college. Are the rest not adults? Indeed, I’d say the opposite is true. Apart from job training, the main function of college in America seems to be extending adolescence and deferring dealing with the real world. 18 year olds in Bangladesh are a lot more “adult” than many college-educated 30-somethings.

The quote I believe corresponds to "the expected civic responsibilities that an individual has in that society."

There are many ways to prepare an individual for that responsibility. In western nations, that is often done more through a formal educational program than through the community and family.

This also isn't a "you must have X amount of civic responsibility" as different societies are looking for adults to have different amounts of responsibility within that society.

While American college is to an extent the deferment of responsibility, in many cases it is also the exposure to a wider range of cultures than one experienced up through high school. It is that exposure to other people and culture - learning to get along with a roommate or doing your own laundry in a gradual process that college presents.

In that respect, it is not a deferment of dealing with the real world, but rather a gradual introduction to the broader world. While the 18 year old American may be able to do unskilled labor and get along (tolerably) with siblings, being able to work in an office or understand that the upbringing of the driver of the carpool isn't the same as yours - that comes from that exposure to other people and cultures.

We talk and I've commented on posts about 'misinformation' 'propaganda' the role of social media and pernicious tentacles of marketing. The amount of surveillance, terrible software promoted as amazing (remember the articles about Shotspotter? or LIDAR? or facial recognition by airlines?)

We're already doing a pretty terrible job educating people and it shows. How much worse does it get when its outsourced to the 'community'? Communities in the US (and everywhere) are fragmented, class stratified, religiously bound structures that we have seen the detriment of when it comes to civic participation. Just check out the IG page of any former evangelical or mormon female.

A secular democracy requires education and time to participate in civic and civil society. That education must imho be grounded in not just how to think, but also the history of humanity. Otherwise we are signing ourselves up for a return to much darker days.

Yes. I fear that this is exactly what is missed by people who expect University to operate as a transaction where middle class people invest money in order to obtain membership in to an elite cast, which is a system where the state is treating these investments as a private enterprise which needs public-sector subsidy, and the university is put in to a system of economic incentives where it becomes an institution for producing people who corporations need, and in turn, the indebted student is lumbered with economic constraints which channel them into being who a corporation needs.

My 19 year old mother in Pakistan might have been a lot more adult because she had me, but I'm sure having to forego her career for a marriage with a Rs 10000 mehr was something she would have liked to have had a few more choices about. Get a grip on yourself, man. (And yes, she went to college there too)

People have more choices in America because of the country’s economic and technological advancement. For women, in particular, there are more job opportunities in an advanced economy than in one based on subsistence farming. Having more choices is one of the luxuries of living in America.

But that’s orthogonal to my point. If I were looking for people to rebuild America (or even just maintain it) I’d much rather have adults like your mom (or my mom) than the children graduating from American colleges these days.

Your mom might be better off. Look at what's happening with educated American women. They forgo children until it's too late to have them, focusing on career instead of on family, and then find that they can not do both.

My mom flipped the order, working until she had us, then taking about a decade off her career and doing an MS in Computer Science in the meanwhile, before returning to her career.

She got an MIS about a decade after having us but couldn’t get internships because she had to take care of us as a single mother so it really never helped her land a job

I'm sure you have some knowledge that I could learn from, but it requires both of us and most of that is inflammatory and hyperbole. Let's both try curiosity and bringing valuable knowledge to the table?

> 18 year olds in Bangladesh are a lot more “adult”

Imagine an 18 year old in the US. They could go to college and learn more about the world, themselves, etc., or get a menial job, an apartment, and become more adult. In fact, any learning or training is about investing in the future. Any investment is about current sacrifice (time, money, etc.) for better future returns.

We could also ask the same question - and it was asked, by prior generations - about 12 year olds, who could become adults and work in coal mines. People used to get married at that age too. In Judaism, 13 year old males technically become adults by completing their Bar Mitzvahs (obviously an ancient tradition). Were they better off? Was our society better off? Is there some benefit to achieving adulthood sooner?

Taking it further, kids who lack effective parenting, either through accident or neglect, often grow up fast. And lacking that time to be kids, to learn and explore and grow themselves, costs them for the rest of their lives. I grew a lot in high school and college, and I would have missed so much if I had to be a full-fledged adult then.

The argument that prior generations lacked college educations and therefore future ones have nothing to gain, or that it's an insult to prior generations to say there is something to gain, seem very flawed for obvious reasons. It's wrong that so many people in Bangledesh, who are just as able to grow and benefit, are denied the opportunity and those benefits.

Let's keep building and improving a world so that they, like so many others over the last several decades, become the first in their families to benefit from college.

I never went to college, instead I got a job and worked like you say at age 18. I then worked my way into software engineering. Compared to my siblings (and virtually everyone else in my family, who took more traditional routes), I’m far more independent and have a stable career with no college debt.

I’ve heard of others talk up the college experience, but I fail to see what’s so special about it. What exactly did I miss in my development? How exactly am I different (besides having a 4-6 year head-start in the working world)?

Parties and friends are also made outside of campus, in the adult world. Working a job at a young age and having to be responsible for yourself builds life skills early. Some of which, my college-educated friends are still having trouble building well into their 30’s. I know some that are terrified of “growing up”: they keep earning degrees or still in their 2nd masters program, accumulating debt that is clearly unsustainable. Many are in fields that inside the sheltered and honestly, kind of bizarre world of academia look nothing like what actually happens in the real world, and they are in for a very rude awakening when that house of cards comes tumbling down.

Every time I meet someone who went to college, if you’re in the same job as them without having a degree, the default response is “but I got the experience”. Part of me thinks this is some kind of rationalization so they don’t have to accept the fact that they might have just been swindled and could have just as easily did what I did and get the same outcome.

The “college experience” of living in a dorm for 4 years is probably overrated, but if you can afford it, there’s definitely a benefit to spending 4 years on directed learning. Both in subjects you’re interested and in being forced to learn subjects you would never touch on your own.

I went back to school after a decade of web development, and learned a ton. I think I’m a much better developer than I would have been had I learned only what I thought I needed for my job (could be wrong about that, but I don’t think I am). I’ve also worked with plenty of people without degrees who were better developers than me, but to a person, I think they would have greatly benefited from a broader theoretical foundation than what they built through self directed learning.

One thing you should think about is that rationalization likely applies to you just as much as it does to the college educated people you’re talking about.

I was in the college is useless boat before I went back and most of it was rationalizing my choices—plus a bit of feeling inferior.

It’s one thing to decide that college wasn’t the right decision for you (and maybe it wasn’t). It’s another entirely to write off everyone who went as suckers.

I graduated from college the first time; did both community college and university as a transfer. Still got the 'freshman experience' my first semester at uni, then lived on campus, except for my final semester where I commuted.

Yes, having dedicated time to focus on learning was great. But I was effective at that because I'd already learned to, well, learn, on my own, by homeschooling the latter half of high school (where I'd study, take CLEP tests).

College isn't for suckers, but the scholastic benefits of it can be gotten through other means (and should probably be done because a job you're interested in requires it, ideally in the confines of that job, like an apprenticeship in the trades). Many of the other purported benefits (social, etc) are BS.

The main benefit I can think of outside of that dedicated study time is being forced into more of a cultural milieu than I had experienced prior. I think that is important, but I also think that entirely depends on the school, just as it depends on the job, so I'm not sure that's entirely a college benefit so much as a "get into the city if you're living somewhere suburban or rural" benefit.

> College isn't for suckers, but the scholastic benefits of it can be gotten through other means

Of course it’s possible, but the number of people who have the discipline/inclination to get through a degree’s worth (or even a significant fraction of a degree’s worth) of education on their own is very small. Small enough that if the reason you’re skipping college is because you think you can/will learn everything they can teach you on your own, you’re most likely kidding yourself.

With self directed learning it’s also shockingly easy to develop huge blind spots that you have no idea you have.

> and should probably be done because a job you're interested in requires it

I’ve personally benefited a good deal from taking the year of physics I was forced to take, despite no job having ever required it.

The same goes for all the papers I had to write in non CS classes.

> the scholastic benefits of it can be gotten through other means

Where else will you get the direct access to expertise in all those fields, guiding you in what works/experiments/skills/etc to read/learn/acquire, answering questions personally, the massive labs and libraries, the students to study with.

As someone who has tried to study on my own at a serious level, I would say the opposite: Studying on my own is nothing like it. I am very jealous of those in college. I don't know which books and papers to read, how to contextualize them, what they have and lack; I have nobody to ask (Reddit and Stack Exchange being very poor substitutes); I lack access to resources that are far too expensive, JSTOR being a simple example, making much study very time-consuming or impossible. I regularly run into things, years later, that would have been introduced in the first day of class by an expert - I have an unknown but large quantity of blind spots.

How do you know what classes to take?

That's kind of my point - the nature of "study on my own" is different than "can I find the resources I need to solve a particular problem". College is creating a problem of "pass this test" or "complete this assignment"; studying on your own, yes, you don't know where your blind spots are or where to begin, because you don't have a problem you're trying to solve. College provides you some, but they aren't fundamentally different than work problems. And while some classes may attempt to 'teach' the material, the ones where that was an effective use of my time (rather than just read the textbook, or those where class time was unrelated to the projects we were graded on) were definitely in the minority. YMMV.

> How do you know what classes to take?

You can ask a professor, or multiple ones. If the classes are within your major, the school will guide you. This part is a non-problem. You can also take several classes for a week or two, depending on the school, and see which ones suit your priorities.

> College provides you some, but they aren't fundamentally different than work problems.

Usually the opposite is said, that college problems are not at all like what you encounter in work, that students are unprepared for work problems and that professors don't understand them. College problems are crafted carefully for you to acquire knowledge and skills; work problems are crafted to avoid having you learn, because that takes extra time.

> And while some classes may attempt to 'teach' the material, the ones where that was an effective use of my time (rather than just read the textbook, or those where class time was unrelated to the projects we were graded on) were definitely in the minority. YMMV.

I think this is not realistic for most people. It's also possible you missed a lot without the professor's context and expertise. In anything, would you rather just read a book or have access to an expert mentor? There's no question IME.

Maybe it depends on the courses, which I'm starting to suspect explains a lot of the response at HN: Were you in a STEM field, particularly T or E?

Didn't see this response - but yes. Computer Science. From a top 10 school. Some of what I'm saying is mostly true of the two years of 'core' classes, and then some of the softer CS classes. Others include classes 'taught' by professors there for research. Literally the only classes that felt like "yeah, this was worth attending" were the ones being taught by 'instructors', not professors, i.e., people with Masters degrees rather than Ph Ds, who weren't being pressured to publish and bring in grant money. Meaning I can think of roughly...4, of the dozens of classes I took, that felt worth it. And chunky classes, like Data Structures and Algorithms, and Computer Graphics, there was no point to attending the class; an hour invested in the textbook was worth more than an hour attending.

Conversely I learned functional programming, multiple languages and new CS concepts, fault tolerant system design, and system architecture skills, all in the context of a short period of work.

I don't know you at all, so I have nothing to say about you, of course. Nothing personal.

Regarding the assertions: Of course, one anecdoctal experience says nothing about a population, and in the population, career and other outcomes are far better for college graduates.

We are all by not knowing what we missed and, as you say about others, to rationalize our choices. Framing the question - always the most powerful mode of argument - by saying someone meets the standard (i.e., you are happy in your life), so why do something else, makes any possible alternative useless. What good is a winning lottery ticket either? But the question is, what are the different sets of outcomes from each alternative choice? Each alternative, such as college, makes us better off in some ways, worse off in others - and that includes impacting things that the other alternatives don't touch.

You're defining the question as if college benefits are social life and speed of acquiring adult life skills and responsibilities. If those are someone's aims, I'd agree - don't go! College is about critical thinking skills, knowledge, and learning skills, which last a lifetime. Are your thinking skills so good that they can't be improved? Do you have nothing to learn? Not me. How do improve those things? Imagine studying with an expert who not only guides you in what to study, but explains the works based many other works, context, etc.; answers your questions regularly, person-to-person, in their office and via computer; pushes you to see dimensions and angles that you didn't know about, and to do it at a high level; and reviews your understanding and gives you feedback. And then it would be great to do that with others studying the same thing. And if the study needs it, if they provided other resources: A huge library of other works and every reseach paper ever written (along with experts in each field that help you discover excellent, relevant materials); labs with specialized equipment; etc. etc.

If college didn't exist for learning, it would be too good to be invented.

Also, don't you want to learn about yourself, the world, etc.? What you read on the Internet is so far removed from the quality of knowledge, it's laughable, and it's tragic.

> I know some that are terrified of “growing up”

> sheltered and honestly, kind of bizarre world of academia

These are well-worn stereotypes. People inside and outside school have trouble growing up; handling a college workload is no joke - much harder than early jobs, which often are 40 hours and not challenging (many service jobs). And academia is no more bizarre than other industries. You should see what goes on in SV or on Wall Street if you want bizarre.

I went to work when I was 18. I don't think I've spent my career doing menial work.

Look how many people have taken this same approach - purposely miscontrue the discussion into a personal attack and respond. Perhaps people who did go to college can also take discussion personally and get mad about others saying they wasted their time and money. Then we'll have an even better discussion!

Yes, I'm saying that you personally - and your dog too - are an ignorant, uneducated, menial worker, who can't count higher than 10 without your toes, while I can count to 1024.

With that out of the way, can we actually talk about something valuable? I see lots of people trying to shut down a reasoned discussion that challenges the orthodoxy (which currently on HN is, college is a waste of time).

I'm not taking offense so much as refuting your argument.

Did I use that word right?

I dunno (I'm being kinda folksy!). It was just arguing and not really qualifying as a refutation, which generally but not always implies proof. (I did look that up to check my suspicion, but in a big dictionary.)

