I know it's maybe too political for HN but I found this article more interesting than expected.
Its main idea is "the loss of social standing, social claims, the social assets that working people used to have, because, in our time, education is so much more decisive".
He details joining a friend of his with a high school education to lunch. He soon recognizes that they jumped a guardrail of sorts in how she was baffled by this fancy world created by elites caught in the microcosm of a gourmet Italian sandwich shop. He reads into the encounter pretty deeply, but backs up a bunch of other elite practices that make elite culture out of reach. It's a pretty interesting read.
Pretty shocking to read this Educated Fools piece where the author basically admits to what are more commonly called unintended consequences.
The authors bit about Trump embracing the poorly educated is interesting. It jibes with something I read once but can't find the source at the moment. It had something to do with his frequent dealings with construction workers and going out to speak and meet the people crafting his buildings. He as a developer supposedly developed a rapport and respect from those working class folks. Also being a landlord in his early days dealing with poor folk. I think I heard about that in this Japanese documentary bit https://youtu.be/rwNTjlEpJD0?t=443. Kind of interesting to see a Japanese perspective on the guy and how they craft stories. His crazy dealings with professional wrestling too and all that gaudy raucousness also intersects with that other class of people. Seems like its not a recent foray for him, he's been engaging with folks in other classes for sometime by the looks of it. That's probably something that went unnoticed for a long time till folks started to scrutinize what the heck happened.
> There is no foothold left in big cities, or anyplace else where the global winners live, for high school graduates to exercise even a tiny bit of power. There’s no church to slot into as a deacon, no chance on the shop floor to rise as a foreman, no union in which to become a shop steward or officeholder, no big-city political machine that in this digital age needs anyone to go door to door. Our wage workers have been stripped of every way to exercise the kind of morality or have the opportunities that come so easily to the top fifth. At least in the case of the Industrial Revolution, as described by E.P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class, there was religion—the new Methodist faith that gave the English working class a sense of moral superiority over their owners. But in the working class remade and discarded for the postindustrial age, there is an uptick in drug abuse, one-parent families, and indebtedness. The top fifth of the country, the most educated, may well be more moral—and, God knows, even more religious in terms of actual Christian values—than the current white working class. But that, too, represents another form of class oppression, worse than in the Industrial Revolution—the top fifth have appropriated all the morality.
I've never seen an article that is simultaneously semi-self-aware yet contains such a high level of arrogance and condescension. That on its own makes it an interesting piece.
It is interestingly skipping period after 1832 (where The Making of the English Working Class ends) and now. The social problems were quite large and very real.
Thanks for sharing this. The piece makes an urgent point that needs to be appropriately acknowledged. It falls in the vein of arguments I've come to term as "relational poverty" or "relational inequality" arguments (what Popper is presented as terming "moral inequality" in the piece) that most social science research I've come across has failed to or is ill-equipped to account for. I do recall Amartya Sen making a definition of poverty along these grounds (in the sense of dignity, or lack thereof, in what one perceives as their social environment) some years back but haven't been able to trace it down since or see if any further work was done on it. (If someone reading this happens to know more about such work, I'd appreciate being directed towards it).
The point made about Trump expressing a liking for poorly educated folk is also noteworthy. Even if the more sensible in the political class come to acknowledge the paradox we face, the matter of articulating and expressing it appropriately arises. Currently, as the author notes, the "college for all" approach doesn't appear to be resonating electorally (that said, there are a number of confounding factors one could put forth) but rather is serving as a reminder to the once robust (perhaps this is romantic nostalgia) working- and lower-middle-classes of their lowered social standing and relational dignity.
Update: I have found a presentation of the relativistic perspective on poverty by Sen (1983). Apologies for the earlier bit, that was laziness on my part. Worth a read.
Sen's work is closely associated with philosophical and economic concerns about exploitation, not just poverty, and I think it's a shame that's missed out on. J.E. Roemer was the main theorist of post-Marxian theories of exploitation, but I've observed that when the discussion centers around poverty rather than exploitation, the resulting theory is much more tame. Also related is capability theory and the various objections to purely negative liberty (something I've also noticed many people miss out on - to speak of liberty as if it is strictly a concept that belongs to the liberal tradition and no other tradition may use it, and to then claim that the only real kind of liberty is negative liberty).
Poverty is the kind of thing you can fix within the current system, or at least make attempts to alleviate. Exploitation and domination are not, which is why you will never hear an elected official talk about it as a systematic issue inherent to the current system - if they knew about the literature on the topic, they'd know they're powerless to do anything about it.
Conservatives are split about the changes the article discribes. Traditional conservatives are glad the labor movement was destroyed, and see the Knowledge Economy as good because it is the latest product of the unrestrained free market.
On the other hand, Trump supporters are very angry, but the problem is that Trump's program won't do anything at all to fix the problems that are making them unhappy.
> Trump supporters are very angry, but the problem is that Trump's program won't do anything at all to fix the problems that are making them unhappy.
There's no way around the fact that more education (doesn't necessarily mean college) and greater labor force mobility (providing people with the ability to move where the jobs are) has to be a significant part of the solution. Stating the facts is not condescension, but I guess it can and does cause politicians to lose elections.
I for long tried to write something along those lines, but I think the author did summarise my thoughts better than I could've done myself.
The class conflict — something that western literati class keep denying acknowledgement, is really the driver of much of social progress. And this holds more even more true in the West than in the East.
The class warfare is there, it exists, and it is what has been responsible for the prime majority of political developments in the West for the last 30 years.
Shhh we're busy reinventing Marx as a new idea for the pundit brained technocrats. We need people like Elon and Andrew Yang to tweet it to us before it can be considered cool again.
How about generating a synthetic group of such personalities using ML with retweet and emotional conflict generation as feedback parameters? Then letting them loose on the public? Wait, that's already happening...
I'm thinking: because it gives people a strong, active, positive goal to pursue. Members of each class want to migrate to the higher one, or at the very least, have their children break into the higher one.
If you're discriminated or treated unfairly by a group of people, the natural reaction would be to separate yourself from that group of people, not fight it. But if for some reason you really want to join that group - perhaps because they're of higher socioeconomical class - then you have a motivation to fight and reform things.
Except that the article says that the working class in the US - and the UK - don't want to migrate. They just want to complain and break everything.
They don't want to improve anything for anyone in a strategic sense. They want textbook authoritarianism with a daddy figure lying that he loves them, and telling them who to hate so they can feel better.
It's an utter infantilisation, and the right are happy to sponsor it and farm it for their convenience. But attacking the left for pointing out that it's not really a solution seems to be part of the rhetorical package it's wrapped in.
The right are always happy to demonise the left for the working classes, because duh - of course they are.
The problem on the left - and I wouldn't consider most of the US Democratic Party as the left, incidentally - isn't so much "be like us" as a failure to understand just how murderous, dishonest, and literally criminal the elites on the other side are, and how limitlessly violent, self-serving and treacherous they can be in pursuit of their aims.
This wasn't a problem for the old turn-of-the-19th-century left, which had direct experience of being beaten up and shot at. But by the time you've been through college and acquired a fairly comfortable job it's hard to remember what your comfort is built on.
These facets of political history are conveniently erased from official nation-building stories of "progress" in the UK and the US, and people have to make a real effort to find out about them - which hardly anyone does now.
Oh of course. We can summarize the conflicts, complaints and angry points of the working class as nothing more than an urge to "complain and break things". I'm sorry but that's a load of dismissive nonsense. So is the notion that only the "far right" seeks to build text-book authoritarianism with a daddy figure who tells the working class how to feel and who to hate.
Either you've completely failed to pay attention to modern history or are deliberately ignoring a huge part of it but the left is just as guilty of the right of that very thing. They just (and even this only lightly) couch their authoritarianism and drive to spread hatred in different terms. In some countries (such as where I live), the left is just as nationalistic as any rightist.
To also claim that the elites with murderous, dishonest and literally criminal intentions are mostly unique to the self described right of politics is absurd.
> I'm thinking: because it gives people a strong, active, positive goal to pursue.
Your statement comes from your philosophical stance. As it happens I share your view about my own motivations. Despite that I recognize that most people do not.
Also: your position sounds American (are you?). The idea of “class” and most of the literature around it is European, where class is not something that people can typically change. Even in the US there is little class mobility.
I'm from Europe, though I have enough exposure to US culture that my own thinking does blend European and American ideas (to the extent you can even define "European" vs. "American" thinking).
Anyway, I think class mobility is actually a real thing over here. For one, a good chunk of Europe was under Soviet rule until ~1990, and in the early days of proper market economy, a lot of enterprising individuals moved up a few rungs in the ladder. Secondly, it's hard to not see our industry as a perfect way for easy upward mobility. Myself, I jumped up a level just by virtue of preferring computers to sports as a kid.
In fact, the US has some of the lowest class mobility in the industrialized world. It's the first and most basic fact that anyone who argues that US-style corporate capitalism is "meritocratic" should have to contend with.
Many European countries have far more class mobility, especially ones with strong social welfare systems like the Scandinavian ones
One of the things the article hits quite well that is otherwise hard to put a finger on - the effective media personalities, etc, etc, are basically all either from or in the process of migrating into the upper class quite quickly by virtue of making lots of money.
So any class struggles, much as I dislike the term, are very effectively silenced by the media because none of the talking heads have an interest in putting it up in lights.
It adds an interesting perspective to Trump and the incoming Twitter/Facebook/Youtube revolution that seems to be hitting the political sphere. It is harder to drown out lower class opinions because the broadcasting channels have become so accessible.
Yep, I think the biggest difference between last centuries 20s and now is that the nationalistic notion is today more of a sugar coating. Today it seems to be more about the rich against the poor, regardless of country, region or continent. A divide that can, and currently is, easily abused by certain parties and groups. Add uncertainty about the future, climate change prime among a lot of different reasons, and societies are much more volatile than they should be. The general egoism doesn't help neither.
> We don’t trust them, and would never vote for one of them. Why should they trust or vote for one of us?
For the same reason I wouldn’t trust a doctor without a degree proving they did due diligence for years. I know this feels different because “anybody can do politics” but without a large worldview the measures taken will be inevitably short sighted.
Now, it works the other way too. As the article states, losing touch with the base leads to problems.
I was thinking about this recently. I’m not qualified in politics, and I’m aware that my knowledge is too limited to be properly aware of how limited it is, but the thought was:
Democracy isn’t so much the best form of government as the best steering wheel to keep the government aligned with the interests of the people. The best actual form of government is technocracy, but technocracy with no democratic accountability is just going to competently achieve things that the people may not care about or may actively dislike.
I am "qualified in politics"...I can tell you that people who are "qualified" think no less bizarre things than people who are not (they are just of a different type).
Stating that there is some kind of qualification suggests, ironically, that you don't understand what politics is. The point is that there is tension, uncertainty (this is a bit like modern views on capitalism...can we have the money but no failure, pls...lul).
Difference is the Doctor has no direct authority over you, and can't implement policies that dictate how much you make, or how you live, or who/what you should morally value.
Everyone loves experts in an advisory role, but they want someone who shares their values in charge
but its not the physician who is actuall making the decision, its the policy makers that actually made the decision that if you meet certain criterias then certain actions will be taken. The physician is only there as an advisor to assess whether you meet those criterias.
> This all fits the claim of the French geographer Christophe Guilluy about his own country in his 2016 book The Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery, and the Future of France.
+1 for Christophe Guilluy's book, it's really eye-opening, even more so considering that he wrote/published it even before the "gilets jaunes" movement started.
Not sure there's a solution for this "periphery" problem, but I see it in my parts of the world (Eastern-European country and EU member), it certainly is present in France and I suppose in other Western European countries, and according to the article is also a real problem in the US.
Not much more than 100 years ago, 40% of world trade passed through Liverpool: 40%! It's staggering how quickly things can turn around, and I find it just unfathomable how the wealth somehow just leached away to other places over time.
In my view, education has begun to act like wealth, because education is a form of wealth, and the productivity divide between wealth and work is increasing.
Still, I'm skeptical of the whole idea, because it just seems too convenient for Republicans to drive a wedge between the Democratic party and the working class based on a perceived social division rather than real policy: We took away your unions and safety net, but by golly, we'll protect your "dignity."
The Democratic Party is driving a wedge between itself, FWIW. The talking points around political correctness could not be better designed to alienate working and middle class white people.
> But according the Telemundo poll, nearly two-thirds of Latinos said they wouldn't vote for a candidate who describes himself as a “socialist.” Sanders identifies as a democratic socialist.
I’m not sure what that has to do with political correctness, seeing as how socialism is a political theory about economics, not about politically correct language.
Abstract preference questions often don't predict preference for specific candidates, because they don't capture subtleties in the area of preference being polled or how it is weighted against other concerns.
Language policing is big in every human circle where people realize language has impacts, whether it's a religion that has prohibitions on the name of God, a disgust-sensitive subculture that finds some words too vulgar, or a political culture that insists the United States is "A republic, not a democracy."
And when you zoom in on specific linguistic struggles, you often find that it's less a matter of one side being the police and the other being the anarchists, or cerebral philosophers accurately reckoning with the hazard of losing some ideas in a wide-ranging territory of thoughtful discourse, and more two sides with competing values they understand are promoted or eroded with certain language. For example, there's no "freedom" side in the fight over "Merry Christmas" vs "Happy Holidays" (however much inflated), just two forms of "policing" with different implicit values.
Sometimes, of course, you do find topics where one side of a struggle is much more about restraint and the other side is struggling against restraint itself. See, for example, people who are upset that they can't tell racist jokes anymore without someone getting offended.
