Comment by solatic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by solatic | Hacker News Reader

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> The obvious solution is... for the government to lower the cost of high-quality education

Not everyone is smart enough to land in the professional class. The US does its young population an enormous disservice by pushing low academic performers to go to college. There needs to be, somehow, a way for people to make a living with their hands, because for some people, that is genuinely all they are capable of.

> ... build out social systems...

The way you build out the social system is by enabling people in the working class to find genuine work that produces value, not some ditch-digging make-work government program. You don't take those jobs away by offshoring them.

I'm not saying I'm against offshoring in general or that I support Trump's tariffs - I don't. But it's not exactly controversial to point out that, since the end of the Cold War, the US prioritized the recommendations of economists over social cohesion and socially harmonious policy. A lot of people were thrown out of work and were left to fend for themselves. Many of them ended up as victims of the opioid epidemic. I'm not convinced that the prior system was completely peaches as cream.

> by enabling people in the working class to find genuine work that produces value, not some ditch-digging make-work government program

Like building out clean energy infrastructure?

Modern "ditch digging government programs" aren't necessarily low-skill. Even at the time, the new deal government programs were massively beneficial for society while also providing jobs for folks who needed it, at reasonable wages. Let's not shit on good government programs just because the right has been feeding us propaganda demonizing it for decades.

Building out clean energy infrastructure provides value. That's perfectly fine. There is plenty of need for hands to maintain American road infrastructure that is falling apart and build new infrastructure like high-speed intercity rail and more subway lines to help support additional population growth.

The reference is to how a government can pay people to literally dig ditches then refill them. This nominally increases GDP (due to additional government expenditure) but it does not produce value and, more importantly, does not give people the dignity they would ordinarily achieve through their labor because they know such work is bullshit.

Never heard of anyone getting paid to do anything like digging ditches and refilling them; is this a real problem?

What happened to the information economy? And getting everyone trained on that type of skills? Nowadays education seems to be frowned upon by those in charge.

Edit: looks like this is discussed in a sibling thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43573036

The "move" from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy didn't end agriculture being a significant part of the national economy; agriculture just lost relative share of GDP. Similarly, the "move" to an information or services economy isn't necessarily going to eliminate either agricultural or industrial work. China, for example, has its tech giants (Tencent, Alibaba, etc.) but it also has vast industrial capacity (e.g. Shenzhen) and agricultural capacity (e.g. the largest pork production in the world). American education deciding to push children towards information-economy jobs that were a poor fit for their talents, neglecting classes like shop skills that were once common, was a mistake and certainly not inevitable.

"move" absolutely did move a lot of workforce, since farmers are much more productive, not as much help is needed.

A lot, but not all. The problem is that educational programs focusing on agriculture and manufacturing skills were eliminated in many school districts, rather than simply downsized to make room in the budget for information-economy education. By not offering these options at all, many children were pushed to positions that they were ill-suited for, often resulting in professional failure at best and at worst, large college debt that they would not be able to service without the expected parallel high-salary professional job.

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