I would be interested in people's experiences, good and bad, with having (not) gone to college, and serious analysis - everyone seems to be trying to shut down any serious discussion and exploration.

I went to college and I've had many times that I wished I'd studied harder. I've also wished at times that I skipped college then and went later in life, when I would benefit far more. I haven't wished that I didn't go; I learned so much that forms my understanding of the world, my thinking skills, etc.; I would be a different person without it. You can't tell me that I didn't benefit greatly from college but I'm just one person. But can you tell anyone that they studied for four years, hard, and didn't learn much? That's a big stretch for anyone; you need to learn enough to pass ~32 classes at various college levels, and that's a minimum.

Many people say here that 'I didn't go and I'm fine'. Fine isn't the question; nobody said we'd die without it, but that's not our standard for our choices. Each path leads to different collections of outcomes, better and worse and completely different, and we have blind spots about what the other path could be like (having no experience of it). Maybe college emphasizes different skills, develops different tools, with different advantages and disadvantages, as an example of how that would work.

I also wonder how much HN readers think of or have experienced STEM only. The humanities is more important (unpopular, I know, and both are essential IMHO); it addresses the most critical issues in the world and life, the ones beyond quantitative understanding, which is most of them.

I watched a bunch of Shakespeare plays recently, fictionalized histories of Rome and England [0]. From them you learn more about our current society and humanity in general, including today's crazy disfuntion, the mis/disinformation and people's responses, than from all the quantitative research combined; art is a mirror that looks into ourselves. And as objects of another human being's creation, they are incredibly inspirational and beautiful. I'm wiser and have grown since a week ago. Would I turn to Shakespeare and get so much from the plays without studying literature in college? I doubt it, though that's just me.

[0] Without knowing the reader's experience with the Bard, let me recommend Julius Caesar especially, also Henry VI Part 2 and Part 3, and of course their sequel, Richard III. Richard II is good too. I'd skip Henry VI Part 1 but read a synopsis as context for Part 2: Part 1 is clearly substandard IMHO and, it turns out, is believed to be mostly written by a collaborator, Christopher Marlowe. It does constrast the difference between an excellent playwright of their day using the same forms and an all-time genius of character and language.

No one denies that humanities are useful. What people deny is that humanities as taught in universities are useful and that one has to go to school to learn them. For example, everything you describe about Shakespeare also applies to Star Wars. The prequel trilogy is a fictionalized account of the fall of the Roman Republic, and is just as useful for learning about history as Julius Caesar is. This is because Shakespeare's plays are just pop culture from the 16th and 17th centuries, and in a hundred years, people like you will be applauding Star Wars and looking down on others who prefer that century's pop culture and don't see the point in studying an old screenplay written in archaic language.

There also isn't a single person on HN who has a American STEM degree who has only experienced STEM. Nearly all STEM college degrees require a significant portion of classes to be humanities (the reverse is not true for humanities majors as they can graduate having never taken any real science or math classes), and every single high school graduate has spent 13 years studying the humanities, including Shakespeare which is a part of most high school English curriculums. What you view as naivety is actually an opinion born from experience.

> What people deny is that humanities as taught in universities are useful and that one has to go to school to learn them.

We must stand on the shoulders of giants; you can't reinvent all the wheels, all the insights, all the knowledge and tools created by all the humans in history by yourself. Why would you? Economic specialization, including in literature, yields talented experts who learn all those things for you (they don't reinvent the wheels either, or just one or two), and unless you think you know everything, you can learn a lot from them.

> everything you describe about Shakespeare also applies to Star Wars. The prequel trilogy is a fictionalized account of the fall of the Roman Republic, and is just as useful for learning about history as Julius Caesar is.

Imagine two or ten or a hundred pieces of media that fictionalize the fall of the Roman Republic. Because they refer to the same real-life history, are all of the stories therefore of equal value (and in the same ways)? That doesn't follow at all. One could be complete BS, the other transcendent genius.

The value of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and of Star Wars, are not learning history. I've never heard someone credit Star Wars as a resource for that before now, nor Shakespeare for that matter. Read a history book. Shakespeare uses the historical setting to talk about humanity, to - like most great art - talk about ourselves, to hold up a mirror to ourselves that looks inside. To learn about ourselves, now.

I enjoy and learn from plenty of sci-fi, including parts of Star Wars (not the prequal trilogy!). Nothing I've encountered is on the same planet as Shakespeare, but that's an impossible standard. Shakespeare was popular when alive, but is also more popular than everyone since, and in languages around the world. The works of Shakespeare are not just pop culture or nothing is more than pop culture (and then we have to differentiate between pop cultural forms so the term means nothing). Einstein and many others have studied physics; their work is not all of the same value.

> the reverse is not true for humanities majors as they can graduate having never taken any real science or math classes

That's not my experience! My experience is that STEM majors usually take lightweight humanities-for-STEM-students (apparently some think they are taking the heavyweight stuff), and humanities majors usually take STEM-for-humanities majors. I almost never saw a STEM major in high-level humanities classes (and in fairness, it would be very difficult without the prerequisites of knowledge and skill - they wouldn't know much of what was being talked about or how to address it), and I almost never saw a humanities major in high-level STEM classes, for similar reasons.

And IME both sets of majors thought there was little purpose to taking the other. 'Why are you doing that?'

Both Julius Caesar and Star Wars Episodes I, II, and III use the historical/fictional setting of the fall of the Roman/Galactic Republic to talk tell a deeper story than what first appears. The fact that Lucas intended the movies to be an allegory for the fall of the Roman Republic is well known and even cited on the trilogy's Wikipedia page.

In the original post I replied to, you said:

>From [Shakespeare] you learn more about our current society and humanity in general, including today's crazy disfuntion, the mis/disinformation and people's responses, than from all the quantitative research combined; art is a mirror that looks into ourselves. And as objects of another human being's creation, they are incredibly inspirational and beautiful. I'm wiser and have grown since a week ago. Would I turn to Shakespeare and get so much from the plays without studying literature in college? I doubt it, though that's just me.

The plot of the prequels revolves around Palpatine's manipulations to destroy democracy and gain absolute control over the Republic. He does so by manipulating people like the CIS/Trade Federation with misinformation and promising to take care of their legitimate grievances. He gets them to start a war, which is legitimized through a complex legal system but immoral and unjust in reality. He then uses this war to justify the creation of an army loyal to him, which he later uses to seize power. It doesn't take a genius to realize how lessons learned from the movies could be applied to real life, in the same manner that you described Shakespeare's plays doing for you. Shakespeare doesn't talk about misinformation or modern society's disfunction directly, you inferred that, and there is nothing stopping someone from drawing similar life lessons from more modern material. It's the entire concept of allegories/fables which are thousands of years old!

I noticed that you didn't make a single argument about why Shakespeare is above being pop culture; you only asserted that it is somehow better. Since future humanities students won't have grown up viewing Star Wars as plebian content, it is possible that they will worship Star Wars the same way present day ones worship Shakespeare, Dickens, and many other historical writers who wrote for primarily to entertain. Your casual dismissal of the prequels while implying that you like the original trilogy also doesn't bode well for your argument that university education in the humanities is useful for being able to analyze and draw conclusions from literature, since the prequels have a much more complex plot and fleshed out world than the originals do. The movies have just as deep of a story as any Shakespeare play and one can draw any of the conclusions you mentioned from them, and in fact many do even without having the "proper" education. There are no analysis skills that one gains from a university humanities education, which is also likely why you didn't list any of the "tools" the "giants" have created.

A humanities education is definitely not necessary, and possibly even determinantal, to address the "critical issues in the world and life, the ones beyond quantitative understanding, which is most of them", and to think otherwise is to think that being a member of an expensive book club makes you qualified to rule the world.

This strenuous denial consumes life and effort, and for what? What do you win? Why do you care? All I can tell you is good news: These are wonderful, incredible things in the humanities, in Shakespeare, that will change you.

An experienced developer looks at code and forms perceptions 100x faster and more accurately than someone without expertise. Their brain is wired differently by their experiences, and they look for and pick out patterns, process their meaning, and understand them, all in moments without conscious thought. Similarly, someone with expertise in wine can perceive far more in a glass than someone who doesn't. I'm mostly in the latter group; often I don't know the difference.

But that doesn't imply that no difference exists; reality doesn't exist or not because I perceive it. I have no doubt that those differences exist and that the person with expertise gets far more out of that glass than I do, sees far more color and detail and shapes and images, and I take the gap between my experience and theirs as a signal that it's a fruitful territory for learning. If I denied that, and things like it, I would wall myself off from much learning.

But I can watch Shakespeare and see far more than most people who haven't studied and learned literature and arts more generally. In case you think it, I don't worship William Shakespeare, I love the works. Shakespeare is not a god and the plays are not scripture that I've been instructed to praise, but Shakespeare is just a person - like HN commenters - who made something incredible, and my experience has led me to the same response as so many others over 400 years.

My god, get some reading comprehension. You are destroying your own argument that humanities education is useful outside of academia. At no point did I deride Shakespeare and the very first sentence I wrote in this comment chain was "No one denies that the humanities are useful". Instead, I pointed out that the qualities you derive from it are available in other cultural items and that everyone draws connections from media to real life. No one needs special training to do that, and it is a waste to force students spend two years and tens of thousands of dollars to write glorified book reports.

college is delaying young people to become mature, we're producing giant babies these days, thanks to endless parenting, online gaming, social screen time, now probably even metaverse, you name it.

on the STEM subject, teens good at math are never teacher's favorites, instead they're called nerds and some are even isolated from the rest, it's quite the opposite in Asia, or even in Europe. That's the root cause we need import so many STEMs from overseas, the culture smothered STEM from K-12. K-12 is anything but success IMHO.

middle school kids are more keen about their gender or identities, or how awful US was in the past, or their hair color...high school students must show how caring they're to the community or everyone must be some leader somehow while the truth is that they can barely take care of themselves without parents' caring, for academics nowadays SAT/ACT/school-ranking/etc are either racism or unfair...I will stop here.

A road to hell.

It's not (just) college. Even if you do make it past college, hitting what older generations would consider typical markers of adulthood (having your own place, a good job, a stable relationship, a family, etc.) are all delayed and/or more difficult to achieve.

Meanwhile many jobs are trying to sell themselves not through a TC that would let one hit these markers, but through football tables, pizza parties, drinks and other social outings. Not to hate on fun activities, but it sure does feel like trying to keep young adults in a perpetual student lifestyle when you keep the booze but not give them the wage to advance in life.

There are plenty of young adults who want to grow up, meeting a ridiculous amount of resistance.

When I was a teen, teenagers had after school jobs. McDonald's, stores, etc., were populated with teen workers at minimum wage.

Today those jobs are held by adults, expecting to be able to raise a family on it. Teenagers rarely have jobs, their first job waits until after they graduate from college.

Cherry on top: once they graduate, they are met with "entry-level jobs" asking for years of experience, giant requirements lists and an overall predatory environment, only to be reinforced that failure is a personal fault and not one of the system.

Personal responsibility is a good thing. People need to fail, this is one of the few ways to see critical feedback that fosters growth.

Ironic considering this is the market where feedback has been gradually taken away to the point of being so vague it is effectively useless, if there is any. Because ghosting and poor one-liners are more cost-effective.

Let's not cover up bad systems because a few individuals rise to the artificial challenge and bite through.

And adults have always occupied those jobs too. How else did you get McDonalds Breakfast 30 years ago on a Wednesday at 8 AM in October going into the office?

Are you sure? I don't ever remember an adult behind the counter in those days. 18 and 19 year-olds are still teens.

And they are also considered legally adults, are they not?

I remember at 18 signing up for 5 years in the Navy. I'd say that is pretty adult. If it isn't, you should consider contacting your senator about raising the age of enlistment.

Legally adult, yes. They're still commonly regarded as kids, though, despite being eligible for the military. Note the drinking age is 21.

The ones that do sign up, though, grow up fast.

> Note the drinking age is 21.

All the more reason to contact your Senator. Lower the drinking age or make the age of enlistment higher. Adult enough to decide to become a sacrificial pawn, but not adult enough to drink a beer.

Kinda changing the subject.

Based on my experience, the primary reason high school kids had jobs was to buy a car.

For various reasons (safety regulation, emissions requirements, minimum wage not keeping up with inflation, insurance outpacing inflation, cash for clunkers etc…) it’s now almost impossible to afford a car working a few hours at McDonald’s.

There’s also far more fast food restaurants per capita than there used to be, and food service/retail make up a larger part of the economy in general.

To top it off, the age of the average American has increased almost 10 years since 1960, so there are just fewer kids to do the jobs.

I still regret not buying that '68 Chevelle Super Sport for $600 when I was in h.s. That thing was a rocket with that giant V8 and very little car. I did wind up with a 67 289 Mustang. It was an automatic, and my buddy & I converted it to a 4 speed because muscle cars with automatics were for weeners.

We sure had fun shredding tires with it. I was lucky to survive the accident that terminated it.

I asked my high school math teacher to write me a recommendation letter for college. He politely refused, saying he could not in good conscience recommend me. I am grateful for him for letting me know, so I could ask another teacher.

More than once he'd announced in class that he was grading the class on a curve, but me separately.

Suffice to say we didn't get along.

> More than once he'd announced in class that he was grading the class on a curve, but me separately.

What was his public reason for doing so?

Let's just say the other kids complained that I was raising the curve.

So he didn't reject you because you were a poor student, but for some other reason? Sounds like you might want to consider what you could have done differently to improve on that outcome. Regardless of whether you agree with what s/he tells you, it's a chance to gain some valuable insights into what others think about you.

Apparently, I was pretty obnoxious in high school. It took me far too long to learn this. (And to learn when not to speak my opinion.) I would have been well served if I had swallowed pride and asked teachers (and peers) for some perspective on how my attitude was, frankly, self destructive.