> Whites are ever so slightly less likely than average to believe that political correctness is a problem in the country: 79 percent of them share this sentiment. Instead, it is Asians (82 percent), Hispanics (87 percent), and American Indians (88 percent) who are most likely to oppose political correctness
> Progressive activists are the only group that strongly backs political correctness: Only 30 percent see it as a problem.
> So what does this group look like? Compared with the rest of the (nationally representative) polling sample, progressive activists are much more likely to be rich, highly educated—and white. They are nearly twice as likely as the average to make more than $100,000 a year. They are nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree. And while 12 percent of the overall sample in the study is African American, only 3 percent of progressive activists are. With the exception of the small tribe of devoted conservatives, progressive activists are the most racially homogeneous group in the country.
(I should caveat this by saying I’m in the apparently 18% of Asians who doesn’t think political correctness is a problem. But there is a huge class/education divide.)
I think this is a tough thing to poll as political correctness can have a few connotations. Does it refer to the act of social sensitivity itself or does it refer to things like virtue signalling or calling out other's lack of political correctness?
Pretending that there are no negative consequences to allowing men who believe they are women into female-only spaces.
Or pretending that the incredible success of East and South Asians in the US doesn’t basically completely torpedo the notion that racism is a significant barrier to the success of poorly performing ethnic groups.
I recently read something about how all folks should define their pronouns since a small minority prefers unexpected ones. A person generally supportive of it was calling out a hardline faction.
Latinx, drag queens as family friendly content, overreach on dilution and removal of gendering (no more daddy/daughter events), politicizing sports, politicizing popcorn movies, censorship of standup comedians, social media bans, student loan forgiveness pitches. Anything that looks like a bailout to the rich and upper middle class, including for homeowners.
With the exception of maybe loan forgiveness, none of those are party or candidate talking points. The rest are social issues and mostly gender issues so I don't really understand what middle class or white hat has to do with it. Was that just code for social conservatives?
Who do you think the social conservatives are? Because they’re certainly not the highly educated, urban whites who make half of the white Democrat constituency. Then you might argue that this has nothing to do with whites, specifically, but as the article’s author notes, probably the only reason that this hasn’t completely alienated black and Latino voters is because they’re already used to being alienated and don’t see the republicans as a viable alternative. But whites don’t have the same things tying them to the democrats.
FWIW, I think there’s a good chance the republicans will start figuring out to flip Latino and Asian voters by appealing to social conservatism.
>We took away your unions and safety net, but by golly, we'll protect your "dignity."
Organized labor may not have been targeted explicitly like by Republicans, but Democrats haven't really been a friend to them either [1]. Both parties have been on board with the neoliberal agenda for 40 years.
Yeah, when you expand your scope of analysis to include the labor movements of other nations, it’s striking how anemic and disenfranchised organized labor has been in the US.
Unions in other countries have historically been a voice of the people, and don’t have a lasting allegiance with any political party or movement. I have no idea why American unions collapsed; perhaps, it was justified in the moment, but the present absence of a strong voice for organized, skilled labor is tragic.
I can't speak for other countries, but Germany's unions are very closely tied to the social democratic party. So much so, that there's a ~70% overlap in membership at the functionary level, while the average worker is somewhat further removed from the party (they're currently polling at ~15%).
While not as extreme, the result is similar as well over here: knowledge workers make a lot of money, blue collar workers cannot afford to live in the large cities. The elite consists primarily of lawyers, political scientists and teachers, and the mocking of the lower class (with a hint of paternalist "we cannot let them be free, they don't know what to do with freedom") is palpable.
> Unions ... don’t have a lasting allegiance with any political party or movement
Not true in the UK - the unions have a strong relationship with the Labour party, in terms of providing funding and endorsement of leadership candidates. Indeed, in its original form [0] the Labour party was created as the political wing of the unions. Many unions automatically took a cut of their members' subscriptions as labour party funding.
Battles between the unions and the Conservative party have been key a feature of UK politics, e.g. the Miners' strike in the 1980s [1]
I learnt a lot about that unknown history from Alex Carey's classic Taking the Risk Out of Democracy (1987). It was no accident but a huge and deliberate campaign. The story is pretty horrifying.
"The American Advertising Council represents large corporations and large advertising agencies. In April 1947 the council announced a $100 million advertising program which, over the next twelve months, would use all media 'to "sell" the American economic system' to the American people. The program was officially described as a 'major project of educating the American people about the economic facts of life'.
Daniel Bell, then an editor of Fortune, provides a perspective on both the scale and the anti-union and anti-New Deal purposes of these campaigns:
"It has been industry's prime concern, in the post war years, to change the climate of opinion ushered in by...the depression. This 'free enterprise' campaign has two essential aims: to re-win the loyalty of the worker which now goes to the union and to halt creeping socialism [i.e. the New Deal] ... In short the campaign has had the definite aim of seeking to shift the Democratic majority of the last 20 years into the Republican camp ..."
Bell sketches some of the resources, created to sell goods but now used in an overwhelming campaign to sell ideas. 'The apparatus itself is prodigious: 1,600 business periodicals, 577 commercial and financial digests, 2,500 advertising agencies, 500 public relations counsellors, 4,000 corporate public relations departments and more than 6,500 "house organs" with a combined circulation of more than 70 million. Of the opinion-shaping product Bell observes: "The output is staggering. The Advertising Council alone, in 1950, inspired 7 million lines of newspaper advertising stressing free enterprise, 400,000 car cards, 2,500,000,000 radio impressions ... By all odds it adds up to the most intensive "sales" campaign in the history of industry'
Huh? A few years ago Obama/Biden were considering what to do about the "entitlement crisis". The famed Simpson-Bowles commission (unsurprisingly they suggested cuts to Medicare and Social Security) [1]. Only Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (who waffled on M4A, and subsequently faded in the polls) are trying to expand the social safety net. Meanwhile the DNC is trying to do whatever it can to protect their class interests [2][3].
You're going to blame Obama/Biden for things they didn't do that never made it out of a bipartisan committee? And this was the same year they passed Obamacare.
Healthcare is something that would benefit the working class.
Unfortunately one of the side effects of Obamacare is that rates have skyrocketed to the point that many people can't afford it.
There are subsidies, but the premiums / deductibles are still high enough to be basically useless for many people. Add to it that we had a mandate that you needed to have insurance or you'd be fined.
There are a lot of good things that came from Obamacare, namely the removal of pre-existing conditions and the ability to keep your kids on your health insurance after they've left the house.
But there are real issues with the program, and what many people hear when they raise them is effectively "You're just holding it wrong" to steal that old iPhone marketing wank.
I honestly don't know anyone who is against improving healthcare in the US. The main thing people are afraid of is that a well-intended change will make things worse for them.
(This is a rant at this point that I'm not even sure is responding to anything you said)
>Unfortunately one of the side effects of Obamacare is that rates have skyrocketed to the point that many people can't afford it.
Is that really a causal relationship? What I see in the data is annual insurance premiums rising at 3-4X the CPI inflation rate starting in the 1990s and continuing to the present. The ACA was an attempt to address the fallout from this. It may not have been entirely successful in doing that, but it certainly wasn't the cause of the problem.
* Check the McKinsey study and the Commonwealth Fund study for data. In the 3 years prior to the ACA, nationwide premiums averaged a 10% annual increase, in the 3 years after the implementation of the ACA they averaged a 6% annual increase.
> Democrats haven't really been a friend to them either [1]. Both parties have been on board with the neoliberal agenda for 40 years.
In a democracy, every interest or issue is either represented by a constituency that will vote reliably in support of it, or it's not and it will suffer. Labor's suffered for the last half century for two reasons:
1) The Democratic buy-in on civil rights and reproductive freedom, and subsequent defection by those hostile to it -- these cut across the lines drawn around working class constituencies and eroded that constituency's reliability.
2) Americans have examined and bought into neoliberal-supporting ideas (or auxiliary ideas that keep progressive economics from gaining mindshare). Discourse architects have been effective enough at shaping political and policy conversations that a good number of politically active citizens and officeholders understand issues the way those advancing neoliberal policies would like.
When you understand this dynamic, you don't see the movement as Mr-Burns-thumb-twiddling by DLC/DNC sellouts, you see the Democratic party struggling for a constituency that will let it win elections along the odd way that key lines are drawn in the US system and finding that it had to move a neoliberal direction.
And you get a sense of the scope of the work that'd be necessary for a working-class friendly politics to take root again, which is gonna be much harder than just electing President Sanders or Warren (which is not an easy sell in itself).
> Both parties have been on board with the neoliberal agenda for 40 years.
For the Democrats, it's more like less than 28; the neoloberal faction didn't become dominant over the economically progressive, faction until during Bill Clinton's Presidency; Clinton himself obviously was a member of the neoliberal faction, but most of the Democratic Party in Congress opposed NAFTA; it wasn't until sometime after the midterm defeat in 1994 that the neoliberals faction definitely dominated the Party.
And the neoliberal faction in the Democratic Party is fighting desperately against being swept from power in the party right now, to the extent of prioritizing that intraparty fight over defeating the other major party.
>education has begun to act like wealth, because education is a form of wealth, and the productivity divide between wealth and work is increasing
You might be interested in reading “The Meritocracy Trap” which discusses how elitism, particularly in regards to education and hyper-competitive productivity, drives inequality. The idea is that this is ultimately worse for both the non-elites who can no longer compete and the elite who must continue to stretch themselves ever thinner to remain competitive.
Great article that exposes many college-educated blind spots, in particular that education is not a panacea for inequality. But the proposed solution of more democratic workplaces — somehow convincing capital-holders that investing in human labor rather than automation is in their own self-interest — feels like swimming against the tide of history.
Meritocracy is a dangerous ideal for humanity to continue to hold so dearly. IQ is partially genetic, and with a low ceiling — sooner than we’re ready to accept, nobody’s brain will hold a candle to AI. Equating our economic value with moral worth will only lead to further cultural division, despair, and anarcho-primitivism. Instead, let’s try to build a culture, society, and government that takes the intrinsic value of human life as an axiom, before it’s too late.
Nobody can outrun a car, either, but cars haven’t made humans obsolete. Instead, we use them as tools to accomplish our goals: just as we will with AI.
I'm very undecided about AI, but this argument doesn't feel right to me. The ability to run fast was never the 'unfair advantage' of being human. Cars are a tool to help us overcome physical limitations. But what happens if a general AI is capable of outdoing us intellectually?
I'm not of the opinion that AI will just decide to destroy us all or anything particularly extreme. Still, I find it very hard to believe that humans could actually 'control' entities that are smarter than we are. Anyone making high-confidence predictions about how that would play is worthy of some skepticism, I believe.
While AI topic today is all fearmongering essentially, I agree with you that we can’t actually or should actually control something that’s smarter and more advanced than us.
I’ll give the wheel to them, like how I trust my doctor to know what’s best for my body. They might not be the best for me but could be better for the Earth Civilization.
But cars have made horses obsolete. Although horses aren’t extinct, owning one is more of a hobby in the western world.
AI is cognitive automation. Not only will blue collar jobs be replaced, but so to will white collar jobs as well. We’re approaching the point where capital alone (without labor) will be able to generate wealth in more general cases. When that happens, employing people will be a hobby. When that happens, humans will need other ways to make income than with their labor.
We haven’t even made baby steps with AI yet. All electronics as of today have 0 cognitive ability because they are all deterministic in nature. That’s right, exactly 0 cognition.
This is ridiculous. Essentially all modern machines have access to sources of "true" randomness, and determinism is certainly not what is holding back advances in AI.
It is not, all of the machine learning software existing do not truly implement randomness at all. Just because such exist doesn’t mean much. You had single celled organism since 3.5B year ago, does it infer AI to you?
Is meritocracy a belief really held by elites though? It seems more a propaganda for the professional class to keep them from acting in solidarity with everyone else.
In material terms, people making high salaries at FAANG companies are still closer to their low-paid and contract working peers. But it’s important for them to think that they’re closer in position to the CEOs and Capital owners so that they’ll continue to administer the ownership class’ empires and bureaucracies. Thus the fiction of meritocracy.
Those at the top seem to embrace a much more base instrumentalism of “might (by proxy of wealth) makes right.”
>Is meritocracy a belief really held by elites though? It seems more a propaganda for the professional class to keep them from acting in solidarity with everyone else.
> In material terms, people making high salaries at FAANG companies are still closer to their low-paid and contract working peers. But it’s important for them to think that they’re closer in position to the CEOs and Capital owners so that they’ll continue to administer the ownership class’ empires and bureaucracies. Thus the fiction of meritocracy.
Why do you think that the members of the professional class would personally benefit from more solidarity with the working class? Many high-earning professionals own millions of dollars worth of "capital" (shares, rental properties) and would not benefit from any kind of revolution that would tank the value of these assets. They also already possess many of the benefits that the working class are agitating for (good benefits, high pay), and don't need an overhaul of the economic structure to obtain those.
I'm not saying solidarity is bad, I'm just saying your derisive view of high-income professionals as dumdums brainwashed by the rich into acting against their own interests when they decline to participate in the revolution is not an accurate reflection of their actual incentives.
>In material terms, people making high salaries at FAANG companies are still closer to their low-paid and contract working peers. But it’s important for them to think that they’re closer in position to the CEOs and Capital owners so that they’ll continue to administer the ownership class’ empires and bureaucracies. Thus the fiction of meritocracy.
