Now, I don't blame entrepeneurship or technology for that, but it's not so simple to just change your personality to fit the economic imperatives of the day, and I simply don't desire to spend all my time as a disruptive wealth maximizer. The whole 'software is eating the _____ industry' mindset is the technological equivalent of slash-and-burn agriculture - it's not a sustainable strategy for the population at large, and we're seeing that reflected in many countries by the drift towards electing increasingly radical politicians of both left and right.
PS: 65 - 18 = 47 years. Just how many bricklayers do you need with 45 years experience and back problems?
But a corollary of my version of "Spoon!" is that skills matter, too. They're how you know the important details from the unimportant ones, and how to manage the important ones. The only way to get that kind of skills is by experience. To use your own example, have you seen the difference in efficiency and results between someone who's just been shown how to lay bricks and someone with 45 years of experience? Or even better, a team with someone with 45 years experience to tell the others when they're not doing it right?
Judging by the brickwork on my house, the answer to your question is "More than we have now."
A master architect and a master mason
Back in 1891, when the Citizens Bank building was under
construction, there were two essential people on the job
site. One was the architect. I imagine that the architect —
someone who clearly cared about water management details —
visited the job site regularly. The project was also
blessed with the presence of a master mason — perhaps a
recent immigrant from Italy — who knew how to sift sand and
wield a trowel. Both of these people oversaw the work of
others, and both insisted that every worker on the job site
needed to adhere to high standards of quality.
The results of their work included the impeccable mortar
joints at the Citizens Bank building.
So, you can easily end up with vastly more people with 25+ years’ experience than <5 years’ experience. That's not a problem for programing or electricians, but for highly physical skills your body breaks down and you don't need 3 supervisors for every worker. For some jobs older workers are simply worse.
Now, with a solid general education these people can move on to less physically demanding work, but trying to plan out the economy 40 years into the future is a bad idea.
That seems to be false in practice.
Otherwise as I said in a different post you end up handing out medical disability early retirements to lots of people which is extremely expensive.
Old dogs might not learn new tricks, but people can.
Of course, even then you are only talking a grand or two pre-tax, which isn't the world, when it comes to programmer sallary, unless the old person has a bunch of dependents and the employer is paying for dependents.
I think it's pretty common for the employer to pick up most or all of the bill for the employee, and then have the employee contribute for their dependents, but it varies from company to company.
Y Combinator and, to a lesser extent, the better coding bootcamps, are trying to solve this problem and I feel we should be supportive of that and encourage more of those initiatives (and I'm not looking to start another subthread about the effectiveness of coding bootcamps, but merely pointing out that they are an attempt to solve the problem of mentorship at scale).
Trades also are inherently focused on a single area. Plumbers can't just pick up a rig and start pressure welding.
PS: Back in WWII we had job training programs that worked and worked quickly. http://militaryhonors.sid-hill.us/honors/images/dothejob.jpg Today, we have a surplus of workers.
Compared to arts and science degrees with substantial debt loads, years of no applicable experience, and a high probability of employment outside your field, the economic model of trade schools seems significantly better.
You are associating two things that have gone together in the past (guild-like systems and apprenticeships) - that don't necessarily need to go together. I am, well, very American in my personal attitudes towards unions. (Okay, maybe I'm a little more tolerant; I don't have a problem with unions in general, I just know they aren't for my personality.)
I've worked in the field for the last 20 years without a degree, and I've been educated, largely, by things that could be called apprenticeships or internships; jobs where I got paid little to do IT work or programming, usually with some, but not very much supervision. Sometimes it was an official-ish internship, sometimes they just wanted an IT guy and didn't want to pay more than minimum wage. I personally didn't see too much difference between the two types of jobs. It was pretty great socially, too; I'd credit it with being one of the major forces that got me out of high school without physical harm or a record. It was really neat being a 16 year old kid who everyone treated like, well, a 16 year old kid (meaning some species of especially disgusting mud) - and then to go to work for three hours a day in an office where nobody else was below 45, where they treated me as a human; a human who could do adult work.
From the age of fifteen I worked at a local computer store, then later some county offices... by the time I got out of high school (in '97, and yes, I know just how lucky I got) I had just a few more months of low-paying work (phone tech support, that time) before I got my first programming gig.
Just because of my personality at the time, I don't think I could have functioned in an official union setting. It took me more than a decade before I could accept that sometimes you need to follow rules that you disagree with, and sometimes... sometimes when you learn more, you start to agree with those rules. I mean, I guess that's what most people do in college, learn how to "play the system" - But the capitalist free-for-all worked really, really well for me; I didn't have to play the system. I could do my work, tell my boss what I thought, and if that caused enough problems, I could get another job.
I'm not saying that it's the best system for everyone; just that it worked really well for me... and there's no way I would have made it in an organization with standards and rules like a union, and unions have very different values; To this day, the idea of working at the same place for a decade seems really weird to me. Some of this, I'm sure, has to do with the fact that I came of age during the first dot-com, and I know how much "loyalty" you are going to get from the company you work for... but some of this is that I really do value the freedom of being able to walk, with two weeks notice, of course, with almost no consequences.
Now, I do see some benefits of unions; in airlines, my understanding is that they've been able to capture a lot of the value (for the workers) that would otherwise have been profits for shareholders. This is not happening in the computer industry. Sure, we get paid pretty great compared to plumbers or mechanics or what have you (I mean, plumbers or mechanics who don't own a company) but compared to the industries we enable... we capture a pretty small portion of that value in terms of salary.
Still, I do really well in the "perceived merit" system we have now, even though all my statistics are terrible or non-existent. No certifications, no degrees, lots of time as a contractor, I've run my own business, etc, etc, - I think like so many others in the computer industry, I feel like a more objective scale is going to rate me less highly than the current system, and I have no evidence that a union could, in fact, obtain more of the surplus value for the workers.