You’re victim blaming somebody when they were a teenager with a power tripping asshole for a teacher…?

Oh, I know why. I was a brat.

>college is delaying young people to become mature, we're producing giant babies these days,

A good interpretation of humans generally is 'giant baby monkeys', in that we have curiosity and openness consistent with juveniles but not with most adult animals.

>on the STEM subject, teens good at math are never teacher's favorites, instead they're called nerds and some are even isolated from the rest,

This doesn't bear any resemblance to my experience of a not-so-special US public school in the 2000s.

I'm not saying your comment is without valid points, but you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater on your attitude about childhood.

> college is delaying young people to become mature, we're producing giant babies these days, thanks to endless parenting, online gaming, social screen time, now probably even metaverse, you name it.

It persists into the professional space, just look at how infantilizing Silicon Valley became, trying to turn the workplace into a playpen complete with propeller head hats.

My propeller hat is a dignified part of my professional attire, thank you very much.

Can you explain how those things are "infantilizing" beyond pure bias?

Instead of playing foosball and gaming online, we should be playing cards and drinking like previous generations?

I think your views on how kids view their peers who are good at math are outdated. For example, NASA gear has, fairly recently, become a fashion trend [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/9tk0jw/w...

good to know. a drop in the ocean is a good start. I will buy a few.

my kids are still in k-12, nothing has really changed for them though.

I graduated high school in 1998, was great at math, and most teachers liked me, some loved me. MAYBE if you're talking about going to high school in the 70's or 80's, or in a more small football-centered town or something, this was accurate at some point.

> middle school kids are more keen about their gender or identities, or how awful US was in the past, or their hair color

Do you genuinely believe this stuff that youre typing? I know that conservative medias say this and use it as a boogeyman to get themselves into power, but do you truly believe it? Ive worked with elementary, middle, and high school kids for the last 5 years, in an area that conservatives constantly make fun of and call awful things, but none of that is even close to the reality.

Kids know that gay people exist (and are okay with that), and they know that they might want to look or act differently than they wouldve been forced to in the past.

Kids today are significantly more accepting of tech and STEM subjects than they were even just a few years ago. Its significantly more common and accepted to play video games, kids are interested in video and picture editing because of social media (like TikTok), and they are increasingly tech literate. None of these boogeyman topics you claim are true, but they are continually parroted by people who want to move our education system backwards.

And as a side note, > high school students must show how caring they're to the community

I personally think this is a great thing. We should encourage more community involvement with young people, especially things that help out disadvantaged community members and educate them about our government. Im surprised someone who parrots the original phrases from your comment would be against something like being caring in your community.

yes I believe it genuinely, as these are my three k-12 kids told me what's going on at school, and I got involved with school quite often, I can see those myself to some extent too. the middle school one actually told me she thinks at least 1/3 of her classmates are hard to tell their genders these days, and to greet a classmate the first sentence now should be: how should I address you? otherwise her classmates actually got offended if you got it wrong on the gender side.

my high school kids told me they are aware of those sensitive gender subjects at middle school and they feel it's more frequent these days.

Google will show you some data points, e.g. Gen Z (from 1995+) has close to 20% claiming to be LGBT+. Things changed a lot.

I'm neither a liberal or conservative, I consider myself independent.

What's wrong with those things? They are different from what I (and I guess you) knew and know, but so what? We did plenty that was shocking and new to our parents, and equally mocked - do you remember? How absurdly narrow-minded our parents seemed? We were mostly right too. Are we going to do the same?

The next generation should not tether themselves at all to what is in our comfort zones; if they aren't going far beyond them, they aren't thinking for themselves. When I was young I remember thinking that the old people were jaded, corrupt, and didn't even try to address their ignorance - and now that I'm 'old', I can see I was right! With power has come all those things - not a commitment to truth, but disdain for being made to learn anything. God I hope the next generation doesn't follow or accomodate us. And to this day, some people I know in the prior generation still don't understand things that are normal to us now as adults, because we grew up with them. I know some that won't wear blue jeans because they see jeans as a symbol of a challenging culture.

They say progress happens one funeral at a time! :)

> What's wrong with those things? They are different from what I (and I guess you) knew and know, but so what?

The numbers are vastly higher than scientific estimates of how many people are in these groups. That suggests it’s become a form of self expression, which is just a way of denying reality.

> We did plenty that was shocking and new to our parents, and equally mocked - do you remember?

Who is “we?” Millennials, as a group, are the good kids compared to baby boomers. They have less sex, do less drugs, etc.

> How absurdly narrow-minded our parents seemed? We were mostly right too.

Our parents started down this road of self expression and denying the realities of life. Mostly they sobered up after the drug binges of the 1960s, but left millennials poorly positioned to handle the real world. We are lucky to live in a society our grandparents built, because I don’t think we could build that society again today.

> The next generation should not tether themselves at all to what is in our comfort zones; if they aren't going far beyond them, they aren't thinking for themselves.

The realities of human existence don’t change so fast. The basic mechanics of American life aren’t much different today compared to 1989. If people are rushing past the comfort zones of their parents, that means they’re increasingly living in a delusion detached from reality.

> When I was young I remember thinking that the old people were jaded, corrupt, and didn't even try to address their ignorance - and now that I'm 'old', I can see I was right!

People’s brains don’t fully develop until they’re 25. So if you believe the same things now as you did when you were young…

> The numbers are vastly higher than scientific estimates of how many people are in these groups. That suggests it’s become a form of self expression, which is just a way of denying reality.

I thought the data was based on surveys of how people identify themselves, which only shows that identification has changed with time. Maybe fluid gender identity is a stage of development that has been denied before; who knows? Why do you have to tell these people what to do with their lives?

Self-expression is denying reality? I don't know what that means, what one has to do with the other. One way of looking at it is that what is inside you is part of reality; you are part of reality. Anyway, you are criticizing middle schoolers for denying reality?

Again, why do you have to tell them what to do, what to feel? Who are you to do it?

> ...

The rest is mostly your self-expression, not some objective reality. You are welcome to it, of course.

Or maybe, the entire west is increasingly a gerontocracy, with the 18-64 working age group being squeezed harder in every way to support a constantly growing number of retirees, who also as a group obstruct construction and make the traditional markers of adulthood harder to achieve. To a 70 year old, everyone below 40 must look like a baby.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/age-dependency-ratio-old?...

> teens good at math are never teacher's favorites, instead they're called nerds and some are even isolated from the rest, it's quite the opposite in Asia, or even in Europe

Nah, no on is going to isolate you for being good at math. Literally, that does not happen. Isolation of kids that cant fit it does happen and some of those are good at math. But, the "being good at math" part is not what gets them isolated. It is the other stuff and behaviors, roughly in the "poor social skills" (may include "have hard time being assertive about own boundaries") that gets you isolated.

> the main function of college in America seems to be extending adolescence and deferring dealing with the real world.

I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that it is the other "main function" but ohhh boy does this need to be discussed more. I know a few people that seemingly couldn't break out of college. College gives a clear path forward for years, each time you're admitted into a program. Give that up and what do you have? For the people I know, the answer to that question is a minimum wage job outside of their field of study.

> ohhh boy does this need to be discussed more

It's discussed all the time, for decades.

> I know a few people that seemingly couldn't break out of college.

Many people have trouble moving forward, regardless of college.

Since you brought Bangladeshis into it, my experience with those that came to the US (mostly for graduate studies) (all guys):

1. They complain that they have to cook

2. They complain that they have to do laundry.

3. They complain they have to iron their clothes.

4. They complain they have to tidy up the apartments.

5. They mostly care about sports, movies, and if they're not religious, getting drunk. Of course, that's not necessarily true for those that go to top universities for their PhDs, but those are the minority, in any case.

6. They boast about how great it was that they didn't take humanities in their undergrad. Talking to them, it's also clear they have little understanding of the arts.

I've also met some very responsible, intellectual Bangladeshis.

There are problem people in every society.

> College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations.

Most people think college prepares them to be resource for corporation, or some other things. Your college education coincides with your formative years, but from my exp, college has nothing to do with growing as an adult. It's mainly moving out of your hometown and work your part time job and start planning your life.

> Most people think college prepares them to be resource for corporation, or some other things.

They do? And if they do, is it true? Who are we talking about? High school students? People who read HN?

> from my exp, college has nothing to do with growing as an adult. It's mainly moving out of your hometown and work your part time job and start planning your life.

That's too bad. There is so much more going on. What about all the knowledge and critical thinking skills, from science and stats, to addressing the bigger questions in the humanities and social sciences?

that's not what "adult" means, you've chosen the wrong word, and now you are changing the definition of "adult" to an activist who has to have opinions about grandiose things in the world.

Again you keep making the argument that university is the only place where you can learn how to think, which is a pretty basic human skill. If that was true, then it's a dangerous system that needs to be fixed, not something to celebrate.

I said "was true" because I didn't know that the government installed locks on books and encrypting mechanisms on the internet and public libraries so that they are only accessible from universities.

Only activists have opinions about "grandiose things in the world"????!!!

You kept ignoring the more important point and cherry-pick a bikeshedding topic (the definition of some word) to reply.

> Only activists have opinions...

That's not what I said, but you certainly did say that adult means that you HAVE TO think about those things, in some particular way that is taught in an university.

Adult to me just means you can take care of people other than yourself. Of course it's a subjective definition, but a teenager can read books/go to university and have sophisticated thoughts about the world, that doesn't make them mature.

Here is something to consider though: why is it that you only study critical thinking, scientific method or whatever at the age 18? Why do kids have to fuck around for years, apparently unable to think, before "university"? Why should they? What are they before that? mindless primates?

> you certainly did say that adult means that you HAVE TO think about those things, in some particular way that is taught in an university.

I didn't say that (provide a link?), though I do happen to think that adults do have to be responsible for others, as you say, and the bigger issues are big because they impact those responsibilities. The rest is your own ideas.

At college, you learn that there is no one right way to think, and also the very narrow limits of your own mind.

> a teenager can read books/go to university and have sophisticated thoughts about the world, that doesn't make them mature.

Right, college is about knowledge and thinking skills, not so much maturity (but it helps there too). For maturity, get married and work in a coal mine at 13 years old.

> why is it that you only study critical thinking, scientific method or whatever at the age 18? Why do kids have to fuck around for years

Hmmm ... I had science classes, and was taught to think critically, before college, but not nearly on the same level. Why do people not learn more complex things earlier? Why not teach graduate level physics to 6 year olds?

> At college, you learn that there is no one right way to think

Again with this "at college" rhetoric. I guess if you don't go to college, you will be a bigot, on top of having no critical thinking and being an absolutely selfish individual

> For maturity, get married and work in a coal mine at 13 years old

Did college teach you this stellar argument?

I think 2 years of schooling and 2 years of working an becoming financially self-sufficient would better prepare people for adulthood than 4 years of schooling. Software development, electrical engineering, and plenty of other tech jobs could be taught in 2 years. Perhaps not to the level where people are contributing to cutting edge research - graduate and PhD programs still have their place. But I think many people are interested in an education that primarily serves to develop employment opportunities.

> I think 2 years of schooling and 2 years of working an becoming financially self-sufficient would better prepare people for adulthood than 4 years of schooling. Software development, electrical engineering, and plenty of other tech jobs could be taught in 2 years.

Engineering programs are widely considered to be difficult to complete in 4 years. Where do you get 2 years?

Also, after my sophomore year in college, I was not nearly well-educated enough (whatever 'enough' means); I would wildly approximate that I learned 70% in the last two years. Much of freshman year was just adjusting to college, learning how to write at a college level, etc.

But most importantly, you are still focusing on college as job training, and as I imply in the GGP, specific skill training is just a side benefit. If corporations want job training, they can provide and pay for it themselves. College for the student, not the corporation.

One, eliminating a bunch of required courses not relevant to the job would make things go faster. Sure, things like humanities are fun but for many people getting an education it's not worth the cost-benefit analysis. Plenty of people taking on debt going to college to improve their future prospects would be better served

Two, I don't think someone needs a full engineering degree to become productive. Writing my own compiler was a blast, and gave me some real insight into how computers work under the hood. But if our goal is to improve the earning potential of young adults with the minimum financial burden, I wouldn't be teaching compilers. I'd be teaching how to spin up cloud services, the network stack, and modern web dev.

College is for the student. But it also costs the student a boatload of money. If we want to give the student the best bang for their buck, approaching it as a form of job training would be more effective. Sure, companies could pay for that training. But they're not and colleges fulfill this role, and insist on tacking on a bunch of other requirements that don't really do much to help the student's job prospects.

You get a lot of writing and analytical reading practice in humanities. Both of which are generally very useful in modern corporations.

> humanities are fun but for many people getting an education it's not worth the cost-benefit analysis

Humanities are more important than STEM. Humanities deal with the world and yourself on issues that aren't quantifiable, which is most of the issues in life and in the world, including at work.

> if our goal is to improve the earning potential of young adults with the minimum financial burden

Again, life is much, much more than jobs - you are much, much more than what you do for some corporation - and early jobs are the least important ones. It's all so absorbed in the corporate perspective: your only value, your existence, is for serving the corporation. And it puts people permanently in that class, as servents rather than as the powerful - the citizens of a democracy, to whom the corporations report.

I think if more people studied the humanities, it would be brazenly obvious. It's craven on the part of the powerful and corporations.

Note: 4 years of college is probably 2.5 years of school, not 4. It runs 36 weeks a year and unless you are doing something rigorous, it mostly doesn't require a 40 hour week, except in short bursts.

> More importantly, college is about much more than job training. College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations.

This is just middle-class religious belief. And a good one, because middle-class professional people have to reproduce themselves every generation, so they have to center credentialism or fall to working class or poverty.