Uh... I think that's the wrong argument. The people making "high salaries" (let's say... >= $100k/year, base salary) at FAANG companies really are, de facto, petty bourgeois. They don't just get "stock options" that never materialize. They get annual bonuses in the tens of thousands of dollars, plus stock options or RSUs that vest to create further paper wealth. In the Bay Area with its stupidly stratospheric housing prices, maybe we can talk about these people being "middle class" in the same way my parents are (ie: as white-collar employees making middling salaries). Maybe.
But really, just about anywhere outside the Bay Area, most of those high salary FAANG employees are building capital far faster than they lose money to living expenses, and provided they're willing to live cheaply and far away, a secure early retirement in middle-age is a strong possibility. Given some moderate but successful investments, they could even get truly rich.
Working class is when you convert labor into money into commodities. Owning class is when you convert money into commodities into money.
But what's correct to point out is that the vast majority of programmers, software engineers, and IT staff aren't high-salary FAANG workers. They take home a median income, in fact, of about ~$65k/year.
The article convinced me that UBI would likely be a more meaningful policy position. Some people (the majority, in reality) just aren't cut out for college. Co-determinism seems D.O.A if companies like Uber are planning on autonomous transportation: the underemployed working class is but a stepping stone to creating a company that depends on exclusively highly skilled, upper middle class laborers. Truthfully, there may be not much of a place for low-skilled labor if the service sector will be inevitably automated. UBI is too far left; education for all is palatable policy. And that's why the Democratic establishment is where it's at.
>Meritocracy is a dangerous ideal for humanity to continue to hold so dearly. IQ is partially genetic, and with a low ceiling
How can you possibly allocate resources efficiently if you don't consider whether those you are allocating to are competent? What do you propose? Derisk with massive government bureaucracy?
Why do we need to allocate resources efficiently? People having lots of resources hasn't really made us any happier. If lots of resources made a difference everyone in developed countries would be euphoric 24/7. Yet we're chock full of anti-depressants and still sometimes intentionally kill ourselves.
No, I'm talking about the manpower and materials that are necessary for food, water, transportation, medical care, and all of the other thousands of things that make society work.
Ultimately, scarce resources, which take their own industries to produce, need to be allocated so the many goods and services we need and want can be designed, built, and/or executed/delivered. If you do not rely on merit to decide who does what, everything will absolutely collapse.
To clarify, I believe in allocating work based on competence, and even incentivizing such behavior when necessary with some monetary reward, which our current markets do an okay job at.
By “meritocracy” I mean the idea that it is morally just for people to be rewarded in money or social status proportional to their economic usefulness — an idea most people implicitly hold to some degree and which some libertarians trumpet as a core tenet. I think the implied inverse to this belief — in the extreme, that lack of economic usefulness deserves poverty — is morally repugnant and dangerous.
I think this essay is missing a discussion on the theories of what make university graduates better paid. The two main theories are:
1. Human capital. People learn stuff at university which makes them more valuable workers.
2. Credentialism. Universities select (or pass) people who were already going to be valuable.
Now let's look at what we might mean by "valuable":
1. You can fool hiring managers into thinking you're competent - good resume writing skills, good interview skills, an impressive certificate.
2. You can fool your manger's manager into thinking you're competent. All the above, plus you're good at churning out superficially credible explanations and justifications. Some critics of university might argue that they've optimised towards teaching students how to fake competence - 4 years of general education isn't enough to produce a truly competent thinker in a field (not reliably for a large fraction of society) but it is enough to teach them to write a clean-looking essay with proper citations, and to churn out paragraphs with "topic sentence, evidence, analysis, transition" (but not enough time that this will get too stale - you'll still be able to grade the students from A-E).
3. You'll actually be good for your company / society because of your ability to analyze things, domain skills, intelligence, conscientiousness, etc.
We could also talk about general vs domain specific skills, but they're often fairly well correlated. Competence in a domain requires thinking skills, and thinking skills are best built up in some real domain where skills can actually be tested (not just abstract "critical thinking" courses).
One other possibility to consider: college degrees are considered a way of making sure the person is from the social class that you feel comfortable being in the room with. It's a (usually) legally defensible requirement that enables class prejudice.
As someone who's about to graduate with an MEng degree: No, I haven't done real work yet, and I hope that most employers don't share this attitude which gets me in a catch-22. I need to have worked to find work, but to work I need to have found work. The only option seems to be these "graduate jobs", a large percentage of which demand arcane tests modelled after IQ tests and tedious timed calculator tests in order to even consider me.
Graduated with 70%+ with the title "Master of Engineering"? Not good enough, do an IQ test to get the job. Write a compiler for a self-designed embedded language for your final project? Not good enough, you forgot how to concatenate lists in MATLAB. Oh, and you don't get to find out your prospective salary until you have an offer; until then, you'll be happy to know it's "competitive", whatever that means.
At this point, I'm not sure if I'd recommend anyone go to university unless they want to stay in academia or something. I'm not convinced it's worth the hassle if this kind of job search is the end result, and if you're going there for knowledge, you're better off not getting yourself into debt with a 4% interest rate.
Who is recommending university for knowledge (at least in STEM?) If knowledge is all you want you’re far better off going to Wikipedia, libgen, sci hub or even buying the books. Heck if you really need lectures for the classes (or from researchers even!) you can legally watch them for free on YouTube!
University helps shape you socially and drag you through some cultural stuff that a lot of people would otherwise ignore, that’s about it.
3. Those who are more able in the workplace also have improved chances of completing higher levels of schooling thanks to their ability (or lack of disability).
I believe this one is validated by the fact that even as more and more people attain a university education, incomes have held stagnant.
as Chinese lives in uk, they had been my questions for a long time: why did you guys voted for david cameron, barack obama, (any politician, really) at all? had they ever struggled to pay their bills? do they really feel your pain?
Democracy isn't just David Cameron and Obama, when you go to vote for them, you also cast votes on local precinct leaders, local referendums, and local positions like school board and sheriff. In some places, you might even know those people personally.
It depends how you define low. The US has low voter turnout by total population (~55%), but very high turnout by percentage of voters registered. Many states have artificial obstacles in place to suppress registration and turnout. Other states like Oregon and Washington have implemented mail-in ballot voting and automatic registration which makes voting more accessible, and have higher turnout (72%). It's certainly not meaningless.
Turnout in local elections is very low. That doesn't make you meaningless. If you vote in local elections, it makes you more meaningful, because your vote has more influence.
Good question. There are certain professions, and really only a very few, that prepare one well for the task of campaigning for office. Lawyer, military officer, business executive, actor, a few others. All of them are from the professional class, nowadays, with the partial exception of military officer.
Once upon a time, a lot more power was held by local politicians, who were often from the working class. Over time, more and more of that became centralized, and the ability to speak well in public is not something that even most professional class jobs prepare you for. Put a programmer up against a lawyer or a CEO, and the programmer will not do well. We not only have mostly professional class politicians, they are overwhelmingly from only a few of those professions, because there are only a few that prepare you to speak, from a script, to a large group of strangers, staying on message and keeping your message short and clear.
Hahaha, has Xi Jingping felt yours? The guy is a billionaire who literally doesn't live in the same world as anyone he rules over.
Thank god that people vote for people like Cameron and Obama. Both are examples of politics working. Competent, middle-of-road types, not ideological, willing to compromise, intelligent...the aim of politics is to further the aims of the people (both were democratically elected) and do so with competent leadership. They are both examples of processes built up over centuries working (even Trump is, in terms of personal values he is disgusting...but this is a democratic choice of the people, and seeing the checks and balances of the American system jumping into action is very reassuring).
Politics isn't a suffering competition where we all get really angry about the bad things that happened to us, and compete to see who has suffered the most grief. A politics built on jealousy, pain, and suffering is no politics at all (for references, Chinese history is the perfect example of this...Mao achieved something that Hitler never could, he convinced ordinary people to murder their neighbours in cold blood, how? Jealousy, pain, and suffering...works every time).
there is really no need to make your point by attacking Mr. Xi, which I'm not a big fan of. However, according to his resume, he had been in pretty hard condition when he was young. in this sense, there is a chance he 'feels' the pains of people he rules more than his counterparts in the west.
you are absolutely right about "Politics isn't a suffering competition", but I'd argue it's a reasonable(even good) starting point: only when you want no one no more people suffering the same as you, you are motivated to play the game of politics.
on the example of Mao, I have no problem with your opinion. however I'd like to point out you simply couldn't use it as 'fact' to support your argument. it only weakens your position.
What do the 2nd and 3rd question have to do with the 1st?
I don't see a clear connection because:
1. the current U.S. president won without having either of those attributes you imply are worth mentioning
2. Bernie Sanders hits both of your imagined electability points and couldn't even beat Hillary Clinton to gain the Democratic nomination last election.
3. Bill Clinton, probably the epitome of "relatable and struggled," did beat George H. Bush who was the opposite of that. But George H. had already been president for four years!
4. OMG Sarah Palin! It's as if the universe read your question and traveled back in time to deliver the perfect counterexample to your implication. Remember that Republican voters absolutely loved her folksy ways, her seemingly unrehearsed speeches, and her professed rejection of PC culture and Democratic elitism. She was unfortunately so much like the average voter that she lacked the basic competency necessary to run. That was noticed by the voting public and it did help tank McCain's campaign.
So yes-- relatability and personal story are an inescapable part of American politics. Also, major triads probably make up a significant proportion of Mozart's symphonies. But if one implies that's all there is to talk about in either case it doesn't show an understanding of the subject matter.
Bernie Sanders was one of my favorite politician, along with Ron Paul(apart from his monetarily policy). They seems to be 'relatable'.
my questions are really about you, as voters, not campaign strategist. your analytical response reminds me the episode of West Wing, about 'presidential'.
There are a lot of comments that are based on the idea that people vote rationally, but I'll describe what I saw.
The federal government has very little influence on how people live their daily lives. Because many people no longer believe that elections matter, they're more than happy to vote for the most entertaining candidate.
It’s a good question. The last genuine PM we had was John Major, the son of a gardener who studied at night school while working for his father during the day. Before him was Maggie Thatcher, an industrial chemist by trade.
All since then have been career politicians from the political class. Blair went to Fettes, the “Scottish Eton”. Cameron and Boris were classmates at Eton and Oxford. Even Jeremy Corbyn, supposed champion of the Workers never worked a day in his life. He will likely be followed as leader of the Labour Party by Sir Kier or Lady Nugee.
that's my issue. I don't think most of people here no longer need to worry about money, yet the leaders from either sides never worked a day in their lives. how could you vote for them?
Only because you can only vote for the candidates on the ballot paper and the two main parties have already been captured. There are other parties of course, but they are loons or worse.
Ironically Boris has done much more real work in his life than Corbyn, but neither has very much in common with the average voter-taxpayer.
> But the truth might be something closer to this: “It’s only because of race that we have any part of the working class turning out for us at all.”
I’ve thought a lot about this, and wondered if we’ll see a major flip post-Trump (perhaps a few more presidencies past), where the republicans somehow manage to shed their racial baggage and suddenly are the party of the entire working class while the Democrats are left with only the “coastal elites.” Five Thirty Eight ran an article on those lines a while back... can’t find the link, but that was also a good read.
The first time you have a black or latinx Republican presidential nominee. It could have been Colin Powell, at one time, and Herman Cain came somewhat close. I would not be surprised to see it in this decade.
If Republicans lose the racial baggage they are still substantially at odds with a substantial majority of voters on health care [1] and climate change/pollution/environment [2]. I don't see them becoming the party of the entire working class as long as that remains true.
Coastal elites expression it self rejests many working class people living in coasts. Majority of Americans live there, many of them working class. They kind of don't exist in this rhetorics.
As a society, a portion of the workforce has to do the plumbing, make the furniture, serve coffee, and do all the jobs that don't require college. The people doing those jobs shouldn't need to spending four of their most productive years not working and accumulating debt. They should just start four years earlier, or get vocational training for a few months to a year.
Instead of college for all, what's needed is an alternative pathway from high school to (optional) industrial training/ apprenticeships to jobs, skipping college altogether for those who don't want/need it. Employers need to be able to hire non-college-graduates without worrying they're getting the dregs of the college system. They should have fine-grained input into getting exactly the sort of skills they want into their workers, and a large portion of this program (for some of the low-req jobs, the entirety) should involve no-strings-attached industry placements to get those employers comfortable with the people they'll be hiring.
Those jobs tend not to pay as well as jobs that require a career focused college degree (e.g. business, engineering, computer science, and even teaching).
I think getting four years of head-start would make up for it a lot. Plus, not everybody is suited to the career focused college degrees and not everybody should be in them.
I agree with you that everyone shouldn't have to work the sorts of jobs that require a degree. However, as long as college is the most effective way to a better job, I think that people are going to keep preferring to go to college.
Hmm, it's a good point that having a four year head start would help balance things. However, I think in the long run things would probably workout in the favor of the person that went to college. Especially in the higher paying majors such as business, CS, and engineering.
A barista is never going to make as much money as a CS major, but not everybody wants to spend all their time coding, and not everybody will be good enough at it to get paid. Lots of people want to be baristas and are capable of getting paid for making coffee, though, and society still needs baristas.
Sure, but those are generally degrees which are well known for having poor employment prospects (philosophy, art, history, etc.). Doesn't that just change the advice from "go to college" to "go to college in one of the majors with a track record or leading to a good career"?
Yep, some plumbers are making way more...even than grads in "majors with a track record" (whatever that means).
