I both strongly agree with you and strongly disagree with you.
I was with you right up to "supply would exceed demand".
Actually, no. You're right that "not everybody is going to be president, or an astronaut, or a doctor", but the limiting factor is not "how many of those the market needs".
It's not actually the case that "somebody, in the end, has to sweep the streets". We do not need anybody to sweep the streets. Or, shortly, do any a number of low-skill, noxious, dangerous or dirty jobs. We actually have the technology now to do that with automation.
For more than a hundred years we have been eliminating whole vast sectors of the job market with automation, and that process is only escalating. As a society, our mechanical ability is now adequate that most lower-end, unskilled jobs are disappearing.
No, the limiting factor is that not everybody can be a knowledge worker. Not everybody had the facility with abstraction, even with the best of educations (and we aren't really into providing the best of educations, but let's let the scenario stand). Even among those many who can in some sense do the remaining work that can't be automated, there will be those who can't both do it and be happy.
There will always be -- may there always be! -- people whose muses call them to work with their hands, to work out of doors, to be wise in their bodies. But our society has been disenfranchising them wholesale, demanding more and more of us spend our lives chained to desks, leaving fewer and fewer opportunities for those not called to booklearning to earn honest livings.
I think in a decent society, people have ways to follow their gifts, whatever they may be. And I don't think we have a decent society.
no subject
I was with you right up to "supply would exceed demand".
Actually, no. You're right that "not everybody is going to be president, or an astronaut, or a doctor", but the limiting factor is not "how many of those the market needs".
It's not actually the case that "somebody, in the end, has to sweep the streets". We do not need anybody to sweep the streets. Or, shortly, do any a number of low-skill, noxious, dangerous or dirty jobs. We actually have the technology now to do that with automation.
For more than a hundred years we have been eliminating whole vast sectors of the job market with automation, and that process is only escalating. As a society, our mechanical ability is now adequate that most lower-end, unskilled jobs are disappearing.
No, the limiting factor is that not everybody can be a knowledge worker. Not everybody had the facility with abstraction, even with the best of educations (and we aren't really into providing the best of educations, but let's let the scenario stand). Even among those many who can in some sense do the remaining work that can't be automated, there will be those who can't both do it and be happy.
There will always be -- may there always be! -- people whose muses call them to work with their hands, to work out of doors, to be wise in their bodies. But our society has been disenfranchising them wholesale, demanding more and more of us spend our lives chained to desks, leaving fewer and fewer opportunities for those not called to booklearning to earn honest livings.
I think in a decent society, people have ways to follow their gifts, whatever they may be. And I don't think we have a decent society.