If you're born rich, it's easy to die rich; if you're born poor, it's easy to die poor; if you're born middle-class, remaining middle-class is a battle for credentials.

I would say the opposite: It's just discrimination to deny people those enormous benefits, of knowledge and skills, based on the wealth of their families.

> People repeat that but what is it based on? Most of the population, including most people who have economic stability and freedom, have not had STEM jobs and very likely will not have STEM jobs.

What generation? In my parents' generation, a secretary could get good health insurance for their family and retire with a pension. Today, someone new hired into that role would struggle to afford rent or health insurance for just themselves, and retirement is out of the question.

I think there is a relative amount of middle class wealth left that hides the fact that many modern jobs do not pay middle class compensation anymore. There are a lot of house poor people that might have the trappings of middle class life, but they're on life support.

In many places, to live a middle class lifestyle from 40 years ago would require young workers without assets to earn six figure incomes. Even in "affordable" places, incomes required for a middle class lifestyle are approaching six figures, as well. I'm certainly not one of those people who think STEM is the be-all and end-all solution to anything, but STEM jobs often put workers in the six figure income range.

STEM jobs don’t put people in that income range, a small subset of STEM jobs do. The majority of STEM careers don’t make 6 figures outside of management.

There just aren't enough STEM jobs to cover a fraction of people with financial stability.

> a secretary could get good health insurance for their family and retire with a pension. Today, someone new hired into that role would struggle to afford rent or health insurance for just themselves, and retirement is out of the question.

While I agree that wages haven't advanced outside of a the very few, secretaries aren't a good example. Computerization has made most of those skills obsolete.

and global competition for labor

We can stand on the shoulders of giants...or go back to feudalism.

Also, just because someone is doing a menial work it does not mean that they should not have a access to higher education. Especially since there's not enough of higher valued jobs for everyone. Educated worker has higher job mobility and is able to respond quickly to shifting business needs.

> Educated worker has higher job mobility and is able to respond quickly to shifting business needs.

Well, a worker with a college degree has higher job mobility. The worker being educated may be orthogonal. And I'm not sure if becoming educated increases one's ability to respond quickly to shifting business needs.

And it's also part of the problem, as I see it. Decades ago, one could switch industries or fields much more easily because of the lack of expectation of a specific college degree. Today one is much more "locked out" of other fields if they don't have that degree, and people feel trapped because they see no path to a higher paying career without taking on a ton of loans and risk to go to college (for the first time or for another degree).

I think we need to be honest with ourselves and acknowledge a lot (but not all) of higher education is arbitrary gatekeeping, and it's long past time to rein in the "arbitrary" part.

> just because someone is doing a menial work it does not mean that they should not have a access to higher education

I agree completely, and I didn't mean to imply otherwise.

> not to be a resource for corporations

I never went to college to get a STEM degree to be a resource for anybody. I went because I imagined myself being Tom Swift.

Of course, Elon Musk turned into a real life Tom Swift!

Vomit. Was Tom Swift an self-centered emerald scion who got lucky with money and poured it into his pet projects? News to me.

Seriously, Musk came into a ton of money in the dot-com era, knew how to maintain that money because of his background, seems to be a capable hands-on project manager and natural self-marketing. You surely know people smarter than him who didn't acquire the mass amounts of money required to do what he does; I certainly do.

Whatever your opinion on Musk is, he is at least an inspirational figure that helps inspire the next generation of kids.

No 10-year olds are talking about how to become a savvy financial engineer like Jack Welch at GE, but they are talking about rockets and electric cars thanks to Musk.

I sure hope he is not inspiring them!

> Vomit.

LOL. C'mon, Musk builds rockets, electric cars, robot trucks, and tunnel boring machines. How much more Tom Swift can one get? Ok, Ok, I admit he hasn't yet built a Jetmarine or an Atomic Earth Blaster.

> You surely know people smarter than him who didn't acquire the mass amounts of money

I've never met Musk, so cannot attest personally to his smarts. But I've met plenty of very smart people.

But smarts alone simply isn't good enough to do what Musk does. You'll also need:

1. excitement

2. interest

3. drive

4. willingness to try impossible things

5. perseverance in the face of enormous obstacles

6. a thick skin for being laughed at

7. a willingness to continue in spite of withering criticism and vomit

8. Lots of money.

Lots of people have lots of money. None of them are doing what Musk is.

Besides, although Musk was born into wealth, there's no evidence on his wikipedia page that he had access to it:

"working odd jobs at a farm and lumber-mill" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk

"Musk says that before the company became successful, he could not afford an apartment and instead rented an office and slept on the couch and showered at the YMCA, and shared one computer with his brother."

He made his initial money on an internet startup. Nothing wrong with that.

Wikipedia quotes Elon Musk saying something, and we take it at face value? Let's apply some collegiate (or otherwise) critical thinking about our sources.

> emerald scion

Got any evidence of this beyond what his estranged father said?

“College prepares people to be adults”

> College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations.

Have you ever met someone fresh out of college? Let's be real, if they didn't do something before or during that wasn't college, they are arguably less qualified to do anything than an average person who didn't. Wew, they've memorized how to traverse a graph, or something something roman emperors

Don't worry, they will catch up and exceed the others. Everyone has to start their adult life experience somewhere, and there is prize for doing it sooner. Note who runs the world for the most part.

> College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations.

Ironically, college starts preparing people to be adults at age 18, where in most jurisdictions in the US, you are already an adult.

> College prepares people to be adults in every way

This can't be good because it suggests that 30%+ of the adult population aren't prepared to be adults.

It doesn't, unless you want to construe it in an extreme, argumentative way. There's an HN guideline about this.

>Most of the population, including most people who have economic stability and freedom, have not had STEM jobs and very likely will not have STEM jobs.

For now. Let's look at young people though. They're indicative of the future.

Outside of finance and STEM, it's really hard to see a clear and reliable path to prosperity for a 20-something year old. Perhaps some trades as well.

What's even worse is that the paths to prosperity seems to get narrower and narrower by the year.

What is often missing in the evaluation of US colleges is just how different they are from most European colleges. I compare, for instance, with the Spanish system. A very high percentage of young Spaniards go to college, just like in the US. However, this whole idea of "learning how to learn" and "college is about learning to be an adult" is completely missing there. All the electives that have nothing to do with your major? Nope. Going to college with an undeclared major? Nope. An experience where most students live, eat and sleep on campus? Again, no.

What does a computer science student take in their first year? In year 1, in my hometown's university, through year 1, a student takes Linear Algebra, Calculus, Human-Machine interaction, Computer Hardware Fundamentals, Electrical engineering fundamentals, Intro to programming, Logic, Discrete Math, Discrete Automata, Numerical Methods, and intro to software engineering. Very different from an American University that might have 1 or 2 years worth of cross-major electives.

This is not unique to computing: A 1st year med students (which you get to start at 18), is going to be crushed under a pile of biology, biostatistics, cytology, anatomy and the like. Literature? Philosophy? History? You better have taken those in high school if you wanted to learn them, because college has no time for you to decide what you want to do with your life.

I am not going to try to figure out which system is better in the short or the long run, but it makes it pretty clear that college in the US is nowhere near close to universal in western countries, even after we take away the unique financial challenges the US gives college students.

The US system is clearly worse and inefficient. Even a GP doctor doesn't finish basic training until about age 30. The whole medical education process has ridiculous amounts of time off -- just wasting human potential -- coupled with redundant learning. It culminates, however, in three years of anachronistic and unnecessary shift work that is a disgusting way of discriminating against pregnant and nursing women by making them work 24 hours at a time. And yeah, they can take time off, but what if they have a baby every year and are never willing to work 24 hour shifts?

As the linked Twitter thread implies, I don't even look at degrees when I do my hiring. I hear that, in the security industry, it's even worse where people with degreed are discriminated against for being filled with worthless and downright wrong bits of knowledge. Based on the latest round of entry level interviews I've had held in software land with recent college graduates, I'm inclined to agree.

College as STEM job training is absurd and clearly a failure. As you say, it's about much more than job training, but I would argue it doesn't even do that. Hell, it makes applicants worse somehow.

I don't like how the word STEM gets thrown around because I feel it whitewashes the fact that most of the opportunity is in ad-supported web apps. Anyone trying to work in chemistry or physics finds this out the hard way.

Yeah. My friends with PhDs in physics are working in software engineering departments at startups and FAANG, their educations almost completely irrelevant to the work they do. At our college reunion, a beloved physics professor was disappointed that not one of his former students at the reunion was still in physics. But I am not sure why he was surprised given how hard and unpleasant it is to stay in academia/research. I didn’t even work at a FAANG, but leaving grad school and getting a programming job immediately cut my workload in half and increased my income by almost 4x … roughly an order-of-magnitude better deal. There’s no real opportunity in physics or math without essentially switching to software eventually.

> There’s no real opportunity in physics or math without essentially switching to software eventually.

In a real free-market scenario, would'nt those PhD programs be drastically reduced?

I suspect this is because this physics PhD program is providing an implicit signalling function, that the fellow out of this program is worth more than the ave college guy - doing the same programming job - because he proved himself on more complex study materials.

This is definitely how it’s interpreted. Especially when a lot of the people in the industry nowadays are clueless PMs who spent college going to frat parties and who can’t do anything in life besides be a PM (or account manager, business analyst, etc), whose first reaction is “oh wow, physics” and the deference begins from there.

Plenty of opportunity in all kinds of software. Ad supported webapps get the headlines because they (or at least the ones you're thinking about) aggregate really well, but there's a lot of work out there.

Academic physics research is not very useful economically, since we've figured out most of the stuff that will ever contribute to engineering needs -- building stuff that real people benefit from -- in our lifetimes. Not all! But most.

Mechanical/structural/chemical/etc. engineering on the other hand (a.k.a. physics and chemistry applied to real world problems) are very well-compensated skill-sets.

> Plenty of opportunity in all kinds of software. Ad supported webapps get the headlines because they (or at least the ones you're thinking about) aggregate really well, but there's a lot of work out there.

I mean, take a look at the next "who's hiring" page. Ad supported webapps seem pretty well represented.

> Academic physics research is not very useful economically, since we've figured out most of the stuff that will ever contribute to engineering needs -- building stuff that real people benefit from -- in our lifetimes. Not all! But most.

My phone lasts a day on a battery because we've managed to turn off the CPU as much as possible - we've got a supercomputer in our pocket that we can't use at its full capacity because battery technology isn't advancing. Academic physics research is not very useful economically because we've defined "useful economically" as "able to be converted into profits within 2-5yrs", and unfortunately we did that about 20 years ago, so the whole thing's sorta running on fumes right now.

> I mean, take a look at the next "who's hiring" page. Ad supported webapps seem pretty well represented.

This is hackernews. The organization that founded this site has mostly made its billions by investing in web properties. They are branching out these days, but that's the demographic.

> battery technology isn't advancing. Academic physics research is not very useful economically because we've defined "useful economically" as "able to be converted into profits within 2-5yrs", and unfortunately we did that about 20 years ago, so the whole thing's sorta running on fumes right now.

If I'm understanding the claim, we aren't doing enough battery R&D, so battery technology advancement is slow? First off, I don't think most physics labs are researching anything even remotely useful to improving batteries. But for the ones that are, let's do fund them.

Second, battery technology is and has been advancing rapidly. See for example the slide in the presentation on the following website ("Battery cell energy densities have almost tripled since 2010 [as of 2020]"):

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...

That being said, it's far from clear that we are spending less than the optimal amount on battery R&D (the current amount is many billions of dollars per year -- Samsung alone spend ~$1B on research and development for just electric vehicle batteries in 2020). How much do you think we are spending? How much more should we spend?

> First off, I don't think most physics labs are researching anything even remotely useful to improving batteries. But for the ones that are, let's do fund them.

The problem is, we don't know which ones those are. We won't know, until the discoveries and advancements they make are refined to the point where they can produce batteries.

That's my point - the actual work that needs to happen to make something new that can be put into an "economically useful" product happens 20-30 years beforehand. That's what we need to fund.

> "Battery cell energy densities have almost tripled since 2010 [as of 2020]"

We have a different definition of "rapidly", and a different definition of need. Battery density is the single largest brake on the day-to-day usefulness of electronic devices right now. 3x is nothing. 10x is better, 100x is what we probably need.

> We have a different definition of "rapidly", and a different definition of need. Battery density is the single largest brake on the day-to-day usefulness of electronic devices right now. 3x is nothing. 10x is better, 100x is what we probably need.

I think we probably disagree on two points. First, it seems unlikely that it is even physically possible to beat current lithium ion energy density by 100x. That would imply batteries that are 2x as energy dense as gasoline. I think there's pretty good reason to believe that is not possible -- i.e. there is no easily reversible configuration of atoms that will yield that level of density.

Even if it were physically possible, I doubt that we'd be there today even if we had bent the entire productive capacity of the planet to this problem excluding all others for the last thirty years. You can't make a baby in a month even if you have nine willing mothers to be.

If you're inclined to strengthen the argument you're presenting here, I have one suggestion. If there is widespread underfunding of battery or precursor research, experts in the field are probably talking about this fact. You should be able to find some talk by a respected academic showing that particular worthy ideas likely to add value that aren't being researched for lack of funds. Another option would be to demonstrate that recent advances in battery technology resulted from blue-sky research in the past of the kind that 1. isn't being funded today and 2. could not reasonably have been foreseen to lead to improvements in battery energy density.

(I should also just point out that the whole thesis that we have stopped funding basic research is not even true, see here: https://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/2020-05/FunctionNON... -- general science funding, after adjusting for inflation, has increased substantially over time.)

I also question your estimate of the importance of energy density, but that's a secondary issue, since I think your views on how fast the technology could be developed are unrealistic under any spending scenario.

Or Biology.