The issue is that most jobs pay too little. College is not a reasonable way to achieve income equality. You can graduate as many people as you like, it doesn't create more jobs (this is how majors get a track record...by controlling the number of people who apply).
For the record, I know many cases of philosophy majors getting good jobs (as computer programmers). Apparently some employers find that people who take Logic classes can be taught to program, and then cost less (at least for a while). But your point stands, that most people have a reasonable idea of which majors give good employment prospects, and if they don't they can nowadays find out online what they are.
But, and here's the kicker, there are a lot of people who lump all college degrees together, either mentally or in their writing on the topic, and then justify going into debt to get a degree based on that. "Go to college" is not that easy to swap out with "go to college in one of the majors with a track record of leading to a good career", not least because there are numerous colleges (Fine Arts, some parts of Liberal Arts, etc.) where if that were the way people thought, that college would shrink to half its current size or less.
Which, maybe is what needs to happen, or maybe we need to find another way for society to fund people who study those topics (my preference), but either way it's not what's happening now, and those closest to the university system are generally the ones most hostile to the idea of looking plainly at the facts about the current situation.
This is primarily because manufacturing has been moved, and there are no manufacturing apprenticeships.
A low-wage manufacturing job can lead to high-wage automation and tooling maintenance and eventually design positions, or shop steward, training or mentoring.
And “learn to code” should be a basic school curriculum topic! It is well, frankly, disgusting that such a universally powerful, useful and accessible skill has been withheld from the vast majority of students, and now made almost into an “epithet” meaning disrespect toward lower-skilled people. I don’t know any job, no matter how menial, that couldn’t be improved by some automation of it’s most repetitive book-keeping tasks.
Funny how being credentialed by a proper institution (using this phrase because it is more precise than just "education") is as important as ever for achieving certain social standing and at the same time there is a constant stream of voices preaching "universities are imploding, college is a waste of money," etc.
Both can be true simultaneously, if you expand the concepts. Nobody will disagree that attending an Ivy provides some prestige and social standing. Of the universities imploding, most are smaller liberal arts colleges that can't withstand changing demographics (less college students). College is indeed a waste of money if you don't complete your degree program: you get none of the benefits in the job market, with all the debt you took on-- the worst of both worlds.
The problem is that a certain social standing is only attainable by a limited number of people. While college may be necessary to get to that social standing, not everyone will be able to get there, even if they go to college.
If your only reason for going to college is to try and attain that certain social standing, and you fall short, then it truly was a waste of money (and, more importantly, time). Colleges do have a struggle to convince those people of their relevance.
A similar phenomena has been seen in incomes. Incomes have held stagnant for decades, even as more and more of the population have become credentialed. Maybe a degree is necessary to reach the top 1%, but those who fall short of that goal are no better off than people were in the past, when they didn't go to college.
Very glad this was written and posted. However, it could have been shorter. If education were indeed the true social value, we could just improve the quality of public education, add an additional year or two to high school, and essentially fold the undergrad syllabus back into the public system. Simply, the purpose of college is to create a culturally separate managerial elite in society.
The basic problem is the legitimacy of the elite it has produced in the eyes of people subject to it. There was always tension, but code changed everything. PhD holding managers today are often functionally illiterate in their domain of responsibility, and that has a huge cultural impact.
There is reliable predictive power in explaining the culture wars of today as the reaction against a managerialist elite using radical cultural change in an attempt to dilute the bargaining power of competent working people, and to insulate itself from a working class from whom they are increasingly undifferentiated.
This is a pet issue of mine, and glad to see it's getting traction, as it's really the defining conflict of today.
I totally agree with the article, but to me the saddest part of all of this is I'm unconvinced that a college education is actually even that useful. (I say that with a four year CS degree). Most majors, to be blunt, are pretty useless in terms of real world skills. The argument is "they teach you how to think". I don't know how you would even measure that, but it doesn't seem that true, especially since colleges are hotbeds of intellectual fads that are easily disproved by reality. The only prerequisite to learning to think is making an effort at it. College used to be a good signal for that, but now its not.
So we essentially created a "virtuous" class of "educated" people that aren't as smart as they think they are, talking down to people that are struggling economically by telling them that they need to spend 100k to "learn to think". It's amazing things have stayed relatively peaceful.
It's funny to me because arguably I am part of this liberal elite, and even I feel a lot of contempt and irritation towards my increasingly smug compatriots. People really need to tone down the "flyover state" and "redneck" rhetoric. I definitely didn't vote for Trump, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't get why people did.
I agree. I say all of this as someone making over six figures working from home in a situation I could have never imagined myself in ten years ago.
I needed my degree; but just to get my foot in the door. I didn't learn much during the process itself other than to recognize the meta fact that I had to do it to get out of my current situation.
This would have been a real problem for me financially if it didn't work out the way it did because I wouldn't have been able to get out from under my(and more so my wife's) student loan debt.
It should be useful and I think it can be, but that was not the experience that I had.
It seems that a lot of people feel their degree was not useful. My studies were definitely far removed from what I now do for a living.
However, I have not met (except on HN) any successful "knowledge workers" without a degree. I'm sure there are many factors contributing to that: smarter people are more likely to pursue degrees in the first place, companies may ignore otherwise good candidates since they lack a degree.
But another possibility is that many of us underestimate the skills we learned in pursuing our degrees. Certainly many people obtain those skills in other ways, but it's impossible to know if I personally would have.
I did not have a degree in the sciences but I did minor in computer science. I think my degrees are very valuable. It could just be response bias: people happy with their educational experience are quietly satisfied, those unhappy are loudly unsatisfied. Would be my guess. Online responses are not a great sample of the real world.
I'm very happy with my degree (a double-major in CS and music). But even though I make my living working as a software developer, I appreciate my music education more.
I feel that I have a lucid understanding of the lack of skills that I learned during my undergraduate program- that is exactly why I am frustrated with my experience.
> However, I have not met (except on HN) any successful "knowledge workers" without a degree.
Aside from hearing the odd person tell a funny story from their college days (which, I might add, does not guarantee that they successfully attained a degree), I don't think I've met anyone (except on HN) in the last decade or so where scholastic background has even come up in conversation.
It was something to talk about when we were young and being fresh out of school was news, sure, but as I get older the conversations have moved on to more pertinent topics like homeownership and children. Nobody really cares to talk about something that happened so long ago that people born back then are now in college themselves.
So, I am rather curious as to how you would ever know? I cannot even begin to see if your assertion holds true within my professional peer group as I have absolutely no idea if any of them have degrees or not.
People around me talk about not just current issues. They talk about own childhood, elementary school teachers, sports club they have been to, what they did with friends, previous jobs.
So college comes up too. Plus if you are hiring it is in cv.
Moreover, the older we are the less interesting new things we have to tall about. We work and then go home to children. And there is often not much else engaging to talk about. So people talk about past.
I'm a university professor in CS. I don't teach people how to problem-solve, and I have never known what other people are talking about when they claim they teach that in their courses. I teach fundamental skills, and then I put my students in front of lots of problems. In an ideal world, they transfer that experience to new problems. My most important role is providing the motivation and structure to go tackle assignments that might be similar to the ones they tackle later on in their careers. I really like Amy Ko's take on the process: https://medium.com/bits-and-behavior/the-transfer-problem-in...
All of that pales to the real process going on: good students were matriculated into my program, and I credential them via a bunch of assessments that I wrote despite never having any classes on formal assessment design. If you gave us a random sample of the population, I doubt we'd be that great at turning them into Computer Scientists.
> My most important role is providing the motivation and structure to go tackle assignments that might be similar to the ones they tackle later on in their careers.
Thank you for distilling the essence of what I feel when I hear people say college education is not necessary. I suspect those individuals are no longer college-aged and have matured. Sure, a 19 year old could self-study online instead of going to college - but what 19 year-old has the discipline and motivation to do so consistently for 3-4 years? Granted - I don't believe that college it should cost six figures, but the structure provided is very helpful.
This type of concern trolling makes me want to ramp up the "redneck" and "flyover state" rhetoric. If the group of people that idolize Steven Crowder and other PC anti-police can't handle the rhetoric they dish out then let Trump destroy there lives. Because that's the cruel irony, the educated and wealthy are not hurt by Trump nearly as much as the poor white trash are.
If you went to University and all you can muster in it's favor is "you learn how to think" argument then you are a fool.
>If the group of people that idolize Steven Crowder and other PC anti-police can't handle the rhetoric they dish out
You realize you're basically just stereotyping half the country, right? These are people with families and friends and communities and jobs. "White trash" is an exceedingly small minority of people who voted for Trump - if they voted at all.
People didn't elect Trump because they're secret closet nazis...but this style of black and white thinking, increasingly common online, was a major contributor.
If you have this kind of disdain for these people why not let them split off and govern themselves in their own country? What good can possibly come from letting two groups that hate each other take turns ruling over one another?
So create two new neighbouring countries with opposing ideologies and wildly inequal economies, each with 15% of the world's military power and 25% of the world's nuclear weapons?
It's not "concern trolling", although Im struggling to come up with a response to your post since I don't really get what point you're even trying to make.
>I'm unconvinced that a college education is actually even that useful.
How is this a question? How many high school grads have you interviewed and thought you could spin them up to the usefulness of a graduate from nothing in a reasonable amount of time/effort?
Education is expensive, sure. We can talk about that... but useful? It seems obviously useful to me.
Not sure if you're missing the point of the poster above.
Poster is more likely asking whether the education gained in college is actually useful vs the doors opened by having that diploma.
If one dropped out of college right before graduation with 99% of the education, likely that person would end up with worse off job prospects compared to the person who completed their program
One of the most important signals sent by finishing a college degree is "I can finish the things I start". That also happens to be one with great transferability into a workplace driven increasingly by independent work.
The diploma is useful in certain fields I'm sure. Although I doubt most CS employers would really hold you to it if you explained you never completed your final quarter but aced the interview.
However, they said college education not college diploma. They're clearly talking about the skills learned.
Sure. A degree isn't a requirement to be good. That's not whats in question here. I'm trying to illustrate the absurd notion that the skills you gain in college are not useful by pointing out the obvious skill gap between a fresh high school and fresh college grad.
What about a fresh college grad vs a high school grad with four more years of problem solving, socialization, and maturity? They comparison you make isn't fair because you aren't giving the high school grad the benefit of added learning they would accumulate in the same time period the college grad was taking courses.
What do you mean, isn't fair? That dev with 4 years experience had to start with zero once. The scenario is exactly what the high school grad will face.
That said, the argument still stands with a candidate with a degree and a similarly aged candidate with no relevant work experience but similar maturity, odds are you'll still be able to pass the Pepsi challenge and see the difference.
Remember, I'm only arguing against the notion that college is useless.
If you're lucky enough to get a mentorship that will teach you everything you need right out of high school, great. Go for it. That's not exactly a common occurrence. College is a high cost, low risk way to get some experience and land a job but its certainly not useless.
My undergrad didn't teach actual courses in C, Ruby on Rails, Scala or in fact any other "style" of programming I've ever used in industry besides Java and Python.
And I went to a top-20 undergrad for CS. That doesn't mean it wasn't useful. It was. I use stuff I learned in my past education a reasonable portion of the time, now, as a researcher.
That doesn't mean that it was a more direct way to "get a job", had I the courage to try that path at the time, than just doing an apprenticeship would have been.
> Education is expensive, sure. We can talk about that... but useful? It seems obviously useful to me.
It all depends what your definition of "Education" is. If you mean a college degree, then I'd agree that in most cases (depending on your major), it's indeed not particularly useful.
It's not a problem solving education, otherwise it would have looked something like TRIZ[1] but with a broader application spectrum. While it certainly gives some fundamental reasoning skills it lacks more sceptical, inquisitive approach. So many subjects are still represented in a dogmatic fashion. Adding aforementioned TRIZ, more skepticism and empiricism, teaching about cognitive[2] and statistical[3] biases would produce a better impact for the whole life.
I'd go further, and say that at this point, college is a self serving regime that needs to be overthrown.
I've no problem with dedicated medical schools and law schools etc, but there's something about the university system that is deeply corrupt and self absorbed.
We should break them up, have the schools be separate schools, and have separate certification centers and competition in certificates (which would plug it all back into the real world).
The fact they set their own exams is a big part of the rot. It's not different to one of us setting our own driving test.
I'm not sure if it's possible. We all have plenty of incentive to keep on pretending that the emperor has clothes. The educated elite run the world. Why would we overthrow ourselves? The degree is the first fence protecting the gated community of the new urban aristocracy.
The degree is the first fence protecting the gated community of the new urban aristocracy
But it isn’t a gate anymore really; in the UK at least basically everyone below a certain age has a degree, since they converted the polys. Having a degree isn’t in any way “elite” now, although of course there are still elite universities.
Apologies. I should have offered the disclaimer than I was talking about the US. The article is describing US politics and I was responding to it. European countries have different systems, different social classes, and different barriers to entry than we do. We also do not have your safety nets. Many here are one missed paycheck away from living on the street.
As the article states, in the US, 70% of people over 25 do not have a 4-year university degree. And contrary to the UK and the rest of Europe, American University is staggeringly expensive. And despite what you might read on HN, without a 4 year degree, nearly all professional jobs would be off limits. And if you did manage to sneak past the first gate, as some talented coders on HN have done, you can look forward to a lifetime inferiority complex, knowing that your co-workers have a safety and desirability you lack.
