White collar jobs are getting more difficult, needing more skills, more flexibility and more capacity for abstract thought. It isn’t surprising that the education needed is longer.
When Rutherford was in charge, the Cavendish laboratory at one point had a single triode valve (vacuum tube).
When Feynman was on the Manhattan Project, people were using screwdrivers to manipulate lumps of plutonium, and calculations were done by manually shifting punch cards through simple calculating machines.
Now we have CERN and experiment teams of hundreds of people. Each of those people is probably working on something more complex than an entire research project in Rutherford’s day.
I don’t think there is a solution to this other than to stop the over-bureaucratisation and profiteering in further education and make it much more accessible. And to do that, you’re going to need to fix the flow of money upwards. There are a lot of vested interests trying to keep that going.
I don’t understand this argument. Is there something inherently worthwhile in intellectual labor that makes it worth more than physical labor? You certainly require a well-built residence far more than standard release software, no matter how dazzling its graphics or soundtrack. Yet wages for construction workers have stagnated.
I do agree that we need to “fix the flow of money upwards,” but the big problem is not a lack of education. It’s a lack of decent wages.
I got the same alarm bells, and was going to make a generic snark comment about setting up a table with Dixie Cups of Kool-Aide for the paid Russian comment spammers.
So Trump running the show is preferable?
In 2000, I remember an NPR interview with a delighted Bush fan-lady. Very close paraphrase:
“What do you say to the charge the George Bush doesn’t have the educational grounding to be president?”
(Pause)
“Well, he’ll have gooood people around him.”
Well, we know how that turned out. The “good people” were neoconservatives, who planned for a war with Iraq a few months into 2001, who encouraged paranoid Orwellian public relations style, whose ideological insanity blinded them to the need for post-war planning, and the experts they did send over were basically interns with heads full of small-government market-based folderol.
What flavor of wackadoodle conservative ideologue will staff a Trump White House? Neoconservatives never admit they’re wrong, so they could leap back in. Or maybe we’ll get monsters from the racist base of the Tea Party.
Of course, Trump’s own base of poorly educated, impoverished rural whites won’t get anything out of it except maybe jobs dragging immigrants onto rail cars.
You also require water far more than truffles, yet you pay less for it. Why is that?
Even with the exchange rate where it is, I think you’re overpaying.
Do you? I’m not aware of vast, publicly-funded, civil engineering projects piping truffles to my house.
But, I have to admit that would be swell.
Ugh - don’t. It was horrible. Starting with the premise. ETA - oh wait, WATCHED - I’m too late.
The economy sucks, but it doesn’t suck as bad as it did 8 years ago or so. Fun fact though, for the most part presidents don’t have a lot to do directly with the economy. Yes they can nudge things. Yes they can present plans and encourage congress. And even when congress passes laws, it is hard to gauge how much specific laws help or hurt the economy. It seems to me, factors outside of the government have the most hard hitting effects. Such as the crash in 2008.
I would disagree only in that entry level white collar jobs do not need BA/BS and MA/MS level education to do. They some base levels of skills and critical thinking and group dynamic experience. Project Management, Product Management, many support roles and functions can be easily done by someone with 3-6 months of training/experience.
Many small team management roles also require only a base education, and candidates merely need on the job training and experience in the team dynamic and function.
Yes there are plenty of other roles and work that need advanced education; however, many roles are things like Technology Project Manager and its filled with someone who has a BA in History.
Props to Stephanopoulos for keeping composed through this. I certainly would have cracked up laughing.
The economy is us.
Not an index. Not a metric. Us.
There is no such thing as a ‘jobless recovery’. The economy isn’t an intangible meta-god emergent from the trillions of transactions of people. It is the people. Here in the U.S., we’ve got about 320 million of 'em. And a lot of them are hurting even worse than they were before. For the first time in 130 years, over a third of those age 25-35 are living with their parents. And it’s not to save on rent.
The unemployment rate indicates just that: the proportion of people looking for a job and don’t have one. Because of this, it doesn’t take into account all of the people who have stopped looking for a job. It also doesn’t tell us anything about how many hours employees are making available to each of their workers, how much the employed are earning, nor what (if any) benefits the employed is receiving. Which means that the head count of those employed includes all of those currently working a part-time, shit-wage job while on Medicaid.
That is not what I’d call a ‘recovery’.
Look, I’m not trying to come down on ya like a ton of bricks—okay, maybe a half-ton if I’m being honest—but this is a misperception that the media seems so eager to push that I am done letting this kind of shit slide.
ETA: My response here is the product of misunderstand and frustration, and we all know that’s a volatile mix. Read @quorihunter’s post below, which articulates his position—and one I can’t help but agree with.
Yeah, the Cold War really was kind of on hold in the mid 1970s. But later of course you had the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the boycott of the Moscow Olympics, and then the election of Reagan and his “Evil Empire” rhetoric to start things up again.
I like to think of it as “Cold War 2:Electric Boogaloo”…
It means whatever he says it does, I guess. And whatever his followers believe in between klan rallies and gay bashing.
“I’m not entirely sure what the situation is, but whatever you’re saying is wrong has gotta be all Obama’s fault!”
Sure, Ukraine. He’s an idiot on that front. But even more importantly, and fundamentally, immediately before being confused about Ukraine he admitted that he has no clue about what is contained in his party’s platform.
I think he knows more than he’s letting on. It was a peculiar party platform negotiation:
…one of the most enduring dynamics of GOP conventions … is … mainstream nominees battling conservative activists over the party platform … This is one thing that made the Trump convention very different. The Trump Camp was totally indifferent to the platform. So party activists were able to write one of the most conservative platforms in history. Not with Trump’s backing but because he simply didn’t care. With one big exception: Trump’s team mobilized the nominee’s traditional mix of cajoling and strong-arming on one point: changing the party platform on assistance to Ukraine against Russian military operations in eastern Ukraine…
This does not mean Trump is controlled by or in the pay of Russia or Putin. It can just as easily be explained by having many of his top advisors having spent years working in Putin’s orbit and being aligned with his thinking and agenda. But it is certainly no coincidence. Again, in the context of near total indifference to the platform and willingness to let party activists write it in any way they want, his team zeroed in on one fairly obscure plank to exert maximum force and it just happens to be the one most important to Putin in terms of US policy…
( Trump & Putin. Yes, It’s Really a Thing - TPM – Talking Points Memo )
Considering his VP is a scumbag I loathe even more as a human being than Trump, that does not comfort me. Pence is Ted Cruz with a less punchable face and experience in executive power.
The top reasons Pence is a douchebag:
- Signing an abortion restriction bill which were so messed up that 2 women are serving long sentences for having miscarriages
2 Singing in a “religious freedom” bill which amounted to Jim Crow 2.0 for gays.
3 Making lame promises to roll back Roe v Wade - Using gubernatorial campaign finds to pay his mortgage. (He was run out of Indiana for that)