That's the attention-share majority, and it's the majority that gets the most press largely because it's so relevant to the press and to people who read a lot of press (investors, other media), but it's an overstatement to say it's the entirety.

Just looking at some quick stats, a little more than half of all STEM occupations are outside of "Computer Occupations", though that one chunk is by far the largest single chunk. And far from the entirety of "Computer Occupations" is ad-supported web apps.

https://www.rclco.com/publication/2021-stem-job-growth-index...

There are a lot of fucking engineers (traditional engineers - based on the definition of 20-30 years ago) out there, and a great many of them make a solid living off it. Most of them simply do their job in relative obscurity compared to the computer workers these days.

> We really need farm workers, and most of them live in poverty.

How are both of these true? If a job pays poorly, doesn't that suggest there are many people willing and able to do those jobs, relative to the need for the job to be done?

Maybe this results from some market distortion? But AFAIK the main market distortion in the farming industry is the opposite: subsidies that make farming more attractive than it would be, which would tend to increase farm workers' equilibrium wages.

>> If a job pays poorly, doesn't that suggest there are many people willing and able to do those jobs, relative to the need for the job to be done?

No. This notion of relentless competition is insane. One school district was paying a janitor barely a living wage. The standard response was "he could improve himself / get a degree, and find a better job. That shifts all blame on him an ignored the fact that the district expects to pay a non living wage for that position, they'll just find someone else if he left.

That's not a rebuttal.

No it's not. I was going to write one but then decided I'm not qualified to speak for farmers.

I will say this. Both my grandfathers were farmers. One worked his whole life and died broke. The other invested what he could, and never worked the land a day in my life (that I can remember). He once said that he didnt make his money farming, meaning it was from saving and investing. He rented his land, barn, and equipment to others.

IMHO investing is really close to renting (yes, I have some investments). SaaS is rent. Loaning money is rent. We increasingly live in a world where or renters and owners and people who do the most actual work are the least valued. It's still not a rebuttal, just a general observation that things aren't "fair" for some definitions of "fair". This situation is a societal choice and doesnt have to be that way. I'm not sure what a better way looks like though.

Thats doesn't mean we need more farmers.

Yes, feel free to say that farmers are payed low. But it remains the same that if they are paid this low, then we don't really need more farmers entering the industry.

Instead hopefully less people will join that industry.

As a farmer myself, I agree that there are too many people in the industry, if you want economic efficiency. Frankly, it provides really great money per hour, making software look poorly paid in comparison, but you quickly run out of work to do because there are so many other farmers trying to do the same. Thus, incomes tend to be low when observed on a yearly basis. I don't know many farmers who wouldn't love to take on more work.

It would be wise to ensure that we have some redundancy in the farming sector. Even if it needs go be subsidized. It is arguably a national security concern.

Half of agriculture workers are immigrants. I'd guess that the harder and less lucrative jobs are going disproportionately towards immigrants and especially undocumented immigrants (about a quarter of the agriculture workforce). I think, rather than pay higher wages and give benefits to American labor, our society imports people from poorer countries to do demanding jobs for low pay.

https://research.newamericaneconomy.org/report/immigration-a...

> But AFAIK the main market distortion in the farming industry is the opposite: subsidies that make farming more attractive than it would be, which would tend to increase farm workers' equilibrium wages.

That might be true for markets in the abstract but the market for farm labor is distorted in several ways. One is due to historical reasons farm labor is treated differently from other labor categories and the end result is many of those workers have fewer protections. The second is, as others mentioned, many cannot seek other work due to lack of documentation. In effect becoming a captive labor force with limited ability to advocate for itself.

As an aside, whenever markets display aberrant behavior in the real world, it pays to look for the distortions. They're usually not hard to spot.

These are interesting points.

Regarding farm labor having fewer protections. In general, labour protections can be distortion-creating (e.g. a minimum wage) or distortion-busting (e.g. rules that ensure people are paid on time).

Regarding the captive labor force: this might be bad for non citizens (and humanity overall), but it seems like it's good for US citizens, who benefit from increased (unlimited?) supply of farm labor, reducing upward pressure on food prices.

If I've understood the above correctly, it seems that 'we need farm workers' isn't an actual problem that needs a solution (from the perspective of US citizens or, by extension, the US government).

What have I missed?

> How are both of these true? If a job pays poorly, doesn't that suggest there are many people willing and able to do those jobs, relative to the need for the job to be done?

Or it suggests that labor doesn't flow through the system as easily as the theory assumes it does, or that the theory assumes incorrect things about the world, or that it's just wrong on the face of it in a whole lot of actual real world cases. As the biologists say, it's usually not the lab mouse who's wrong.

Yes, definitely, there might be an alternate explanation that's closer to reality, than what I proposed.

Any ideas?

Well, at a first pass: Labor market negotiating power is unbalanced; owners of capital are loathe to give it away under any circumstances; workers, especially poor workers, don't have a lot of flexibility to shop around for jobs when they need one; and by and large modern business thinking & planning is incredibly short-term and liable to walk itself into stupid and avoidable situations like not being able to stock shelves with toilet paper for six months or sell $30k cars for lack of $5 worth of old computer chips.

Basically, you've got a pile of short-sighted, emotional apes, often operating under conditions of stress or duress, with imperfect information and a planning system that's effectively hijacking stress responses designed to respond to actual flesh & blood predators to evaluate interest rates. All that indicates to me that the cohabitation of "we can't find workers" and "no, we're not raising wages" is maybe less surprising than theory would suggest.

Specific to what's happening in the farm labor market, I'd suspect there's a lot of interplay between the immigration system being pretty broken and farm owners being on the whole kind of crappy businessmen that leads to this particular market distortion.

It seems like the explanation you're putting forward is: farm owners are suffering from too few farm workers but, because they are bad businesspeople, they don't realize that raising offered wages would allow them to hire enough people.

Have I understood correctly?

STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom.

You are correct -- this is an awful notion. Plumbers, HVAC technicians, electricians, bricklayers, joiners, framers, builders, are the people who build and maintain the real world, and we need to raise the status of these (and others, forgive me for not listing them all) professions, which take just as long if not longer in which to get qualified, and recognize the dedication to professional standards and the entrepreneurial attitude required to be successful in their respective trade and to bring up the next generation of tradespeople via apprenticeships. * In fact, when you add it all up it meets or exceeds the work put into an undergraduate degree, and yet we don't value it the same.

If you're going to college, you could do worse than to begin getting qualified in a trade on the side -- at worst, you'll learn some widely-transferable practical skills.

* One might also note how much of the above is missing or done badly in the software industry.

Saying we need to pay them more doesn't change the laws of supply and demand. Besides, as of right now none of the careers you mentioned pay poorly, they are in very high demand and most live very comfortable lives. Are they getting Google software engineer type salaries? No, unless they branch off and start their own business. You can't just say "these people deserve more" because it's just not true. If the path to a STEM job was just as easy as becoming a plumber then literally everyone would do it just for the pay. They don't because it is actually harder to become an expert and you don't have a secure base of customers. Plumbers are needed in every single building and for every person to live. Tech is mostly non necessary and you literally have to improve upon those before you to make it. It is actually much much more difficult to succeed to tech.

I am often curious about the actual salary numbers for the trades versus STEM and often see comments around trade positions being high demand and "none . . pay poorly."

I googled around a bit to grab some numbers. I think the below supports the idea that the trades mentioned by GP have median earning numbers very close to the median earning numbers for a full time worker in the United States, maybe a touch less if we grouped all the trades together.

The demand question is less clear to me. The BLS source implies less demand (measured by job growth) in general for the trades than the "average" demand growth for jobs in the US.

The U.S. Census Bureau lists the annual real median earnings at $41,535 in 2020 for all workers with earnings[4] and lists the annual median earnings at $56,287 in 2020 for people who worked full-time, year round. [1]

  Plumber - median $56,330, demand growth, slower than average [2]
  HVAC tech - median $50,590, demand growth, slower than average [3]
  Electrician - median $56,900, demand growth average (actually 9%) [4]
  Framer(Carpenter) - median $49,520, demand growth, slower than average [5]
  Bricklayer(Mason) - median $47,710, declining demand. [6]
  Software engineer - median $110,140, demand growth, higher than average [7]

The same source of data projects the average job growth to be 8%, so "slower than average" and "higher than average" are in relation to that number.

It gets interesting trying to generally compare demand for STEM to the trades. The BLS estimates about 84,700 openings for electricians per year for the next decade. Contrast that to, for example, chemists - the BLS estimate there is 9,100 positions per year. I didn't find a really great source for the number of BS degrees awarded per year to Chemistry majors, but numbers seemed to be between 14,000 and 17,000 per year.

When I think about supply and demand in careers, it seems to me that STEM is weird. People say "STEM is harder and just worth more in the end" but there seems to me, based on the numbers, for there to be a large "winners take all" effect. But it's hard to measure how many BS in Chemistry holders go to medical school, law school, or take project managment jobs versus being baristas in your local coffee shop. I did find one source that implied the highest percentage of graduates with "Physical Science" degrees (which includes chemistry graduates) at 8.5% work in post-secondary education.

One thing I know for sure - my organization (academic medical research) often hires post-docs that start at a little less than the US median earnings for full-time workers. And there seems to be a lot of competition for those post-doc roles. Salaries do go up over time.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States
  [2] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/plumbers-pipefitters-and-steamfitters.htm
  [3] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/installation-maintenance-and-repair/heating-air-conditioning-and-refrigeration-mechanics-and-installers.htm
  [4] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/electricians.htm
  [5] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/carpenters.htm
  [6] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/brickmasons-blockmasons-and-stonemasons.htm
  [7] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm

You don't need to raise the status. They pay well enough. Most trade gigs require shift work, for 12 hours at a time - STEM workers get 9-5. That is a massive disparity. It's never been necessary for workers to be on days one week and nights the next in order for industries to function, but this persists and even union shops allow it.

That's real problem

Only one person (the oldest one) from my like 20-30ppl circle within age range of 20-30 gets close to IT salaries, that's ridiculous

in most cases it is around 40% (around 2 minimal wages) of my *nothing special* salary by IT standards (4.5 minimal wages), people with better cards get 7-10 minimal wages here, top people like 15-20+

and they see no reasonably easy way to jump higher (e.g within one or two years)

I can't honestly recommend anything but IT to anyone that can put a lot of effort (while mentioning all bad things ofc)

Cards?

>have a card up your sleeve

>to have an advantage that other people do not know about:

(without that last part)

Typically I’ve heard the construction “dealt a better hand”

Same.

Thanks for explaining. I was thinking along the lines of "report card", as in that document that lists your school grades for a period of time such as a semester.

People doing low voltage cat6 wiring make bank. Friend of mine got quoted 10k to run wires in his single family house, and that was w/o any walls up.

Plumbers doing fancy installs, not plunging toilets, over $100/hr. Huge demand, not nearly enough workers.

Some of the trades pay very, very, well.

Heck live in nannies working 8 hour shifts don't have to pay for housing and they pull in 60k-80k.

I know a woman running her own cat nail cutting service who is making good money and looking to hire help.

Home improvement is a crazy market. A lot of people seem to quote based upon what they think you can afford, which is easy to figure out since they usually do it while standing in your house.

One of our contractors actually said, "Yeah, I looked your house up on Redfin."

Home improvement is pretty cancerous right now. I get quotes with ~$5k in labor for work that would take me a week to do in the worst case. That’s literally double my rate without considering that working for yourself is tax free.

It baffles me that our markets are so inefficient that it’s 125% more effective for me to take time off my ‘highly skilled’ engineering job to do ‘low skilled’ renovation/repair work myself.

I can only imagine all of the inefficiency comes from teams of salesmen/project managers/owners who suck all of value out.

But still how do they get away with such bad deals? Are people so pigeonholed that they can’t imagine doing the work themselves? Is getting bonded/licensed/whatever other paperwork is required to compete with these sleazy companies that difficult? I’m sure a lot of people wouldn’t mind learning how to install drain systems for $125/hr minus overhead.

It's not possible to hire Americans to do this kind of work without getting screwed. If you don't want to get screwed, you have to start doing this work yourself. (Or maybe someone in your family could do it? Do you have a 19yo nephew?) Not everyone is capable of some of the manual or cognitive tasks involved, but not everyone you could hire would be, and most of the work is of the simple-yet-laborious variety.

In the 3-county rural area where I've spent most of my time recently, we have 3 Lowes, 2 Home Depots, a Menard's, multiple Orschelns and Tractor Supplies, and probably fifty smaller hardware stores and lumber yards. This is many thousands of commercial square feet basically devoted to home improvement, for an area with fewer than 140,000 residents. If it were possible to hire this sort of work without significant expense, the home supply market would be very different.

I'm not criticizing any carpenters or plumbers here. Their work is naturally seasonal and cyclical, and our society DGAF about people with that sort of work. If an electrician would wire your new bedroom for less than $3,000, he wouldn't be able to afford $1,000/month for medical insurance for his family, at least not every month of the year.

> It's not possible to hire Americans to do this kind of work without getting screwed.

It’s worse than that. Even when you try to hire Americans, it’ll turn out that only the salesman/owner are legally working. The actual work is almost exclusively done by immigrants being paid exploitative wages.

It’s frustrating that there is actually money in the industry but such a small amount reaches the laborers.

> It baffles me that our markets are so inefficient that it’s 125% more effective for me to take time off my ‘highly skilled’ engineering job to do ‘low skilled’ renovation/repair work myself.

I don’t think it’s particularly baffling. A large class of jobs, including the trades and so-called “low skilled” professions, are in very high demand - which indicates that what they do is valuable to a lot of people - and while you could theoretically do their job yourself, many people simply don’t want to “get their hands dirty.”

In my opinion that’s a good thing by the way. People who do jobs that are important for us and few people want to do should be paid accordingly.