In the US, the 4-year degree really is a significantly high barrier to entry to the professional class. You also need to be living in one of a dozen elite cities, be the right race, have the right politics, the right friends and family, and the right set of previous employers. Only then have you gained that special status that lets you own a home you're not afraid to lose, go to a doctor you can afford, and enjoy a job that affords you comfort, stability, respect, and some measure of control over your destiny.
The overall point of this article is that in the US economy, there's not enough spots at the top for everyone. And everyone not at the top will live economically precarious lives. One political party likes to pretend that there is endless opertunity for all with promises of more university, and the other party has realized the lie and is decending into anti-intellectual madness, rejecting acedemia, experts and science.
Your country has some uncertain times ahead and there will be plenty of call to more closely emulate the free-market American system now that you've distanced yourselves from the more regulated and socialist European system. Do be careful.
I do say the same thing frequently, but I also fear I am giving into another sort of smugness: someone who has had a special leg up and is denying it. Trying to look like I have less from the degrees than I actually do is maybe also not so great, could possibly be even worse (disincentives people who could really benefit from an appropriate degree).
While CS related knowledge comes up almost never in day to day work and conversation, it is a common background I share with most people at work. We all have the same frame of reference, and can pick up what each other are talking about more easily that way. And perhaps the most useful aspects of our degree have become so second nature to our thinking we do not notice them anymore.
Also, the experience during the degree of working with rarified problems does train my mind to find the underlying concept behind it all, instead of hacking barely working pieces of code together. Or at least helps me feel more shame when I do the latter, and give me some instinct to push for something better.
I think you’re missing the forest for the trees. Having grown up in a small town, I can tell you the difference between my classmates who went to college and those who didn’t is night and day. I’m not talking “intelligence” I’m talking world view. The folks who never left home just don’t seem to care what’s happening outside of their bubble. Massacre in Uganda? Meh, I’ve got bowling tonight. Assassination in Iran? We need to get the kids to basketball. Global warming? I still have snow to take the sled out.
I’m not sure you can quantify that the way you want to. People voted for trump because he said what they wanted to hear and they didn’t care About the details because they’ve never had to apply critical thinking at that level. That’s not a good thing...
A university education never pretended to prepare you for real life. Its not some sort of advanced vocational training. There you are trained to think, produce new knowledge.
So while you may expect to struggle economically after a university degree, it behooves the rest of us to listen to what they have to say, because those of us who did get vocational training, or no training at all, in all likelihood never had time or reason to stretch the ratio as far as they. I would be very disappointed if they did not develop a sense of smugness, it would mean they didn't see any problems with how society at large currently thinks or operates.
A university graduate without an opinion would be time and money wasted.
> I'm unconvinced that a college education is actually even that useful.
I can't talk for every majors but at least for STEM, you need to study hard for years to acquire solid foundations.
I don't see how you can gather all the required knowledge by yourself.
I don't know in the US, but during the 5 years it took me to graduate, I usually had about 30-40 hours of classes a week, plus a lot of personal work (especially in maths), and that for 5 years.
If you want to do that by yourself, you need to:
- decide what you need to learn, and find what are the best resources to learn it
- keep motivated for many years, without feedback that you're on the right track
- convince your future employer that you have skills
We should keep learning all life long, but I don't think anything can replace a formal education. It's one thing to learn things on the side when you need them. But it's much harder to tackle heavy foundational topics without supervision.
They have these devices called books, and work experience. I think the main benefit is the discipline of others having expectations, especially when young.
I went to school in the US and my experience is identical to yours. During the school year I'd spend much more than 40 hours a week on schoolwork, I recall taking a software engineering course where my team and I would meet on both Saturday and Sunday for 10ish hours each day for a couple months to get our project done.
I also couldn't have done that myself because I was only able to do it with access to student loans, as I had to (at the minimum) eat and have somewhere warm to sleep, which I certainly had no money for, so I had to take out loans for food and rent.
Coming from a country where tertiary education is more accessible and cheaper, there is decent free healthcare and more social welfare, all of which give more people the option of higher education, what ends up happening is people go to University too much. Universities have undergone a huge explosion in headcount and footprint. As publicly funded institutions, they have funded this expansion with a kind of Ponzi scheme where more and more full fee paying international students are required to sustain the machine. At the same time there has been a lot of training institutes and vocational colleges popping up, some with dubious quality and intent. The stimulus for this seems to be that young people can't get enough quality work, and so they try and educate themselves. They can do this partly because of the largesse of their boomer parents. This effect is happening at all levels, including fields where lots of education is already required, like medicine, law and engineering.
So I would agree that pumping education is not a panacea. It is starting to feel almost exploitative around here (Australia). Weddings, healthcare and education are surefire ways to extract money from people even when the economy is in a slump. At least you get cake at a wedding.
Now those of us with postgraduate degrees and who are in the elite of the Democratic Party live in our own Versailles, and we don’t know any working-class people either—except perhaps the name of a barista at Starbucks or the woman who comes by at night to clean the office.
I think this is one thing churches did really well; people from all social spheres coming together to serve their God. It didn't matter what job or status you had. Everybody was equal.
I'm sure the same could be achieved today without the religious aspect as well. There's plenty of volunteering opportunities, for example. Being part of a amateur sports team can bring people from all classes together.
Right, except that we've rebuilt a world where working-class people don't have time for leisure activities like amateur athletics and volunteerism due to the second full-time job they need to pay the rent.
A long time ago churches did work that way. But during the last ~2 centuries, people of different classes would go into different churches nearer the place they live.
Some churches are better than that at others, and I suspect this has always been the case (unless you go all the way back to churches in Paul's day or something like that).
My church, which is home to a number of college professors, lawyers, and other overly-educated people, is soon to be celebrating a member receiving her high school diploma; she returned to school to finish it (she's in her mid-20s and has two kids) and is just taking initial steps to enter the workforce and try to get away from depending on public assistance.
TBH I'm indifferent to the rural working classes plight. I'm LGBT and they've proven time and time again that they aren't my friends (both growing up in flyover country and later after I escaped that wasteland by how they vote and how they treat my brothers and sisters who didn't escape).
If they want to vote against our shared interests and suffer the consequences, so be it. Me and mine will keep building without them and I won't spare a moments thought for their self inflicted suffering (except to be glad it isn't me).
I completely understand your position, and sympathize with it, but it seems a bit shortsighted given that you have to live with these people, and things won't improve for your "brothers and sisters who didn't escape" if things don't get better for them. They'll happily drag you and yours down with them. This is all to say that we're all in this together, and while your indifference towards their plight may be justified, it is not productive.
Give hate and antipathy no quarter. Where there is pain, it must our pain, or there will inevitably be revolution and chaos. Love without discrimination, even with those you disagree with, because they cannot be moved if we act like impetuous children by refusing to talk to them. Prejudice also cannot be convenient, or we likely possess internal inconsistencies we must face if we are to be honest and have integrity.
Their "communities" are dieing, their businesses are failing, and their smart kid leave. The only question is whether those fools death throes doom the rest of us.
Hilariously, on the fringes they're being supplanted by refugees from metro areas that got priced out. Those people are bringing sanity to the wasteland with them like pilgrims in an unholy land.
From my perspective, I can do little to nothing to influence how all this plays out besides voting, living my life as I see fit, and directing my time and attention toward those I deem worthy. And that's exactly what I'm going to do.
"You could see that they were ready to be friends with anyone who was friendly and didn't give a fig for anyone who wasn't." C.S. Lewis
Where there is pain, it must our pain and your pain too. Identity politics, hating and us-vs.-them doesn't get us anywhere but divided-and-conquered into the greedy hands of the amoral elites. Hate the ideology but not the person, or we'll convince no one and divided we fall. Do you really want to go back to segregation, lynchings or pushing LGBT+ people off buildings so long as it doesn't affect you?
Thanks for screwing over fellow minority groups by opposing solidaristic politics. Those of us whose identity group only makes up 2% of the population don't have the luxury of excluding anyone from coalitions -- we've never been big enough.
When did I say anything against solidarity with other minority groups? That's where all my time and attention goes, not rotting rural white cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers.
I’m assuming by flyover country you mean pretty much any part of the US that isn’t a major metro? Most of California is red outside of LA and the Bay Area.
The UK is a good example of this...the Labour Party went from solidly working class with good connections to voters to a party of the wealthy, metro elite with no connection to voters.
You can point to individual factors of circumstance (an ill-conceived 2015 leadership election) or big structural issues (rising inequality). But the end result is the same: no empathy, no interest. It is funny the article talks about race...did everyone just suddenly become a racist overnight? Or did they just decide they don't like being talked down to? Which is more likely (bearing in mind that the people talking down do like to talk about race a hell of a lot).
The left will get nowhere by trying to "learn to talk" to these awful poor people (sarcasm). They don't care. Not interested. Give the working class their voice back (Blair and Clinton did just fine). Go back to suburbia, find another job in which you are way overpaid for incompetence, and stop talking. Btw, Trump has done this...he is the worst candidate, the worst president...and still the Dems can't muster anything up...how is this incompetence even possible?
Just generally, as someone who falls firmly into the category of metro elite...I have never understood why other rich people feel the need to always tell poor people what they want. Politics is to help those people but it has gone from helping them to telling them what they should think, how they should live, etc. Is it any wonder that doesn't win votes?
I grew up in the author's city in the midst of long term economic abandonment and decline. It was terrifying, to be honest. I think the spread of this across the industrialized Midwest elected Trump. I have had many arguments with fellow liberals about the globalized economy. In a nutshell, I don't believe in it, if the result is an alienated wasteland where the old working class economy used to be. We, the elite (I include myself as I'm a well off and successful engineer), have destroyed the social contract by supporting and implementing outsourcing and automation. The result may well be the destruction of our democracy. Cheap consumer goods from China are not worth this price. The article is only wrong in downplaying the potential of bringing industrial jobs back to this country. That is essential, as a part of the overall change in priorities.
> Cheap consumer goods from China are not worth this price.
The only answer is to stop buying cheap consumer goods from China (or anywhere, for that matter). Disposal-oriented consumerism is ripping our society (and the world) to shreds.
Exactly, this seemed completely missing from the hand-wringing about how what's wrong with the Democratic party is that it is just too elitist for the working classes now. There is in fact a lot of truth to that, but it is the economic policy, or lack thereof, of both parties has allowed capital, controlled by very few, to flow unimpeded overseas. If you want to retain a middle-class economic base, you have to take measures to incentivize capital to remain in the country.
My own employer is aggressively moving to shift all of it's technical knowledge work to India; companies like Accenture and IBM now employ more people there than in the US. There will soon be as little Knowledge Economy work in the US as there is old Industrial Economy work. Where will all of these college (or Denmark-style vocationally trained) end up working? Wal-Mart. Sell the people out twice and you will end up with some kind of revolt. You're not going to convince anybody at that point that it's the grad school gap that's killing America and that we should have a Ph.D. For All program to solve it.
> My own employer is aggressively moving to shift all of it's technical knowledge work to India; companies like Accenture and IBM now employ more people there than in the US.
Turns out "Beware the behaviors you incentivize" doesn't only apply to scrappy startups, but scales up to whole nations. If profit is the sole metric you judge companies/CEOs/boards by, don't be surprised by the lengths they will go to maximize it.
> Cheap consumer goods from China are not worth this price.
How about the multitude of America products/software/services that are exported around the globe? Globalization is not a one-way street: a good chunk of the American economic growth is due to exports ("How's your 401k doing?")
> The result may well be the destruction of our democracy.
Who could have predicted unfettered/crony capitalism could work against democracy; after all, profits, political power and human dignity are completely unrelated to each other, right?
The social trend discussed in the article has taken over the world. Not just the USA. I realized this a bit late with the "gillet jaune" uprisings in France. The working class from outside the cities were upset with the increasingly disconnected ruling class and "bobos". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobo_(socio-economic_group) (this wikipédia page really should be much longer)
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 275 ms ] threadIts main idea is "the loss of social standing, social claims, the social assets that working people used to have, because, in our time, education is so much more decisive".
He details joining a friend of his with a high school education to lunch. He soon recognizes that they jumped a guardrail of sorts in how she was baffled by this fancy world created by elites caught in the microcosm of a gourmet Italian sandwich shop. He reads into the encounter pretty deeply, but backs up a bunch of other elite practices that make elite culture out of reach. It's a pretty interesting read.
Pretty shocking to read this Educated Fools piece where the author basically admits to what are more commonly called unintended consequences.
The authors bit about Trump embracing the poorly educated is interesting. It jibes with something I read once but can't find the source at the moment. It had something to do with his frequent dealings with construction workers and going out to speak and meet the people crafting his buildings. He as a developer supposedly developed a rapport and respect from those working class folks. Also being a landlord in his early days dealing with poor folk. I think I heard about that in this Japanese documentary bit https://youtu.be/rwNTjlEpJD0?t=443. Kind of interesting to see a Japanese perspective on the guy and how they craft stories. His crazy dealings with professional wrestling too and all that gaudy raucousness also intersects with that other class of people. Seems like its not a recent foray for him, he's been engaging with folks in other classes for sometime by the looks of it. That's probably something that went unnoticed for a long time till folks started to scrutinize what the heck happened.
I've never seen an article that is simultaneously semi-self-aware yet contains such a high level of arrogance and condescension. That on its own makes it an interesting piece.
The point made about Trump expressing a liking for poorly educated folk is also noteworthy. Even if the more sensible in the political class come to acknowledge the paradox we face, the matter of articulating and expressing it appropriately arises. Currently, as the author notes, the "college for all" approach doesn't appear to be resonating electorally (that said, there are a number of confounding factors one could put forth) but rather is serving as a reminder to the once robust (perhaps this is romantic nostalgia) working- and lower-middle-classes of their lowered social standing and relational dignity.
