Comment by jabroni_salad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jabroni_salad | Hacker News Reader

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Iowan here, this is actually a long-running talking point. Prior to the pandemic, Iowa was experiencing "full employment" with a 2.5% unemployment rate, which was among the lowest in the country prior to the pandemic spike. Some amount of churn is actually desirable as it means that employers can grow their operations and employees are finding opportunities. However, businesses in the manufacturing, agricultural, and service sectors were getting throttled by headcount.

There was a lot of discussion about getting SAHMs to re-enter, and how to get incentivize hiring disabled people, and stuff like that.

In the post-pandemic era our news cycle got captured by pandemic entitlement discussion, but ultimately this and measures like it was always going to be what Iowa's "return to normal" would end up looking like.

Notably off the table is how to get kids to go to school here and stay here. Currently they are going to school out of state and leaving the state. It seems like we will do anything except make the state more desirable to live in.

& quite frankly the politics here were only tolerable because the state used to be reliably purple, and we are swinging in a direction I do not really care for. My employer has offices in minnesota and I have been thinking of trying to transfer northwards for awhile now.

> Notably off the table is how to get kids to go to school here and stay here.

Ah, so the plan is to put the 16/17 year olds in the workplace because they're too young to live independently and leave the state.

Regarding schools you have both the university of Iowa and Iowa state. I feel like those are both good schools, I had a family member go to Iowa state's PHD program and it was one of their top choices(for their profession).

As for letting children(teenagers in this case) work earlier(and longer) I feel conflicted. In some sense the mantra that has been pushed on the past 2-3 generations has been everyone has to get a college degree or you will be considered a failure to society. That statement has been categorically wrong and has lead to a glut of people with college degrees and mountains of student loan debt from an imbalance in the workforce of too many college educated workers. The reality is the economy needs blue collar jobs and some do pay very well. Also some people are not cut out for college and pushing them into a institution they do not want to attend is bad for both the college and the individual. I feel like Germany has this problem figured out well with solid paths to high paying blue collar professions via apprenticeships and such. I wish the US had something similar and Obama's push for community colleges was a step in the right direction. Getting teenagers into blue collar apprenticeships gives them a head start in their careers and they still need parental approval for starting these jobs.

That being said there is also a trap that having a 14-16 year make pretty good money in high school (via trades or apprenticeships) can dissuade them from ever getting into college, which they may excel at but never go that route due to financial loss of lost wages by attending college(and not working). Unsure what the solution is here but could see this change of law being abused by some and helpful for others(those who are headed for a blue collar profession).

> a trap that having a 14-16 year make pretty good money in high school (via trades or apprenticeships) can dissuade them from ever getting into college

Or have their parents dissuade them from ever getting into college. I think you could make a strong argument that the minimum full-time work age should be no lower than the age of being legally independent of the family.

The hybrid solution, which is very rarely seen, is a proper apprenticeship system where people are (a) doing real work and (b) continuing to learn during the process, but that is hard to organize.

I would also like to mention the UK briefly had the Education Mainenance Allowance, which was paid to kids 16-18 to give them an immediate economic incentive to stay in school.

Working a crappy service job as a teenager is actually more motivation for going to college than not. And some of our parents didn’t give us much after 15, you need to do something to get out of that single wide trailer as soon as possible.

so is this an issue Iowans are concerned about or is this a synthetic issue that corporations are astroturfing? I can't see it being a very high priority imo even though I am sympathetic to 14 yr olds who want money.

I can't speak for Iowans but it looks very close to what has happened in my home state of Montana. That is, the Republican party has very successfully bonded a functional plurality to itself mostly via the culture war. In Montana this isn't just about your wedge issues like abortion. Particularly there's a long standing animice towards people who move there from California. This goes back to the 90s, long before it became an internet meme. Californians serve as an abstract outgroup that a pundits can pin any absurd or unpopular cultural issue on whilst creating a contrast to "real Montanans" whose character and interests conveniently align with all the pundit's favorite policies. For many of the voters in this plurality, what goes on on the business side is secondary to these culture war and identitarian issues.

This is compounded over time because as the empowered business interest of the party break down the social programs which were the product of a historic culture of community and combination, voters endure real deprivation and feel the pressure and anxiety from that deprivation. But instead of turning against the party and the business interests, they again find their antagonist in the culture. That is, everything has become so expensive and hostile and competitive not because of the growth of financialization and creeping capital but because of a decline in character.

These people are so saturated with culture issues that they cannot see how the very thing they are in bond with, business, is destroying the things they claim to care most about: families, communities and generosity. I am not being condescending when I say that they find themselves able to blaim skyrocketing medical costs on the fact that you cannot pay a doctor in eggs and butter anymore. (Something almost none of them ever did btw. Even in Montana that was a thing of the past by their time. But I have literally heard this argument and many of a similar for. on trips to my home state.)

> These people are so saturated with culture issues that they cannot see how the very thing they are in bond with, business, is destroying the things they claim to care most about: families, communities and generosity.

It's worth noting that's the whole point of these wars -- to keep people divided and riled up so they ignore other issues.

It is a real issue and not just repealing labor laws for funsies.

There are too many predators and not enough prey in the ecosystem. Either we need to accept that some of the businesses will starve or find a way to increase the labor force.

If a business is so terrible that it needs to hire children "to survive" it seems obvious to me it should be destroyed.

Maybe they should pay more. That's usually the way to attract workers.

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