That’s the charge out rate. The people actually doing the labor (overwhelmingly immigrants) are only seeing a tiny fraction of that money (~1/10th or less).

The unknown unknowns aren't worth it when you're risking the asset of your house. Yeah, you could spend hours on YouTube watching how to videos, spend a dozen hours on basic tools and safety skills, etc., but you're likely only gonna do this job once in 15+ years. And even then, you might still make it looks aesthetically ugly, not have the institutional knowledge of the best brands for parts that last, etc... it's really not worth it for the average home owner who can afford a house to take time away from his likely more lucrative work hours to learn this stuff, other than in really depressed areas.

It's pretty common to both pay a lot and get a bad job done. I had a bathroom redone and the very expensive plumber sawed through 3/4 of the floor joists.

If you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself.

I have noticed though that the large brand name plumbers are the most expensive. I think it's because they're mandated to upsell on any call. I hired one for $100 to replace some shower fixtures. But he spent 2 hours both figuring out what else he could do, and writing it all up and putting it in their database.

On that list of things was replacing the water pressure regulator. For $1500. It's a $300 part, and it screws on and off. Or you could buy a $100 restoration kit instead.

I was also recently quoted $1100 to replace two toilets. Not including the toilets. Looking online it should take 1-2 hours per toilet for an experienced plumber, and around $50-100 to dispose of each. So that's, at best, $200-$250 per hour. My hourly earnings after taxes are about $50. So I both learned how to, and replaced, the toilets in about 4 hours.

Replacing a toilet takes well under an hour.

Disposing of the old toilet, eh, that is a bit more work depending on how far your local dump is.

> People doing low voltage cat6 wiring make bank. Friend of mine got quoted 10k to run wires in his single family house, and that was w/o any walls up.

Someone on Nextdoor was confused about how to "add those jack things" to the ethernet cables in her prewired house. I spent a few minutes linking her to YT videos and an article so she could do it herself. No response, but a few weeks later someone else PM'd me: "Wanna make a couple bucks?"

Ignoring the tone-deafness of that question: yes, low voltage wiring quotes are ridiculous, but it's also one of the easiest DIY projects you can do if have an attic or crawlspace. I installed four access points through my attic and a UAP-AC-M-PRO-US for backyard coverage.

How many jobs in those niches though can a local market actually sustain? IT doesn't just pay high - it's a huge unmet need in the labor force.

Civil engineering? Pretty sure you could get qualified in a few years via community college / state school.

America is a country that loves the free market country, yet no one seems to be talking about supply and demand to fix college prices.

Double the number of large quality state universities.

Re-index public university tuition to what they were in 2000 + inflation. Mandate that funding comes with X number increase in tenured professors.

Re-instate public funding for state universities to what it was in 2000 + inflation.

A supply/demand imbalance is in effect, and bloat has taken hold on top of that.

Yes building new 20k student universities takes time, but in 20 years these problems will be solved.

Room and board is already more expensive than the in-state tuition on an average basis. You could further reduce tuition and fees, but it costs a lot to be housed and fed (and to forgo earning a full-time income for 4 years).

Could you realistically get room and board down below $8K/year with more spartan dormitories and meal plans? Maybe, but not by much I don't think.

https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college

Speaking from anecdotal experience, the university I went to put a lot of thought and money into things like being sustainable, producing zero waste, having high quality healthy food, etc. This is fantastic if you're looking at things from a long term perspective.

On the other hand, if your goal is to churn as many bodies out as possible with degrees, it's a pretty big waste of money. We could ship in frozen tyson chicken from China or whatever and just deep fry it as dinner, and turn the dorms into pod hotels or something.

Of course that goes from ideal to complete dystopia, but if that's your goal... lol.

> Room and board is already more expensive than the in-state tuition on an average basis.

As Bronn of the Blackwater said, “it’s all [housing policy] in the end”.

The problem is student loans, if the students don't have the money the college will adapt to be less expensive.

Europe has cheap high quality colleges, I believe part of the difference is European colleges exist mainly to teach, while American colleges are a mini city with expensive sports teams and stadiums, large bureaucracy with many layers of admin, fancy facilities not directly related to education, etc, all to attract students to pay high fees.

Europe is not some magical place where everyone goes to college. Lots of people don't, and have no ability to go, because the billets are fixed by statute.

European style colleges exist in the US: They're community colleges.

The problem in the US is that "community college" is seen as a lower grade qualification that people "settled" for, instead of an educational focused institutional with bare bones and no immoral mandatory tie-ins (e.g. first year mandatory high price accommodations/gyms/meal plans, etc).

I understand community colleges have a lot of problems too (e.g. low educator pay and conditions). I'm just pointing out that everyone thinks that a European University is 1:1 with the city-colleges of the US, when in reality they're often nothing that fancy and pretty bare-bones.

Community college doesn't let you get a bachelors degree. You can't say that is equivalent to European universities that can take you all the way through a post-doc. You map them based on how far you can progress on the academic ladder, 2 year colleges aren't a big thing in Europe. In Europe being a university means it at least graduates phd's, and most students study at universities since they are so large.

The bigger problem is that post-secondary schooling hasn't produced higher incomes to offset the cost. Adjusted for inflation, incomes are the same now as they were before anyone went to these schools (i.e. incomes are stagnant). Even if tuitions were affordable without debt, there would still be no economic return on investment. Even if it were free, the opportunity cost of your time still leaves you net negative. Unless its your hobby and you are accepting of the cost for the trade in enjoyment, why bother?

I once read an essay by an administrator of a small college who was talking about some incentives for high tuition costs. The biggest for his school was that parents and prospective students expected any tuition to be high, and if it wasn't, people figured that to mean the quality of the education was lower compared to similarly sized colleges which charged a lot more but the education was basically identical. To keep the doors open, he substantially raised tuition and enrollment increased by a huge factor.

> Double the number of large quality state universities.

As far I can tell there aren't capacity issues to get accredited education at the undergrad level. The prices are driven by student loan availability and the need for investment in amenities for colleges to attract students.

Increasing the number of universities might worsen the problem due to the latter needing to redouble investments to attract students.

> The prices are driven by student loan availability and the need for investment in amenities for colleges to attract students.

Does the US have colleges that choose to attract students with lower prices instead?

>STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom.

>We really need farm workers, and most of them live in poverty. I love having more engineers, scientists, and doctors, but we desperately need non-STEM work to be a viable option

This is basically a non-problem because of the supply/demand mechanics of the labor market. If farm workers' job gets sufficiently bad from a value proposition perspective, then people will leave the occupation and employers would be forced to pay higher wages to attract workers.

Macro-farms and thousands of automation systems can make your need for human labour decrease more rapidly than people can find other jobs...

It´s going to be a fuckin´mess, 4 dudes richer and everyone else screwed

In that case, this statement would become false:

>We really need farm workers

We really need them if we want to farm in sustainable and moral ways, as we have done by thousands of years.

But point maken

> We really need them if we want to farm in sustainable and moral ways

How so? Sustainable farming has nothing to do with a man vs machine doing the labor. Moral as in we need to make sure people can keep doing this job or what kind of argument are you even making? I'd rather see improved social safety nets and job training then some appeal to history that people need to work the fields because we've always done that.

> How so?

Modern industrial farming practices, designed to optimize agricultural output per unit of labor, are an ecological and environmental travesty. They require the widespread use of pesticides and toxic fertilizers that are decimating the biosphere. Monocropping unsustainably degrades soil quality. And the large contiguous areas used for industrial agricultural operations are extremely disruptive to wildlife.

The most obvious solution to the above is an agricultural system with many more, much smaller farms, where human beings do the work currently done by machines and chemicals.

Not sure about this: everyone else screwed seems kind of a far reach. If you consider screwed “unable to buy luxuries” then maybe, but I consider screwed “unable to buy food” and Macro farms stand to make food substantially cheaper.

How will the four people get richer if the food they create is priced so high that no one can buy it?

I get this is deeply economic and philosophical, but it’s an interesting thought experiment.

If they can make food cheaper, what pressure is there to sell their product at a lower price? The economic answer is that a competitor will do it first to get a larger marketshare, but the pratical answer is nothing will force them. If the regulatory and capital cost to enter the market are high, then a competitor isn't likely to appear and the existing players can continue functioning in a quasi-cartel.

Taking this to its logical end, the owners of said farms will get richer as the general population earns less on average (due to their labour no longer being needed).

Before it gets that far, they build a hierarchy of underlings that oppress the labor force. (See CGP Grey's "the rules for rulers" on YouTube.)

Either that or everyone else gets fed up and violently overthrows them. It could, perhaps, be avoided with higher taxes on the rich, but the rich have the most influence over the tax code.

The government steps in and subsidizes food for those who can't afford it, either by printing money, or using taxes. The end result is robbery from the commons while your four mates who give you kickbacks and a cushy post government gig get richer.

> If farm workers' job gets sufficiently bad from a value proposition perspective, then people will leave the occupation and employers would be forced to pay higher wages to attract workers.

Serious question - have you ever been poor? Are you aware that sometimes people have to work at shitty jobs because they have no other options? And, if employers really would "be forced to pay higher wages" as you claim, why are all the restaurants in my city still short staffed?

I'm not claiming to have a solution but claiming "the market will fix it" seems like such a cop-out, like telling someone god will take care of it.

>Serious question - have you ever been poor? Are you aware that sometimes people have to work at shitty jobs because they have no other options?

OP was talking about the problem from a practical perspective (ie. "We really need farm workers", presumably worried about a future where there aren't enough farm workers and we starve or something), and I was addressing that in the same way. Your objection seems to be from a humanitarian perspective (ie. how can we provide a minimum standard of living to non-STEM workers?), which is valid concern, but ultimately not relevant to the original problem.

>And, if employers really would "be forced to pay higher wages" as you claim, why are all the restaurants in my city still short staffed?

combination of:

1. stubbornness/price stickiness

2. belief that it's better to hold out in the short term and wait for the labor supply to return, then it is to give out pay raises now. Wages are sticky, which mean wage hikes would turn into ongoing expenses into the future.

3. belief that the raising wages would raise prices, which would decrease demand and ultimately make the business worse off.

>I'm not claiming to have a solution but claiming "the market will fix it" seems like such a cop-out, like telling someone god will take care of it.

The market seems to be working just fine in my area. Some restaurants have shut down. Some have raised prices. Some have decreased service. Which is the right approach? I don't know. The restaurants that took the right approach will win out in the end. In the meanwhile I'm still able to eat out.

The whole price stickiness thing is the free market not working. How can you say the market will sort it out and in the next post give the mechanism for why it doesn't do so?

What you're really arguing isn't that the market will sort things out to someone's satisfaction, you're just saying the market is a jungle and whatever survives survives.

> The whole price stickiness thing is the free market not working

Wouldn't the standard response to that be that it's not really a free market, and if it were made more free then such inefficiencies would be less likely to occur?

Lots of people might say this, but no one believes it.

I think you'll find that many do, and I also don't know why anyone persists with making absolutists statements that are clearly wrong or can be shown to be so with barely any effort.

What does it contribute?

OK then please provide an example of a market for labor (since that's what we're discussing ITT) that has been "made more free" and that has seen wages rise as a result.

Those of the former USSR. There are many other examples that are also such low hanging fruit that I wonder if you were trying to get at something else with that question?

The absolutism was in no one believes it, by the way.

I'm willing to imagine that there was some point in USSR history at which this would have been the case, but please let's not pretend that this describes the period after the fall of USSR during which life expectancy dropped by a decade. The incomes of billionaire "oligarchs" are not reflected in the median income level.

By the principle of charity, I don't expect anyone to believe nonsensical things.

If you wish to cherry pick those years, then yes, you would find some non-Soviet years that were bad, but it wouldn't be a persuasive case so be my guest.

> By the principle of charity, I don't expect anyone to believe nonsensical things.

You're not being charitable, if you were you wouldn't have begun with hyperbole, then moving the goalposts when challenged, and now cherry picking. You don't seem interested in any case but the one you already favour.

Either you meant that time, which in light of public health numbers is obviously not a good example for the argument, or you meant some other time. If you care to specify some other time, we'll be happy to consider it. If you want to forget about USSR and nominate some other time and place, we'll be happy to consider that.

I make "absolute" or even "hyperbolic" statements because I'd like to learn something. If I'm wrong, some example to that effect may easily be provided. In doing so, I'm letting someone else win all the internet points because I care more about learning than about internet points. As you observe upthread, a statement in such form can be shown to be wrong "with barely any effort". I invite you, if you please, to expend that small amount of effort. However, absolute statements can't simply be assumed to be wrong. Absolute statements exist that are absolutely true. "Any living human will die if deprived of oxygen."

I grant that you've already expended a smaller amount of effort, to somewhat imply that you yourself (or perhaps others not present in this thread?) believe that less regulation of labor markets leads to higher pay, but in the absence of any relevant example that implication is itself suspect. We know that some people believe silly things, and some other people claim to believe silly things that correspond to their particular psychological commitments (this seems common in the context of religion), but those beliefs and claims do not prove their silly objects.

> The whole price stickiness thing is the free market not working. How can you say the market will sort it out and in the next post give the mechanism for why it doesn't do so?

I suppose it's "not working" if by "not working" you mean "behaves exactly like economics 101 models that assume rational actors". But as it relates to this context, business are reacting approximately in the way we would expect, albeit with some delay/hesitancy. Average pay has gone up in the past few months, for instance.

>What you're really arguing isn't that the market will sort things out to someone's satisfaction, you're just saying the market is a jungle and whatever survives survives.