Update: I have found a presentation of the relativistic perspective on poverty by Sen (1983). Apologies for the earlier bit, that was laziness on my part. Worth a read.
https://are.berkeley.edu/courses/ARE251/fall2008/Papers/sen8...
Poverty is the kind of thing you can fix within the current system, or at least make attempts to alleviate. Exploitation and domination are not, which is why you will never hear an elected official talk about it as a systematic issue inherent to the current system - if they knew about the literature on the topic, they'd know they're powerless to do anything about it.
On the other hand, Trump supporters are very angry, but the problem is that Trump's program won't do anything at all to fix the problems that are making them unhappy.
There's no way around the fact that more education (doesn't necessarily mean college) and greater labor force mobility (providing people with the ability to move where the jobs are) has to be a significant part of the solution. Stating the facts is not condescension, but I guess it can and does cause politicians to lose elections.
I for long tried to write something along those lines, but I think the author did summarise my thoughts better than I could've done myself.
The class conflict — something that western literati class keep denying acknowledgement, is really the driver of much of social progress. And this holds more even more true in the West than in the East.
The class warfare is there, it exists, and it is what has been responsible for the prime majority of political developments in the West for the last 30 years.
How so?
If you're discriminated or treated unfairly by a group of people, the natural reaction would be to separate yourself from that group of people, not fight it. But if for some reason you really want to join that group - perhaps because they're of higher socioeconomical class - then you have a motivation to fight and reform things.
They don't want to improve anything for anyone in a strategic sense. They want textbook authoritarianism with a daddy figure lying that he loves them, and telling them who to hate so they can feel better.
It's an utter infantilisation, and the right are happy to sponsor it and farm it for their convenience. But attacking the left for pointing out that it's not really a solution seems to be part of the rhetorical package it's wrapped in.
The right are always happy to demonise the left for the working classes, because duh - of course they are.
The problem on the left - and I wouldn't consider most of the US Democratic Party as the left, incidentally - isn't so much "be like us" as a failure to understand just how murderous, dishonest, and literally criminal the elites on the other side are, and how limitlessly violent, self-serving and treacherous they can be in pursuit of their aims.
This wasn't a problem for the old turn-of-the-19th-century left, which had direct experience of being beaten up and shot at. But by the time you've been through college and acquired a fairly comfortable job it's hard to remember what your comfort is built on.
These facets of political history are conveniently erased from official nation-building stories of "progress" in the UK and the US, and people have to make a real effort to find out about them - which hardly anyone does now.
Either you've completely failed to pay attention to modern history or are deliberately ignoring a huge part of it but the left is just as guilty of the right of that very thing. They just (and even this only lightly) couch their authoritarianism and drive to spread hatred in different terms. In some countries (such as where I live), the left is just as nationalistic as any rightist.
To also claim that the elites with murderous, dishonest and literally criminal intentions are mostly unique to the self described right of politics is absurd.
Your statement comes from your philosophical stance. As it happens I share your view about my own motivations. Despite that I recognize that most people do not.
Also: your position sounds American (are you?). The idea of “class” and most of the literature around it is European, where class is not something that people can typically change. Even in the US there is little class mobility.
Anyway, I think class mobility is actually a real thing over here. For one, a good chunk of Europe was under Soviet rule until ~1990, and in the early days of proper market economy, a lot of enterprising individuals moved up a few rungs in the ladder. Secondly, it's hard to not see our industry as a perfect way for easy upward mobility. Myself, I jumped up a level just by virtue of preferring computers to sports as a kid.
Many European countries have far more class mobility, especially ones with strong social welfare systems like the Scandinavian ones
https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobi...
So any class struggles, much as I dislike the term, are very effectively silenced by the media because none of the talking heads have an interest in putting it up in lights.
It adds an interesting perspective to Trump and the incoming Twitter/Facebook/Youtube revolution that seems to be hitting the political sphere. It is harder to drown out lower class opinions because the broadcasting channels have become so accessible.
Perceived problem, attempted solutions, potential new solution.
I have no idea what the hell the article is going on about - it reads like a rant by a typical politically active idiot.
For the same reason I wouldn’t trust a doctor without a degree proving they did due diligence for years. I know this feels different because “anybody can do politics” but without a large worldview the measures taken will be inevitably short sighted.
Now, it works the other way too. As the article states, losing touch with the base leads to problems.
Democracy isn’t so much the best form of government as the best steering wheel to keep the government aligned with the interests of the people. The best actual form of government is technocracy, but technocracy with no democratic accountability is just going to competently achieve things that the people may not care about or may actively dislike.
Stating that there is some kind of qualification suggests, ironically, that you don't understand what politics is. The point is that there is tension, uncertainty (this is a bit like modern views on capitalism...can we have the money but no failure, pls...lul).
In a fantasy world where we actually had sciences for all the things governments are asked to do, sure.
But in the actual world we live in, no way. You can't have experts running government if there are no actual experts.
Everyone loves experts in an advisory role, but they want someone who shares their values in charge
They can have your children taken away.
They can have your vehicle license revoked: car or aircraft.
I still want one that is well educated and competent.
+1 for Christophe Guilluy's book, it's really eye-opening, even more so considering that he wrote/published it even before the "gilets jaunes" movement started.
Not sure there's a solution for this "periphery" problem, but I see it in my parts of the world (Eastern-European country and EU member), it certainly is present in France and I suppose in other Western European countries, and according to the article is also a real problem in the US.
Still, I'm skeptical of the whole idea, because it just seems too convenient for Republicans to drive a wedge between the Democratic party and the working class based on a perceived social division rather than real policy: We took away your unions and safety net, but by golly, we'll protect your "dignity."
> But according the Telemundo poll, nearly two-thirds of Latinos said they wouldn't vote for a candidate who describes himself as a “socialist.” Sanders identifies as a democratic socialist.
https://www.npr.org/2019/12/20/790319860/polls-show-sanders-...
Abstract preference questions often don't predict preference for specific candidates, because they don't capture subtleties in the area of preference being polled or how it is weighted against other concerns.
Language policing is still big in dem circles.
And when you zoom in on specific linguistic struggles, you often find that it's less a matter of one side being the police and the other being the anarchists, or cerebral philosophers accurately reckoning with the hazard of losing some ideas in a wide-ranging territory of thoughtful discourse, and more two sides with competing values they understand are promoted or eroded with certain language. For example, there's no "freedom" side in the fight over "Merry Christmas" vs "Happy Holidays" (however much inflated), just two forms of "policing" with different implicit values.
Sometimes, of course, you do find topics where one side of a struggle is much more about restraint and the other side is struggling against restraint itself. See, for example, people who are upset that they can't tell racist jokes anymore without someone getting offended.
> Whites are ever so slightly less likely than average to believe that political correctness is a problem in the country: 79 percent of them share this sentiment. Instead, it is Asians (82 percent), Hispanics (87 percent), and American Indians (88 percent) who are most likely to oppose political correctness
> Progressive activists are the only group that strongly backs political correctness: Only 30 percent see it as a problem.
> So what does this group look like? Compared with the rest of the (nationally representative) polling sample, progressive activists are much more likely to be rich, highly educated—and white. They are nearly twice as likely as the average to make more than $100,000 a year. They are nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree. And while 12 percent of the overall sample in the study is African American, only 3 percent of progressive activists are. With the exception of the small tribe of devoted conservatives, progressive activists are the most racially homogeneous group in the country.
(I should caveat this by saying I’m in the apparently 18% of Asians who doesn’t think political correctness is a problem. But there is a huge class/education divide.)
As a middle class white, I ask "such as?"
Or pretending that the incredible success of East and South Asians in the US doesn’t basically completely torpedo the notion that racism is a significant barrier to the success of poorly performing ethnic groups.
Latinx, drag queens as family friendly content, overreach on dilution and removal of gendering (no more daddy/daughter events), politicizing sports, politicizing popcorn movies, censorship of standup comedians, social media bans, student loan forgiveness pitches. Anything that looks like a bailout to the rich and upper middle class, including for homeowners.
FWIW, I think there’s a good chance the republicans will start figuring out to flip Latino and Asian voters by appealing to social conservatism.
Organized labor may not have been targeted explicitly like by Republicans, but Democrats haven't really been a friend to them either [1]. Both parties have been on board with the neoliberal agenda for 40 years.
[1] http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/01/democrats-paid-a-huge...
Unions in other countries have historically been a voice of the people, and don’t have a lasting allegiance with any political party or movement. I have no idea why American unions collapsed; perhaps, it was justified in the moment, but the present absence of a strong voice for organized, skilled labor is tragic.
While not as extreme, the result is similar as well over here: knowledge workers make a lot of money, blue collar workers cannot afford to live in the large cities. The elite consists primarily of lawyers, political scientists and teachers, and the mocking of the lower class (with a hint of paternalist "we cannot let them be free, they don't know what to do with freedom") is palpable.
Not true in the UK - the unions have a strong relationship with the Labour party, in terms of providing funding and endorsement of leadership candidates. Indeed, in its original form [0] the Labour party was created as the political wing of the unions. Many unions automatically took a cut of their members' subscriptions as labour party funding.
Battles between the unions and the Conservative party have been key a feature of UK politics, e.g. the Miners' strike in the 1980s [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_miners%27_strike_(1984–85)
I learnt a lot about that unknown history from Alex Carey's classic Taking the Risk Out of Democracy (1987). It was no accident but a huge and deliberate campaign. The story is pretty horrifying.
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/search.php?req=Alex+Carey&column=autho...
A small part of the story, from p31:
"The American Advertising Council represents large corporations and large advertising agencies. In April 1947 the council announced a $100 million advertising program which, over the next twelve months, would use all media 'to "sell" the American economic system' to the American people. The program was officially described as a 'major project of educating the American people about the economic facts of life'.
Daniel Bell, then an editor of Fortune, provides a perspective on both the scale and the anti-union and anti-New Deal purposes of these campaigns:
"It has been industry's prime concern, in the post war years, to change the climate of opinion ushered in by...the depression. This 'free enterprise' campaign has two essential aims: to re-win the loyalty of the worker which now goes to the union and to halt creeping socialism [i.e. the New Deal] ... In short the campaign has had the definite aim of seeking to shift the Democratic majority of the last 20 years into the Republican camp ..."
Bell sketches some of the resources, created to sell goods but now used in an overwhelming campaign to sell ideas. 'The apparatus itself is prodigious: 1,600 business periodicals, 577 commercial and financial digests, 2,500 advertising agencies, 500 public relations counsellors, 4,000 corporate public relations departments and more than 6,500 "house organs" with a combined circulation of more than 70 million. Of the opinion-shaping product Bell observes: "The output is staggering. The Advertising Council alone, in 1950, inspired 7 million lines of newspaper advertising stressing free enterprise, 400,000 car cards, 2,500,000,000 radio impressions ... By all odds it adds up to the most intensive "sales" campaign in the history of industry'
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Commission_on_Fiscal_...
[2] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/31/dnc-superdelegates-...
[3] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/31/dnc-shifts-debate-r...
Unfortunately one of the side effects of Obamacare is that rates have skyrocketed to the point that many people can't afford it.
There are subsidies, but the premiums / deductibles are still high enough to be basically useless for many people. Add to it that we had a mandate that you needed to have insurance or you'd be fined.
There are a lot of good things that came from Obamacare, namely the removal of pre-existing conditions and the ability to keep your kids on your health insurance after they've left the house.
But there are real issues with the program, and what many people hear when they raise them is effectively "You're just holding it wrong" to steal that old iPhone marketing wank.
I honestly don't know anyone who is against improving healthcare in the US. The main thing people are afraid of is that a well-intended change will make things worse for them.
(This is a rant at this point that I'm not even sure is responding to anything you said)
Is that really a causal relationship? What I see in the data is annual insurance premiums rising at 3-4X the CPI inflation rate starting in the 1990s and continuing to the present. The ACA was an attempt to address the fallout from this. It may not have been entirely successful in doing that, but it certainly wasn't the cause of the problem.
* Check the McKinsey study and the Commonwealth Fund study for data. In the 3 years prior to the ACA, nationwide premiums averaged a 10% annual increase, in the 3 years after the implementation of the ACA they averaged a 6% annual increase.
I will admit I didn't look at the study. Does this mean the 3 years prior to the law passing or the 3 years prior to the law going into effect?
I would expect insurance companies to start adjusting rates in anticipation of the new law, even if it hasn't taken effect yet.
In a democracy, every interest or issue is either represented by a constituency that will vote reliably in support of it, or it's not and it will suffer. Labor's suffered for the last half century for two reasons:
1) The Democratic buy-in on civil rights and reproductive freedom, and subsequent defection by those hostile to it -- these cut across the lines drawn around working class constituencies and eroded that constituency's reliability.
2) Americans have examined and bought into neoliberal-supporting ideas (or auxiliary ideas that keep progressive economics from gaining mindshare). Discourse architects have been effective enough at shaping political and policy conversations that a good number of politically active citizens and officeholders understand issues the way those advancing neoliberal policies would like.
When you understand this dynamic, you don't see the movement as Mr-Burns-thumb-twiddling by DLC/DNC sellouts, you see the Democratic party struggling for a constituency that will let it win elections along the odd way that key lines are drawn in the US system and finding that it had to move a neoliberal direction.
