For the United States, there is even a site where you can help plan your next ten years, find something that's high growth:
You can sort occupations by projected growth rate:
http://www.bls.gov/ooh/occupation-finder.htm?pay=&education=...
For the United States, there is even a site where you can help plan your next ten years, find something that's high growth:
You can sort occupations by projected growth rate:
http://www.bls.gov/ooh/occupation-finder.htm?pay=&education=...
Maybe I don't care if my degree (philosophy) has questionable utility in the work force. Maybe I don't want to be "employable". Maybe I chose to study philosophy and didn't fall into into because I was undecided.
For you realism is adapting to the world. For me realism is making sense of the world, figuring out if perhaps there could be a better world, and constructing the world that I would like to live in and that I would like my kids to live in.
You don't get to decide for me what I should study in the same way I don't get to decide for you what you should study. If you'd studied philosophy you'd be able to see stuff like that easily.
It's interesting to see my views kind of in parallel in this instance with polar ideological opposites. One the one hand you have libertarians who don't want to pick up the tab for your life, and on the other you got social justice warriors like me who think that with social security comes social responsibility.
If a person wants to get as much from the state as they can and put nothing back in then big deal I say.
Why?
1) Because there are very few people like that anyway. This group of people, so-called welfare scroungers, are always trotted out in these arguments. I've never met one of them in all my days, I'd like to see actual proper percentages regarding this. I'm betting these people are < 1% of the population.
2) Besides there are all sorts of consumption taxes and what have you that funnel the money back into the state anyway.
3) Most people want meaningful work. What you find meaningful may not be what I find meaningful of course. And failing being able to find meaningful work most people choose to work at _anything_ at all rather than be idle. The one thing that never ceases to amaze me is how many people work at jobs they don't like because that's the only work they could get.
4) Society didn't wake up one morning and decide to take care of me. Social security has been and continues to be a continual struggle to redistribute the wealth from the have-a-lots to the have-very-littles and it's a struggle I identify with. Vigilance is needed as we have seen because all the gains are slowly rolled back when we're not paying attention.
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This is all beside the original bone of contention I had with you. It was with your questionable statement "If fewer people got philosophy degrees or other majors of questionable utility in the work force and instead focused on getting an education in marketable skills with job openings maybe the story might be different." Did you ever stop to think why someone would want to study philosophy before you came out with that? You're full of what people ought to do, may I suggest you ought not think like that.
edit: grammar n stuff
People paying their bills amazes you?
There are very few 'career transition' positions that are entry level and only require a positive attitude and a willingness to show up. Those were 'upgraded' to require a degree and a few years of experience for complete strangers.
Also, some people try to avoid gaps of unemployment, and that means slinging pizzas with a couple of katanas for the Mafia when there's nothing else.
I've been thinking about how to respond to you. I realize how it must sound for me to say that it amazes me that people will take on whatever is available to them at a particular stage in their life to pay their bills. I didn't mean it in a disparaging way. I meant it more in a, "wow, I would find it very hard, I don't think I'd be cut out for that". I'm not suggesting I'm better or worse. I've had plenty of jobs that didn't inspire me at all but they were still decent jobs by anybody's standards: software testing, software development ... though many people I'm sure couldn't imagine being stuck in front of a monitor 8+ hours a day.
This is a perfectly valid position and stands in no contradiction to the parent post. I think the parent post was tacitly referring to people who want to have the cake and eat it too: study subjects of questionable market utility and be employable at the same time.
Good! That's the utopia we should all be aspiring to. In the foreseeable future (perhaps 100-200 years), increases in automation and efficiency should allow us to support most of humanity in at least passable comfort with minimal labor.
I used to be a big fan of BI, but lately I've come to think that human desires will always make BI irrelevant. No matter how much you pay every citizen, it won't be enough to sate human greed and envy. Combine that with a society that can't stand being bored, I think most people would entertain/eat/act risky themselves to death. Very few Mozart's will arise, and very many dangerously over/underweight selfie-taking alcoholics will.
Look at modern college, which when compared to any other point in life objectively requires the least work: and it's the time filled with the most hedonism and immaturity of most human's lives.
I'd rather people learn to treat work as a noble thing now, and learn to better themselves in the remaining time before we try to pull off the training wheels. I don't disagree that most work now is absolutely terrible, but I'm not sure just paying everyone to live would fix that. As things currently are, we would just pay so much that people would be willing to tolerate the terrible work. Why not try to make jobs better now?
We need a _theory_ of society that is as good model of society the way quantum mechanics is of nanoscopic physical phenomena.
We need to be able to twiddle the variables in our model and be able to see what would happen if we did X or Y.
If it is not possible to come up with this theory, construct this model, and build these simulations I want to know _why_.
Where I can debate people is if, all other things being equal, they tell me how I ought to live my life with no data other than their own opinion which I'm going to take as being a shorthand for their own ego and ideology.
I'd be fascinated to see such a model of society, it'd be incredibly helpful in economics, finance, social policy, education, fitness, law, etc, etc.
I suspect if you could make a machine that could predict human behavior that accurately, you'd want to keep it to yourself, while you became unfathomably rich and powerful.
That is why I pointed out colleges as a case study. The thing is, colleges weren't always that way. Sure students have always played pranks or messed around (I think of John Quincy Adams at Harvard getting caught streaking on the lawn drunk), but it's clear that sort of thing was uncommon. Compare that to today, when the only thing that changed is the way society treats college. I'm not sure how we can predict and change things in people's lives enough to make society as a whole take college seriously.
Compare how simple that is to the problem BI is trying to solve: some people can't find work. It boggles the mind contemplating how big an issue that is, and how much we'd have to change people for it to work.
Looking to the government to enact keysnian economics didn't work so well for Japan. And anyway policy matters and is important, but people at the same time need to take their lives in their own hands and make changes. Hard changes.
Just like we're always trying to get everyone to give up their gas guzzling carbon emitters, we should also be trying to get everyone to adopt a little bit more of a responsibility of managing their own lives. For the social good. The more people earn, the more wealth we have to lift all boats.
Don't get me wrong: many undergrads would be better off for paying greater attention to the job market and their coming role in it, but education can also be a step towards less tangible goals or an end in itself.
Yes, there is value in philosophy etc, but it is value for you. It is selfish. In a fair and free market society you need to give in order to receive. Once you render yourself unable to deliver value to others, you shouldn't expect others to deliver value to you.
The problem is that this value is intangible and cannot help with more worldly problems such as paying the bills. Until we have social policies that take care of those worldly problems (such as basic income), people are better off treating undergraduate education as vocational training.