I don't argue that because it's not clear what "satisfaction" entails. If you mean the optimal choice every time, I don't think you'll find any free market advocate who would make that claim. In the meantime, I'm pretty satisfied. I can still eat out, and I have the choice between "higher wages but more expensive" restaurants and "lower wages but worse service" restaurants. It's not really clear right now which is the best choice here (eg. maybe I'd rather accept reduced/worse service than pay more), so letting consumers as a whole decide seems like the best course of action.

The free market applies at every level, but it does take time to find it's level. Is the problem that people won't just raise the wages, like the other poster described? Absolutely not. The location that doesn't raise it wages will end up losing in the end if there truly is a labor supply problem. They may refuse to raise their wages, but they will get the lower quality applicants, lower quality workers, and maybe not any workers at all if they don't raise it enough. The fact is it takes time for market to adjust and those that don't follow the market get left behind. The businesses that aren't efficient enough to run on fewer employees will get left behind. Companies don't go bankrupt overnight but they do go bankrupt eventually if they aren't as efficient as other companies. Those that make bad decisions, that raise wages to much, will get hurt, and those that don't raise them enough will get hurt. The fact is wages are only one factor and in a free market it will always find the correct level over time.

I'm no student of this, and it might come under rational/irrational actors, but I think any casual consideration of employers and wages needs to understand that the vast majority of small businesses are flying by the seat of their pants (I'm one of them, so I think about this a lot).

If the owners were competent, the businesses might have grown to the point where the enterprise isn't so much an extension of the owner's personality. A small restaurant's style extrapolates strongly from the owner's quirks - whether they feel they make enough money, they're disorganised, they're under stress going without leave or getting hit by taxes at the worst times. I figure they're the ones most likely to hold wages down almost out of angst because they themselves feel hard done by. "Why should that teenager get $15/hr?! I have the risk of the lease. I started this business! I got $5/hr when I was a kid!" I'd bet this is a solid factor in local restaurants.

Once a business is large enough to have a tier or two under the owner, I suspect this buffer helps. I notice this separation a lot when working directly with an owner versus with their marketing person. The latter has to uphold their end of the relationship with me or they'll get fired. The owner meanwhile can miss deadlines and forget to write copy and so on, and usually their worst case is they keep flying by the seat of their pants. If their business fails, it's usually much later and harder to tie to specific issues along the way.

The labor market - especially the low paid labor market - is a lot less liquid than it needs to be for pure supply/demand to work in the US (that's also taking human suffering caused by poverty out of the equation, which is pretty callous).

Laissez-faire markets are also bad at taking negative externalities into account. Food being too expensive to afford in the stores while it's also rotting in the fields (which has happened in my state multiple times on the last few decades) is really bad. Children not being being effectively taught because teachers are quitting due to burnout and terrible wages is really bad. I don't think it's sufficient to shrug out hands and say "it'll work itself out" when we can actively see very these kinds of detrimental problems

> Children not being being effectively taught because teachers are quitting due to burnout and terrible wages is really bad.

The market for teachers, at least in the US, is not a 'laissez-faire market'.

Neither is the farm/food market. It is heavily subsidized and regulated by the government to incentivize very specific outcomes.

The market for teachers, at least in the US, is not a 'laissez-faire market'

Whatever that means. In Alabama the low wages and poor working conditions have now led to a grave teacher shortage. The government's solution? Suspend teacher certification. To use graphic imagery: the talent pool is full of piss, let's open it to the incontinents!

"the talent pool is full of piss"

This suggests 'teacher certification' isn't effective at distinguishing between good and bad teachers.

"Suspend teacher certification"

If 'teacher certification' isn't useful for distinguishing good/bad teachers, then removing the requirement may be a good idea.

"In Alabama"

It's hard to fire bad teachers in Alabama. If you're a principal in an Alabama public school, you can't just give a poorly performing teachers 2-4 weeks' notice, freeing up the money to hire someone new. Look up 'Alabama teacher tenure'.

The way to raise standards isn't to lower expectations. But you have to offer something in return, money or job security, either will work, no one will work for free.

And what's this obsession with firing people? You can get rid of subpar performers, but the rapid turnover isn't going to improve the average unless you manage to hire and retain above average performers. In the long run, it's a supply issue, and the revolving door model is going to do nothing about the subpar supply.

Re: #1, I didn't talk about lowering expectations. I talked about removing a requirement that you said resulted in a poor talent pool.

Re: #2 getting rid of underperformers helps you hire good teachers (because, unless you fire someone, you have no money to hire someone new), and retain good ones (because, if you're a good teacher, you're not going to want to work somewhere where your students' other teachers are bad).

If you look at the PRAXIS exam (there's example tests out there) you'll see that the bar is set extremely low already. Dropping it does nothing to improve the talent pool and will certainly not attract quality applicants.

I've said it already - it's not the best students that go to work in teaching. You can fire a low performer, but chances are that the replacement is just as bad. It's a supply issue, a training issue and a culture issue - the anti-intellectualism in large swathes of the population really doesn't help matters.

You say "It's a supply issue, a training issue and a culture issue".

This may be true, but it's the result of how the system is set up and, in particular, the interaction between:

a) politicians

b) teachers and teachers unions

c) school district leaders

d) school district administration staff

e) students

In most systems, group (e) is the one with the least power. Their parents may be able to vote for school board members, but these elections are infrequent, and the way to get elected is not by being an advocate for students, but by aligning with a particular political party, or getting the support of teachers unions.

Parents cannot easily opt out of that system. In Alabama, per pupil spending is ~$10k/year. This distorts the market: a parochial school that costs $10k/year to run cannot compete with a public school that costs $10k/year to run, even if the former better. Because in one case the marginal cost to the parent is $0.

It comes back to what I said at the start of our conversation: The market for teachers, at least in the US, is not a 'laissez-faire market'.

Ever time I have had co-workers fired in some desperate attempt to blame low quality of a system on individuals in the system, I leave, because that shit is demoralizing.

Yes, your past experience sounds sad.

But, with regard to public education systems in the US:

- it's definitely true that some people 'attempt to blame low quality of a system on individuals'

- it's not generally true that this leads to firing (of teachers)

If you want to know more about some of the problems, you might enjoy the documentary 'Waiting for "Superman"': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_%22Superman%22

> This is basically a non-problem because of the supply/demand mechanics of the labor market.

You’ll have to back-up that assertion.

Supply/demand mechanisms fail the labor market badly. By law of supply and demand, professions introduce artificial scarcity to boost their income; and the market responds either through some combination of: Immigration, automation, consolidation (less businesses), cut-corners

Farming has aspects of all three, and it’s a major national risk.

He justified it with his next sentence:

> If farm workers' job gets sufficiently bad from a value proposition perspective, then people will leave the occupation and employers would be forced to pay higher wages to attract workers.

Not everything is like the laws of physics, which continue to work over many orders of magnitude. Supply and demand for employment works backwards at both the top and the bottom of the salary range. At the top, beyond a certain point supply decreases because people save enough to give up working. At the other end, reducing post can increase supply because people's need for income of inelastic below a certain point, so they start working longer hours and working second or third jobs.

>Supply and demand for employment works backwards at both the top and the bottom of the salary range. At the top, beyond a certain point supply decreases because people save enough to give up working.

Is this really applicable to this context? In other words, are farming jobs really going to get to a point where the pay is $10M a year, and people only take the job for a year and then never work another day? Considering that being a farmer has basically no barrier to entry, I doubt it will get to that point. Not to mention, if farm labor was really that expensive, so would the cost of living, so those would be FIRE farm workers would have to come back to pay the increased food bill.

> Considering that being a farmer has basically no barrier to entry, I doubt it will get to that point.

Care to breakdown the costs?

No, the case of farm workers is much more likely to be the opposite one, where workers are paid so little that they take multiple jobs and increase supply, leading to a low income trap.

Every mechanism has regimes in which it fails. 'Supply and demand' isn't always the answer any more than 'mongodb' or 'rust' are always the answer.

during the peak of the COVID labor shortage, many producers did increase wages but found that they still couldn't get workers. also in North America at least, many/most laborers are undocumented immigrants. white collar workers aren't quitting the desk to go out in the field..it is backbreaking work. if the labor pipeline dries up (which is a very real thing as immigration has decreased in North America/the US) then no one will be doing that job.

i suspect the amount of money that farms would need to pay workers to fix these shortages would drive all producers into bankruptcy

>if the labor pipeline dries up (which is a very real thing as immigration has decreased in North America/the US) then no one will be doing that job.

>i suspect the amount of money that farms would need to pay workers to fix these shortages would drive all producers into bankruptcy

I definitely think it's the latter rather than the former. Producers being driven to bankruptcy is an issue, but that seems like it's something that's going to happen regardless if we made "non-STEM work to be a viable option". At the end of the day, if it's a shitty job, then you'll have to pay more to get people to show up.

Probably because farm labor is skilled labor and seasonal. It sucks to live out of a vehicle traveling with the crop harvest. If you want them to work just within the area you need to make the month or two of work worth more than just a month or two of wages, because they will soon have zero work and will fuck over holding other non-seasonal jobs while every other seasonal industry also competes for that labor. Agriculture is also exempt from overtime pay. On top of all that, you can't just throw some rando in a field and expect them to get anywhere near the output of an experienced picker, especially with 12 hour days and a physical workload far higher than most people have ever experienced.

Their meager wage increase is not worth uprooting your entire life just for 2 months or less of work unless you are sending that money back to a country where a dollar goes much farther. They need far more than just add 2 bucks to an already way underpaid job to not only attract workers now but keep them around and available for following years.

> If farm workers' job gets sufficiently bad from a value proposition perspective, then people will leave the occupation

They are. Farmer suicides over the past 10 years have skyrocketed. Farmers are committing suicide at twice the rate of combat veterans. [1]

I'm afraid I can't take your comment seriously as a dispassionate economic analysis since it lacks even basic empathy for people caught in this ongoing trainwreck of "supply/demand" mechanics.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/06/why-are-amer...

This is quite convincing. We should ban independent farmers. It is too dangerous a job for independents. Industrialized commercial farming is the only acceptable recourse since we need to grow food.

As an escape valve for independents we could have them post a sufficiently large bond that will come due in the event of farm failure and bail them out.

People committing suicide rather than quitting and doing something else (declaring bankruptcy if necessary) means it's not just a supply and demand thing.

It's also important to distinguish between farm workers (hired hands) and the business owners.

At least in my limited knowledge, it's the small time farmers that commit suicide (so owner that works), and generally in the older population. What else are you going to do if you've been doing that your whole life, you're 50, no college (or it was for agriculture)? You likely can't stay where you are because many of the areas are depressed and they'll take your land if you can't pay the taxes, are foreclosed, etc. Just making it to the next year and all the hard choices become a heavy burden - one that you can struggle with for years and only make it that long because you've motivated yourself that it's the only way and only goal. So it's not just a job, but their entire way of life and identity that are lost.

Yes, people agree that farm works sucks and have low wage.

But the point that you and others are missing is that if farm works sucks, and pays low, then that means we should not be sending more people to become farmers.

And what exactly are we going to have them do that doesn't suck and isn't low wage?

The point you are missing is that jobs that suck still have to be done. If we ship many the low/medium skill jobs over seas and then automate many of the remaining ones, what are those people to do? Surely if they were able to get a higher paying job that didn't suck they would have done so.

The better solution is to make sure we appropriately value tasks that are necessary and have some level of potential self sufficiency should we find ourselves in a global event like conflict, famine, etc. Not to mention, the non-industrial farms are generally better for animals and the environment. This shouldn't be a race to the bottom.

> And what exactly are we going to have them do that doesn't suck and isn't low wage?

I am not saying that we need to retrain all existing farmers. Instead, I am saying that we should simply discourage more people going into that industry, instead of what the original poster was claiming, which is that we'd need more people there.

> The point you are missing is that jobs that suck still have to be done

We don't need more people in that industry, no. We can have less in that industry.

> what are those people to do

At a very minimum we shouldn't be adding more problems by encourage more people to go into these bad jobs, is the point though. That would just make things worse.

You didn't answer the question. What are these people going to do instead? If we keep eliminating low/middle skilled jobs, what is left for them to do?

I don't think you can win this one.

The free market might as well be a religion for some people. Nothing (not even historical facts) is enough evidence for it to not be the answers to all economic issues.

Also, there are lots of US tech people here - with overly inflated salaries compared to approximately everyone else. And everyone knows those winning the game have a tendency to lose empathy and think the game is fair, no matter how much evidence against it.

> "Also, there are lots of US tech people here - with overly inflated salaries compared to approximately everyone else. "

And even then, you're usually required to live within reasonable driving distance of the office. You don't make enough to buy a place. At least half your salary post-tax probably goes to rent. So yeah, you've got a few bucks in the bank probably, but it's not like you're saving up to buy your third Porsche or something lol.

> The free market might as well be a religion for some people. Nothing (not even historical facts) is enough evidence for it to not be the answers to all economic issues.

Aside from their lack of empathy and the ignoring of the distortion of the supply of labour happening that makes the "non-problem" an actual problem, what is incorrect about pointing out that supply and demand are, if not the most fundamental factor then close to it, in a market?

A close to most fundamental factor must survive close to most observations of the real world. That's not the case.

Monopolies have historically shit all over the notion that supply and demand is a good model to use for the market.

Much like most economic models, there are underlying assumptions about it that make it bad at actually predicting the real world. Things like perfectly competitive markets (haha), prices being adjustable (haha) and the forces that act on supply/demand being rational (extra hahaha).

There are lots and lots of cases where it fails, like the housing bubble, administered prices and wages.

Still, it might as well be a religion. Afterall, people can say it is close to a most fundamental law about markets with a straight face (despite it failling all the time).

Monopolies are the opposite of a free market. I'm not sure how a critique of using supply and demand to explain how free markets work will apply if you choose a monopolised market as your rebuttal. You may as well say that supply and demand doesn't hold under communist conditions.