And you get a sense of the scope of the work that'd be necessary for a working-class friendly politics to take root again, which is gonna be much harder than just electing President Sanders or Warren (which is not an easy sell in itself).
See Mont Pelerin Society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society
... and Friedrich Hayek, Frank Knight, Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, George Stigler, and Milton Friedman.
Implemented by Reagan and Thatcher.
Biases:
• The Market is efficient => give it free-reign
• The State is incompetent => remove it
• Trade is win-win => open borders
• Society => There is no such thing (see Thatcher)
• Finance is infallible => 2008?
For the Democrats, it's more like less than 28; the neoloberal faction didn't become dominant over the economically progressive, faction until during Bill Clinton's Presidency; Clinton himself obviously was a member of the neoliberal faction, but most of the Democratic Party in Congress opposed NAFTA; it wasn't until sometime after the midterm defeat in 1994 that the neoliberals faction definitely dominated the Party.
And the neoliberal faction in the Democratic Party is fighting desperately against being swept from power in the party right now, to the extent of prioritizing that intraparty fight over defeating the other major party.
You might be interested in reading “The Meritocracy Trap” which discusses how elitism, particularly in regards to education and hyper-competitive productivity, drives inequality. The idea is that this is ultimately worse for both the non-elites who can no longer compete and the elite who must continue to stretch themselves ever thinner to remain competitive.
-- Winston Churchill
Meritocracy is a dangerous ideal for humanity to continue to hold so dearly. IQ is partially genetic, and with a low ceiling — sooner than we’re ready to accept, nobody’s brain will hold a candle to AI. Equating our economic value with moral worth will only lead to further cultural division, despair, and anarcho-primitivism. Instead, let’s try to build a culture, society, and government that takes the intrinsic value of human life as an axiom, before it’s too late.
Nobody can outrun a car, either, but cars haven’t made humans obsolete. Instead, we use them as tools to accomplish our goals: just as we will with AI.
I'm not of the opinion that AI will just decide to destroy us all or anything particularly extreme. Still, I find it very hard to believe that humans could actually 'control' entities that are smarter than we are. Anyone making high-confidence predictions about how that would play is worthy of some skepticism, I believe.
I’ll give the wheel to them, like how I trust my doctor to know what’s best for my body. They might not be the best for me but could be better for the Earth Civilization.
AI is cognitive automation. Not only will blue collar jobs be replaced, but so to will white collar jobs as well. We’re approaching the point where capital alone (without labor) will be able to generate wealth in more general cases. When that happens, employing people will be a hobby. When that happens, humans will need other ways to make income than with their labor.
How much time was spent worrying about what would happen when energy was too cheap too meter? It didn't happen.
It's easy to come up with problems to worry about that don't actually exist.
In material terms, people making high salaries at FAANG companies are still closer to their low-paid and contract working peers. But it’s important for them to think that they’re closer in position to the CEOs and Capital owners so that they’ll continue to administer the ownership class’ empires and bureaucracies. Thus the fiction of meritocracy.
Those at the top seem to embrace a much more base instrumentalism of “might (by proxy of wealth) makes right.”
Why do you think that the members of the professional class would personally benefit from more solidarity with the working class? Many high-earning professionals own millions of dollars worth of "capital" (shares, rental properties) and would not benefit from any kind of revolution that would tank the value of these assets. They also already possess many of the benefits that the working class are agitating for (good benefits, high pay), and don't need an overhaul of the economic structure to obtain those.
I'm not saying solidarity is bad, I'm just saying your derisive view of high-income professionals as dumdums brainwashed by the rich into acting against their own interests when they decline to participate in the revolution is not an accurate reflection of their actual incentives.
Uh... I think that's the wrong argument. The people making "high salaries" (let's say... >= $100k/year, base salary) at FAANG companies really are, de facto, petty bourgeois. They don't just get "stock options" that never materialize. They get annual bonuses in the tens of thousands of dollars, plus stock options or RSUs that vest to create further paper wealth. In the Bay Area with its stupidly stratospheric housing prices, maybe we can talk about these people being "middle class" in the same way my parents are (ie: as white-collar employees making middling salaries). Maybe.
But really, just about anywhere outside the Bay Area, most of those high salary FAANG employees are building capital far faster than they lose money to living expenses, and provided they're willing to live cheaply and far away, a secure early retirement in middle-age is a strong possibility. Given some moderate but successful investments, they could even get truly rich.
Working class is when you convert labor into money into commodities. Owning class is when you convert money into commodities into money.
But what's correct to point out is that the vast majority of programmers, software engineers, and IT staff aren't high-salary FAANG workers. They take home a median income, in fact, of about ~$65k/year.
How can you possibly allocate resources efficiently if you don't consider whether those you are allocating to are competent? What do you propose? Derisk with massive government bureaucracy?
Ultimately, scarce resources, which take their own industries to produce, need to be allocated so the many goods and services we need and want can be designed, built, and/or executed/delivered. If you do not rely on merit to decide who does what, everything will absolutely collapse.
By “meritocracy” I mean the idea that it is morally just for people to be rewarded in money or social status proportional to their economic usefulness — an idea most people implicitly hold to some degree and which some libertarians trumpet as a core tenet. I think the implied inverse to this belief — in the extreme, that lack of economic usefulness deserves poverty — is morally repugnant and dangerous.
1. Human capital. People learn stuff at university which makes them more valuable workers.
2. Credentialism. Universities select (or pass) people who were already going to be valuable.
Now let's look at what we might mean by "valuable":
1. You can fool hiring managers into thinking you're competent - good resume writing skills, good interview skills, an impressive certificate.
2. You can fool your manger's manager into thinking you're competent. All the above, plus you're good at churning out superficially credible explanations and justifications. Some critics of university might argue that they've optimised towards teaching students how to fake competence - 4 years of general education isn't enough to produce a truly competent thinker in a field (not reliably for a large fraction of society) but it is enough to teach them to write a clean-looking essay with proper citations, and to churn out paragraphs with "topic sentence, evidence, analysis, transition" (but not enough time that this will get too stale - you'll still be able to grade the students from A-E).
3. You'll actually be good for your company / society because of your ability to analyze things, domain skills, intelligence, conscientiousness, etc.
We could also talk about general vs domain specific skills, but they're often fairly well correlated. Competence in a domain requires thinking skills, and thinking skills are best built up in some real domain where skills can actually be tested (not just abstract "critical thinking" courses).
Graduated with 70%+ with the title "Master of Engineering"? Not good enough, do an IQ test to get the job. Write a compiler for a self-designed embedded language for your final project? Not good enough, you forgot how to concatenate lists in MATLAB. Oh, and you don't get to find out your prospective salary until you have an offer; until then, you'll be happy to know it's "competitive", whatever that means.
At this point, I'm not sure if I'd recommend anyone go to university unless they want to stay in academia or something. I'm not convinced it's worth the hassle if this kind of job search is the end result, and if you're going there for knowledge, you're better off not getting yourself into debt with a 4% interest rate.
University helps shape you socially and drag you through some cultural stuff that a lot of people would otherwise ignore, that’s about it.
3. Those who are more able in the workplace also have improved chances of completing higher levels of schooling thanks to their ability (or lack of disability).
I believe this one is validated by the fact that even as more and more people attain a university education, incomes have held stagnant.
my questions were for US voters as well.
Once upon a time, a lot more power was held by local politicians, who were often from the working class. Over time, more and more of that became centralized, and the ability to speak well in public is not something that even most professional class jobs prepare you for. Put a programmer up against a lawyer or a CEO, and the programmer will not do well. We not only have mostly professional class politicians, they are overwhelmingly from only a few of those professions, because there are only a few that prepare you to speak, from a script, to a large group of strangers, staying on message and keeping your message short and clear.
Thank god that people vote for people like Cameron and Obama. Both are examples of politics working. Competent, middle-of-road types, not ideological, willing to compromise, intelligent...the aim of politics is to further the aims of the people (both were democratically elected) and do so with competent leadership. They are both examples of processes built up over centuries working (even Trump is, in terms of personal values he is disgusting...but this is a democratic choice of the people, and seeing the checks and balances of the American system jumping into action is very reassuring).
Politics isn't a suffering competition where we all get really angry about the bad things that happened to us, and compete to see who has suffered the most grief. A politics built on jealousy, pain, and suffering is no politics at all (for references, Chinese history is the perfect example of this...Mao achieved something that Hitler never could, he convinced ordinary people to murder their neighbours in cold blood, how? Jealousy, pain, and suffering...works every time).
you are absolutely right about "Politics isn't a suffering competition", but I'd argue it's a reasonable(even good) starting point: only when you want no one no more people suffering the same as you, you are motivated to play the game of politics.
on the example of Mao, I have no problem with your opinion. however I'd like to point out you simply couldn't use it as 'fact' to support your argument. it only weakens your position.
I don't see a clear connection because:
1. the current U.S. president won without having either of those attributes you imply are worth mentioning
2. Bernie Sanders hits both of your imagined electability points and couldn't even beat Hillary Clinton to gain the Democratic nomination last election.
3. Bill Clinton, probably the epitome of "relatable and struggled," did beat George H. Bush who was the opposite of that. But George H. had already been president for four years!
4. OMG Sarah Palin! It's as if the universe read your question and traveled back in time to deliver the perfect counterexample to your implication. Remember that Republican voters absolutely loved her folksy ways, her seemingly unrehearsed speeches, and her professed rejection of PC culture and Democratic elitism. She was unfortunately so much like the average voter that she lacked the basic competency necessary to run. That was noticed by the voting public and it did help tank McCain's campaign.
So yes-- relatability and personal story are an inescapable part of American politics. Also, major triads probably make up a significant proportion of Mozart's symphonies. But if one implies that's all there is to talk about in either case it doesn't show an understanding of the subject matter.
Edit: protect against irrelevant digressions.
my questions are really about you, as voters, not campaign strategist. your analytical response reminds me the episode of West Wing, about 'presidential'.
The federal government has very little influence on how people live their daily lives. Because many people no longer believe that elections matter, they're more than happy to vote for the most entertaining candidate.
It’s a good question. The last genuine PM we had was John Major, the son of a gardener who studied at night school while working for his father during the day. Before him was Maggie Thatcher, an industrial chemist by trade.
All since then have been career politicians from the political class. Blair went to Fettes, the “Scottish Eton”. Cameron and Boris were classmates at Eton and Oxford. Even Jeremy Corbyn, supposed champion of the Workers never worked a day in his life. He will likely be followed as leader of the Labour Party by Sir Kier or Lady Nugee.
Only because you can only vote for the candidates on the ballot paper and the two main parties have already been captured. There are other parties of course, but they are loons or worse.
Ironically Boris has done much more real work in his life than Corbyn, but neither has very much in common with the average voter-taxpayer.
I’ve thought a lot about this, and wondered if we’ll see a major flip post-Trump (perhaps a few more presidencies past), where the republicans somehow manage to shed their racial baggage and suddenly are the party of the entire working class while the Democrats are left with only the “coastal elites.” Five Thirty Eight ran an article on those lines a while back... can’t find the link, but that was also a good read.
[1] https://www.kff.org/slideshow/public-opinion-on-single-payer...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/11/25/u-s-public-vi...
Instead of college for all, what's needed is an alternative pathway from high school to (optional) industrial training/ apprenticeships to jobs, skipping college altogether for those who don't want/need it. Employers need to be able to hire non-college-graduates without worrying they're getting the dregs of the college system. They should have fine-grained input into getting exactly the sort of skills they want into their workers, and a large portion of this program (for some of the low-req jobs, the entirety) should involve no-strings-attached industry placements to get those employers comfortable with the people they'll be hiring.
Hmm, it's a good point that having a four year head start would help balance things. However, I think in the long run things would probably workout in the favor of the person that went to college. Especially in the higher paying majors such as business, CS, and engineering.
Being a barista is a reasonable job for a 14-year-old. Adults shouldn't be taking jobs from teens.
The issue is that most jobs pay too little. College is not a reasonable way to achieve income equality. You can graduate as many people as you like, it doesn't create more jobs (this is how majors get a track record...by controlling the number of people who apply).
But, and here's the kicker, there are a lot of people who lump all college degrees together, either mentally or in their writing on the topic, and then justify going into debt to get a degree based on that. "Go to college" is not that easy to swap out with "go to college in one of the majors with a track record of leading to a good career", not least because there are numerous colleges (Fine Arts, some parts of Liberal Arts, etc.) where if that were the way people thought, that college would shrink to half its current size or less.
Which, maybe is what needs to happen, or maybe we need to find another way for society to fund people who study those topics (my preference), but either way it's not what's happening now, and those closest to the university system are generally the ones most hostile to the idea of looking plainly at the facts about the current situation.
A low-wage manufacturing job can lead to high-wage automation and tooling maintenance and eventually design positions, or shop steward, training or mentoring.
And “learn to code” should be a basic school curriculum topic! It is well, frankly, disgusting that such a universally powerful, useful and accessible skill has been withheld from the vast majority of students, and now made almost into an “epithet” meaning disrespect toward lower-skilled people. I don’t know any job, no matter how menial, that couldn’t be improved by some automation of it’s most repetitive book-keeping tasks.
If your only reason for going to college is to try and attain that certain social standing, and you fall short, then it truly was a waste of money (and, more importantly, time). Colleges do have a struggle to convince those people of their relevance.
A similar phenomena has been seen in incomes. Incomes have held stagnant for decades, even as more and more of the population have become credentialed. Maybe a degree is necessary to reach the top 1%, but those who fall short of that goal are no better off than people were in the past, when they didn't go to college.