What I would counter is that it that we can see that free markets work preferably to monopolised ones, or any of the other ones you've provided where selfish intervention of one kind or another has interfered with supply or demand.

monopoly is the goal of the free market, not its opposite. "supply and demand" are clearly forces at work in the economy, but the idea that an unspecified dynamic simply called "supply and demand" is predictive of anything is not accurate.

this false dichotomy between monopoly and its precursor is non sequitur.

> monopoly is the goal of the free market

Ignoring the fallacious teleological argument, I'm happy to rely on Wikipedia for this as this is basic knowledge:

> In economics, a free market is a system in which the prices for goods and services are self-regulated by buyers and sellers negotiating in an open market without market coercions.

What are market coercions?

> Examples of such prohibited market coercions include: economic privilege, *monopolies*, and artificial scarcities.

So you're implying me the only place supply and demand actually works is in an idealized free market that doesn't exist? If that's the case, yeah, we agree on it.

All those cases I mentioned came arose under one of the most (maybe the most?) free market of modernity.

> So you're implying me the only place supply and demand actually works is in an idealized free market that doesn't exist?

No. I don't believe you're trying to create a straw man intentionally but if you're going to jump from black to white, and a large jump at that, then it produces the same outcome all the same.

Abstractions around frictionless marketplaces don’t work well in markets with as extreme friction as the labor market.

It is not a non-problem for people without your privilege. Gig workers, immigrants and others with no viable options are forced to do these jobs or starve. All the while people complain about immigrants crossing the border and "taking their jobs". Graduating high school seniors aren't lining up to mow grass or pick fruit or work as a meat packer for $15/hour. They want to come out of college to a 6 figure job with no skills or training. It is going to be a long long time until we have enough automation to not need workers for things like picking apples, etc. A lot of people coming out of school with out a tech or medical disposition would be best served by picking a trade. We have a shortage already and it is only going to get worse. Running a 3 person plumbing company could easily compete with most tech jobs.

> It is not a non-problem for people without your privilege. Gig workers, immigrants and others with no viable options are forced to do these jobs or starve. All the while people complain about immigrants crossing the border and "taking their jobs".

That’s exactly what’s happening. With a steady flow of cheap labor to take these jobs, the wages for them will remain stagnant. It makes perfect sense for low income workers to be complaining about immigrants taking their jobs because that’s exactly what happens.

Cut off illegal immigration for a few years and watch as the price of all unskilled labor increases. It’s basic supply and demand.

The ones at the top generally don’t care because the people coming in are not competing for their jobs. And they arguably benefit from the cheap low end labor through lower prices for staples and even luxuries like landscapers and nannies.

Even that is changing with remote work and offshoring. I don’t know if it will take five years or a decade, but the so called knowledge workers who don’t sock away their savings now are in for a rude awakening when their own paper pushing jobs get replaced.

This is exactly right. Here in Australia, the borders have been closed for two years, and surprise surprise, we now have some of the lowest unemployment figures in the country's history. And for the first time in a generation, wages are starting to increase.

For knowledge workers who want to work from home, the end result will be competing on a global market against workers from developing countries who can afford to do the same work for less. We already see this on various freelancing platforms where it's only a viable side gig for those in places with a low cost of living.

At the end of the day, workers need some kind of protection against these movements, by putting local workers first and managing immigration to protect the middle and working classes. The problem is that we have a political class who have gotten rich on the back of removing such protections, because they're also business owners and property investors.

And don’t forget helping the workers in low wage places to organize and get their fair share of revenue from the multinational corps. Long term, a more level income landscape world wide is needed to protect even domestic workers power/income.

you may find that labor shortage and shrinking population takes some of the joy out of the exclusion of additional participants in your economy

>It is not a non-problem for people without your privilege. Gig workers, immigrants and others with no viable options are forced to do these jobs or starve.

Nothing I said precludes aid for these people, to ensure a minimum standard of living. I'm just pointing out the implied consequences of not making "non-STEM work to be a viable option", isn't we run out of farmers and we all starve because the market will correct it long before the number of farmers drop dangerously low.

>All the while people complain about immigrants crossing the border and "taking their jobs".

I don't get it. Just a few sentences ago you implied that the jobs are crap, and that people are "forced to do these jobs or starve", yet here you're implying that we should allow "immigrants crossing the border" to take those crap jobs?

>Graduating high school seniors aren't lining up to mow grass or pick fruit or work as a meat packer for $15/hour. They want to come out of college to a 6 figure job with no skills or training.

People don't want hard jobs and want easy money. Can you really blame them for that? Also, the solution to this, as mentioned in the previous comment is to raise wages.

>A lot of people coming out of school with out a tech or medical disposition would be best served by picking a trade. We have a shortage already and it is only going to get worse. Running a 3 person plumbing company could easily compete with most tech jobs.

In other words, the market is working as intended, by making jobs more lucrative because there's a shortage?

Doesn't supply and demand not apply here though? There are tons of subsidies and small farmers who are propped up more by government assistance than they are the market though?

> I love having more engineers, scientists, and doctors, but we desperately need non-STEM work to be a viable option

I’m not sure I agree. We could open more research labs, and dramatically increase the number of positions in STEM.

We could double or quadruple the number of teachers, and if we got even a small increase in the number of highly successful students who can do original work in research or STEM it would make all our lives better.

We could increase the number of nurse practitioners who could do basic medicine like fixing broken bones and treating common illnesses.

There’s room to add lots more mechanical and robotics engineers, and a lot of that work requires more spatial reasoning skills than math, despite what one might think. A lot of people who we wouldn’t think of as STEM oriented can do and enjoy those jobs.

If everyone becomes a software dev, then you will end up with the starving software dev who waits tables while trying to make it big in software.

It appears we have a demographic crisis in the making. We desperately need to automate as many jobs as we can, get people to take the jobs we can't, and pay UBI to folks without the skills to find a job.

> We really need farm workers, and most of them live in poverty.

Do we, though? As a farmer and software developer, I struggle to find enough farm work to do. I'd take on more work if I could. Everyone and their brother wants to be farmers, though, so there is hot competition and a lot of us end up with only a small piece of the pie.

Per hour it pays more than software. There just aren't that many hours. I would likely be apporaching poverty relying on my farm income alone, but it is also very little work, so maybe that's economically rational?

With respect, OP isn't talking about hobby farms here.

Five acres is a great lifestyle and some nice tax benefits, but not a career.

I work just shy of 500 acres, for what it's worth. While that may still be a hobby, you're off by a couple of orders of magnitude.

Still not a career, perhaps, but that's kind of the point here. I could easily handle thousands of acres if it were my career. However, obtaining thousands of acres to work is effectively impossible. Every other farmer is also desperately trying to get their hands on those acres.

If we want farming to be a viable, full-time career for people then we need far fewer people involved in the industry, not more.

Have you been to a shopping mall or McDonalds, even in expensive areas like the Bay Area? Poor , low-income families with the latest gadgets, nice clothes. The money is coming from somewhere. Also, tons of subsidized programs like education, housing, and healthcare. Sure, they are not wealthy in the sense of making a lot of money, but enjoy a good standard of living nevertheless.

Damn, you must have that special type of clairvoyance that allows you to look at a person and determine both their income and the cost of their phones and clothes. Do you make your money teaching this skill or do you do web apps?

i have google. it shows how much iPhones cost.

Does Google tell you their income?

According to Google the iPhone 7 I use as my daily driver is worth around $100. Not exactly breaking the bank.

It's called debt and most households are swimming in it. Looking at what people wear or if they use an iPhone is a really poor proxy for their financial health.

https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/average-credit-card-debt-hou...

Imagine having tons of debt but enjoying a high standard of living as if you were making more money. so what, if the end result is the same anyway, that being a high standard of living, but one one funded by debt and the other funded by earning more money. It's not like your children will inherit your debt. Debtors prisons do not exist either. I think debt is a problem though if you already have a lot of money, because then you're just being wasteful.

My niece was in that situation -- she always had the latest iPhone, drove a nice (leased) car, went out to nice bars with friends, had nice clothes (but worked in a mall, so at least the clothes were inexpensive).

Turns out she was racking up 10's of thousands of dollars of credit card debt and skimping on necessities -- literally eating Ramen noodles at home and food she scavenged from friends at the mall, she wasn't paying her gas bill and got cut off after she accumulated over $3000 of unpaid bills (in the winter she heated only the bedroom of her apartment with a space heater), etc. It all started falling apart when she got pneumonia and was off work for a few weeks and couldn't pay any of her bills.

She had some of the accoutrements of a high standard of living, but was still very much living in poverty. She's living with her mom now and working on paying down the debt.

Debt is just a result of poor education. People literally not realizing what is happening with credit card debt is 100% an education problem. I've had girlfriends who build up credit card debt like they were going for a high score until I tell them what it's doing and how much they could save. They literally don't understand that buying something they want because its on sale at a 20% discount on the credit card is not a discount when you end up paying 20% on that money every single year going forward. They just saved $20 on some purse and because they carry a big running balance on their card, it will be 5 years until they even get close to paying down that purchase. That $100 purchase that was discount to $80 actually costs them around $200 in 5 years, when actually it will be much longer than that for them than 5 years to pay off with the balances they have. I've seen people who make $40/hour being a waiter or waitress after tips at a nice restaurant but they just purely live beyond their means. They often just eat out, every single day for lunch and dinner, not realizing if they look at their charges that they just spent $2K on food this month, and $400 was given straight to Uber just for convenience. Then you also have the people that are just going through hard times and want to survive using debt but I've found again, an education problem, not as simple as simple not understanding interest, but a problem none the less. No budgeting, no planning, no sacrifices. The amount of people that could move each other out of poverty by simply getting a roommate is insane. On another note, there's a hotel nearby, it's not the best but it is the cheapest and the homeless will spend $60/night together to stay there as a group of 4 people, only about $15/day per person more than they make panhandling in a day. They are almost there with their thinking in sharing but again have made a critical mistake. $60 a night is also equal to about $1,800 per month - the same cost it would have been to get maybe a 1 or 2 bedroom apartment. Sure they would have to actually trust the people they live with, but on literally $15 per day, they could have permanent shelter. Of course drugs and everything else complicates that, but in our society it really isn't that bad to simply get food and shelter, but people always live beyond their means and make poor decisions due to poor education.

Our current president has been in the employ of credit card companies for decades. Many others in Congress and in state offices are the same. Do you really think they're going to allow "education" (or anything, really) to cut into their bottom line? This would be like Raytheon allowing us to get into fewer stupid wars. There may be a nation like that, but we don't live in it.

Non-STEM viability, in any sustainable sense, is a productivity problem.

It's similar to the debate around onshoring manufacturing. There is a clear and simple (not easy, simple) way we can have more blue-collar workers making livable wages in the United States, despite that livable wage requirement being much higher than what other countries require to produce the same goods - improve either the quality of the outputs or the productivity of each laborer. My understanding is this is how Germany held such a strong position in manufacturing for years - by doing things better. It's also why one of the most direct blue-collar paths to a six-figure salary in the U.S. is machine shop work, because the U.S. has, in some regions, maintained the ability to produce parts that cannot be produced more cheaply elsewhere, by developing and maintaining a highly skilled workforce and the tools to support them within that particular sector.

Put in the negative sense - I would be curious to know what the average profit generated by an average farmworker is these days, after both internal and external expenses are taken into account, and how much slack there is between the wages they are currently earning and that profit. My understanding from family-owned / smaller operations is that running a farm in 2022 is really hard and really expensive, and that there isn't a whole lot of slack there right now.

Of course, there is a solution other than increasing productivity - a giant mess of regulatory and fiscal policy that, in direct and indirect ways, subsidizes the industry in a way that makes paying farm workers a livable wage tenable in a way a truly free market would not bear. And those policies are reasonable and even desirable within certain frameworks, and furthermore may be necessary as an interim step toward increased productivity. But wouldn't it be better for America to be able to subsidize a whole bunch of six-figure salaries not simply because that is what people need to live (i.e., that it is a public good to have six-figure salaries, and so we will take on public cost to ensure they exist), but because we have a whole bunch of people that generate six-figures annually in productivity?

Obviously, this is all empirically justifiable or refutable, so if I'm totally off my rocker qualitatively and if there's something offensive here like, "each farmworker actually generates $1.1MM/yr in pretax profit for the average farm employer", then let's frame all that out and legislate til the cows come home. And once they're home, too.

I think the piece that you are missing is automation. A large portion of non-STEM jobs (including most farm jobs) can be automated and likely will be automated in the coming decades. If you are college age, you should be planning for a more automated future.

> A large portion of non-STEM jobs (including most farm jobs) can be automated

Most farm jobs are STEM. The non-STEM aspects of agriculture were mostly automated away centuries ago. You'll notice that farming went from ~90% of the workforce to ~2% over that time.

There exists some remaining small scale stuff that hasn't justified the cost of automation, but at the small scale it will be a long time before automation does pencil out. Robots don't work for free.

>STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom.

Why STEM and not tradesmen? Plenty of decent trade jobs out there that can lead to serious $$$ if you're hard-working and competent enough to manage self-employment.

The other side of the coin is for-profit colleges which are providing the highest cost and lowest value educations. Most of the most indebted college students attended for-profit colleges.

> We really need farm workers

Until the STEM workers figure out a way to completely automate food production, anyway.

what about a wise form of agrotech ?

Do we really need farm workers? Then why is nobody paying them? I think most stories about poor farmers is about farmers who want to farm in a more traditional way, while actually most stuff is produced in huge enterprises that don't need as many people to run anymore?

Nothing against farmers, just would like to see the real picture.

In any case, if farmers are needed and still don't get paid, there has to be a reason, and it presumably isn't the markets.

Sam's tweet is about college grads being too expensive. Which surprises me that he donated 250k to Joe Biden rather then Bernie Sanders.

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