The basic problem is the legitimacy of the elite it has produced in the eyes of people subject to it. There was always tension, but code changed everything. PhD holding managers today are often functionally illiterate in their domain of responsibility, and that has a huge cultural impact.
There is reliable predictive power in explaining the culture wars of today as the reaction against a managerialist elite using radical cultural change in an attempt to dilute the bargaining power of competent working people, and to insulate itself from a working class from whom they are increasingly undifferentiated.
This is a pet issue of mine, and glad to see it's getting traction, as it's really the defining conflict of today.
So we essentially created a "virtuous" class of "educated" people that aren't as smart as they think they are, talking down to people that are struggling economically by telling them that they need to spend 100k to "learn to think". It's amazing things have stayed relatively peaceful.
It's funny to me because arguably I am part of this liberal elite, and even I feel a lot of contempt and irritation towards my increasingly smug compatriots. People really need to tone down the "flyover state" and "redneck" rhetoric. I definitely didn't vote for Trump, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't get why people did.
I needed my degree; but just to get my foot in the door. I didn't learn much during the process itself other than to recognize the meta fact that I had to do it to get out of my current situation.
This would have been a real problem for me financially if it didn't work out the way it did because I wouldn't have been able to get out from under my(and more so my wife's) student loan debt.
It should be useful and I think it can be, but that was not the experience that I had.
However, I have not met (except on HN) any successful "knowledge workers" without a degree. I'm sure there are many factors contributing to that: smarter people are more likely to pursue degrees in the first place, companies may ignore otherwise good candidates since they lack a degree.
But another possibility is that many of us underestimate the skills we learned in pursuing our degrees. Certainly many people obtain those skills in other ways, but it's impossible to know if I personally would have.
Aside from hearing the odd person tell a funny story from their college days (which, I might add, does not guarantee that they successfully attained a degree), I don't think I've met anyone (except on HN) in the last decade or so where scholastic background has even come up in conversation.
It was something to talk about when we were young and being fresh out of school was news, sure, but as I get older the conversations have moved on to more pertinent topics like homeownership and children. Nobody really cares to talk about something that happened so long ago that people born back then are now in college themselves.
So, I am rather curious as to how you would ever know? I cannot even begin to see if your assertion holds true within my professional peer group as I have absolutely no idea if any of them have degrees or not.
So college comes up too. Plus if you are hiring it is in cv.
Moreover, the older we are the less interesting new things we have to tall about. We work and then go home to children. And there is often not much else engaging to talk about. So people talk about past.
All of that pales to the real process going on: good students were matriculated into my program, and I credential them via a bunch of assessments that I wrote despite never having any classes on formal assessment design. If you gave us a random sample of the population, I doubt we'd be that great at turning them into Computer Scientists.
PG had a post here recently on (approximately) that subject. http://www.paulgraham.com/lesson.html
Very few assessments are well-designed.
Thank you for distilling the essence of what I feel when I hear people say college education is not necessary. I suspect those individuals are no longer college-aged and have matured. Sure, a 19 year old could self-study online instead of going to college - but what 19 year-old has the discipline and motivation to do so consistently for 3-4 years? Granted - I don't believe that college it should cost six figures, but the structure provided is very helpful.
If you went to University and all you can muster in it's favor is "you learn how to think" argument then you are a fool.
You realize you're basically just stereotyping half the country, right? These are people with families and friends and communities and jobs. "White trash" is an exceedingly small minority of people who voted for Trump - if they voted at all.
People didn't elect Trump because they're secret closet nazis...but this style of black and white thinking, increasingly common online, was a major contributor.
What could go wrong?
It’s not a flyover issue. It’s in your backyard. I’ve seen confederate flags outside of South Lake Tahoe which makes no sense.
People will get fed up and they’re closer than you think.
How is this a question? How many high school grads have you interviewed and thought you could spin them up to the usefulness of a graduate from nothing in a reasonable amount of time/effort?
Education is expensive, sure. We can talk about that... but useful? It seems obviously useful to me.
Poster is more likely asking whether the education gained in college is actually useful vs the doors opened by having that diploma.
If one dropped out of college right before graduation with 99% of the education, likely that person would end up with worse off job prospects compared to the person who completed their program
However, they said college education not college diploma. They're clearly talking about the skills learned.
That said, the argument still stands with a candidate with a degree and a similarly aged candidate with no relevant work experience but similar maturity, odds are you'll still be able to pass the Pepsi challenge and see the difference.
Remember, I'm only arguing against the notion that college is useless.
If you're lucky enough to get a mentorship that will teach you everything you need right out of high school, great. Go for it. That's not exactly a common occurrence. College is a high cost, low risk way to get some experience and land a job but its certainly not useless.
And I went to a top-20 undergrad for CS. That doesn't mean it wasn't useful. It was. I use stuff I learned in my past education a reasonable portion of the time, now, as a researcher.
That doesn't mean that it was a more direct way to "get a job", had I the courage to try that path at the time, than just doing an apprenticeship would have been.
It all depends what your definition of "Education" is. If you mean a college degree, then I'd agree that in most cases (depending on your major), it's indeed not particularly useful.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_(statistics)
I've no problem with dedicated medical schools and law schools etc, but there's something about the university system that is deeply corrupt and self absorbed.
We should break them up, have the schools be separate schools, and have separate certification centers and competition in certificates (which would plug it all back into the real world).
The fact they set their own exams is a big part of the rot. It's not different to one of us setting our own driving test.
But it isn’t a gate anymore really; in the UK at least basically everyone below a certain age has a degree, since they converted the polys. Having a degree isn’t in any way “elite” now, although of course there are still elite universities.
As the article states, in the US, 70% of people over 25 do not have a 4-year university degree. And contrary to the UK and the rest of Europe, American University is staggeringly expensive. And despite what you might read on HN, without a 4 year degree, nearly all professional jobs would be off limits. And if you did manage to sneak past the first gate, as some talented coders on HN have done, you can look forward to a lifetime inferiority complex, knowing that your co-workers have a safety and desirability you lack.
In the US, the 4-year degree really is a significantly high barrier to entry to the professional class. You also need to be living in one of a dozen elite cities, be the right race, have the right politics, the right friends and family, and the right set of previous employers. Only then have you gained that special status that lets you own a home you're not afraid to lose, go to a doctor you can afford, and enjoy a job that affords you comfort, stability, respect, and some measure of control over your destiny.
The overall point of this article is that in the US economy, there's not enough spots at the top for everyone. And everyone not at the top will live economically precarious lives. One political party likes to pretend that there is endless opertunity for all with promises of more university, and the other party has realized the lie and is decending into anti-intellectual madness, rejecting acedemia, experts and science.
Your country has some uncertain times ahead and there will be plenty of call to more closely emulate the free-market American system now that you've distanced yourselves from the more regulated and socialist European system. Do be careful.
While CS related knowledge comes up almost never in day to day work and conversation, it is a common background I share with most people at work. We all have the same frame of reference, and can pick up what each other are talking about more easily that way. And perhaps the most useful aspects of our degree have become so second nature to our thinking we do not notice them anymore.
Also, the experience during the degree of working with rarified problems does train my mind to find the underlying concept behind it all, instead of hacking barely working pieces of code together. Or at least helps me feel more shame when I do the latter, and give me some instinct to push for something better.
I’m not sure you can quantify that the way you want to. People voted for trump because he said what they wanted to hear and they didn’t care About the details because they’ve never had to apply critical thinking at that level. That’s not a good thing...
So while you may expect to struggle economically after a university degree, it behooves the rest of us to listen to what they have to say, because those of us who did get vocational training, or no training at all, in all likelihood never had time or reason to stretch the ratio as far as they. I would be very disappointed if they did not develop a sense of smugness, it would mean they didn't see any problems with how society at large currently thinks or operates.
A university graduate without an opinion would be time and money wasted.
I can't talk for every majors but at least for STEM, you need to study hard for years to acquire solid foundations. I don't see how you can gather all the required knowledge by yourself.
If you want to do that by yourself, you need to:
- decide what you need to learn, and find what are the best resources to learn it
- keep motivated for many years, without feedback that you're on the right track
- convince your future employer that you have skills
We should keep learning all life long, but I don't think anything can replace a formal education. It's one thing to learn things on the side when you need them. But it's much harder to tackle heavy foundational topics without supervision.
I also couldn't have done that myself because I was only able to do it with access to student loans, as I had to (at the minimum) eat and have somewhere warm to sleep, which I certainly had no money for, so I had to take out loans for food and rent.
Coming from a country where tertiary education is more accessible and cheaper, there is decent free healthcare and more social welfare, all of which give more people the option of higher education, what ends up happening is people go to University too much. Universities have undergone a huge explosion in headcount and footprint. As publicly funded institutions, they have funded this expansion with a kind of Ponzi scheme where more and more full fee paying international students are required to sustain the machine. At the same time there has been a lot of training institutes and vocational colleges popping up, some with dubious quality and intent. The stimulus for this seems to be that young people can't get enough quality work, and so they try and educate themselves. They can do this partly because of the largesse of their boomer parents. This effect is happening at all levels, including fields where lots of education is already required, like medicine, law and engineering.
So I would agree that pumping education is not a panacea. It is starting to feel almost exploitative around here (Australia). Weddings, healthcare and education are surefire ways to extract money from people even when the economy is in a slump. At least you get cake at a wedding.
I think this is one thing churches did really well; people from all social spheres coming together to serve their God. It didn't matter what job or status you had. Everybody was equal.
I'm sure the same could be achieved today without the religious aspect as well. There's plenty of volunteering opportunities, for example. Being part of a amateur sports team can bring people from all classes together.
My church, which is home to a number of college professors, lawyers, and other overly-educated people, is soon to be celebrating a member receiving her high school diploma; she returned to school to finish it (she's in her mid-20s and has two kids) and is just taking initial steps to enter the workforce and try to get away from depending on public assistance.
If they want to vote against our shared interests and suffer the consequences, so be it. Me and mine will keep building without them and I won't spare a moments thought for their self inflicted suffering (except to be glad it isn't me).
Give hate and antipathy no quarter. Where there is pain, it must our pain, or there will inevitably be revolution and chaos. Love without discrimination, even with those you disagree with, because they cannot be moved if we act like impetuous children by refusing to talk to them. Prejudice also cannot be convenient, or we likely possess internal inconsistencies we must face if we are to be honest and have integrity.
Their "communities" are dieing, their businesses are failing, and their smart kid leave. The only question is whether those fools death throes doom the rest of us.
Hilariously, on the fringes they're being supplanted by refugees from metro areas that got priced out. Those people are bringing sanity to the wasteland with them like pilgrims in an unholy land.
From my perspective, I can do little to nothing to influence how all this plays out besides voting, living my life as I see fit, and directing my time and attention toward those I deem worthy. And that's exactly what I'm going to do.
"You could see that they were ready to be friends with anyone who was friendly and didn't give a fig for anyone who wasn't." C.S. Lewis
Copy-pasting unattributed quotes doesn't make you look smart.
You can point to individual factors of circumstance (an ill-conceived 2015 leadership election) or big structural issues (rising inequality). But the end result is the same: no empathy, no interest. It is funny the article talks about race...did everyone just suddenly become a racist overnight? Or did they just decide they don't like being talked down to? Which is more likely (bearing in mind that the people talking down do like to talk about race a hell of a lot).
The left will get nowhere by trying to "learn to talk" to these awful poor people (sarcasm). They don't care. Not interested. Give the working class their voice back (Blair and Clinton did just fine). Go back to suburbia, find another job in which you are way overpaid for incompetence, and stop talking. Btw, Trump has done this...he is the worst candidate, the worst president...and still the Dems can't muster anything up...how is this incompetence even possible?
Just generally, as someone who falls firmly into the category of metro elite...I have never understood why other rich people feel the need to always tell poor people what they want. Politics is to help those people but it has gone from helping them to telling them what they should think, how they should live, etc. Is it any wonder that doesn't win votes?
The only answer is to stop buying cheap consumer goods from China (or anywhere, for that matter). Disposal-oriented consumerism is ripping our society (and the world) to shreds.
Exactly, this seemed completely missing from the hand-wringing about how what's wrong with the Democratic party is that it is just too elitist for the working classes now. There is in fact a lot of truth to that, but it is the economic policy, or lack thereof, of both parties has allowed capital, controlled by very few, to flow unimpeded overseas. If you want to retain a middle-class economic base, you have to take measures to incentivize capital to remain in the country.
My own employer is aggressively moving to shift all of it's technical knowledge work to India; companies like Accenture and IBM now employ more people there than in the US. There will soon be as little Knowledge Economy work in the US as there is old Industrial Economy work. Where will all of these college (or Denmark-style vocationally trained) end up working? Wal-Mart. Sell the people out twice and you will end up with some kind of revolt. You're not going to convince anybody at that point that it's the grad school gap that's killing America and that we should have a Ph.D. For All program to solve it.
Turns out "Beware the behaviors you incentivize" doesn't only apply to scrappy startups, but scales up to whole nations. If profit is the sole metric you judge companies/CEOs/boards by, don't be surprised by the lengths they will go to maximize it.
How about the multitude of America products/software/services that are exported around the globe? Globalization is not a one-way street: a good chunk of the American economic growth is due to exports ("How's your 401k doing?")
> The result may well be the destruction of our democracy.
Who could have predicted unfettered/crony capitalism could work against democracy; after all, profits, political power and human dignity are completely unrelated to each other, right?