Unschoolable people in 1st world countries

[pacer]

There are a lot of people working jobs that pay $8-$9 per hour and they barely get by. Note I say jobs because those jobs hardly have a career path. Pizza delivery comes to mind and Sales ( in some cases) is another. Don't ask me how many former stay-at-home moms become realtors after they get divorced. Are these part of the oft touted "service" industries that are supposed to be experiencing job growth? Aside from pay, these jobs rarely carry any status and offer little psychic reward for a job well done.

Further many folks really seem to believe they live in Lake Wobegon where all the children are above average and thereby do little to prepare themselves or their children to face life. I know of few parents who would admit to encouraging their children to become skilled in a trade unless it is to continue a family business.

It reminds me of a poster my husband has above the workbench in the garage. It says " The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because it is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water."

[Feltan]

Originally Posted by jeff

Feltan, which artificial rules do you have in mind? (And, are any rules not artificial?)

One hears how the "invisible hand" solves all problems...but it really doesn't describe all of reality.

Indeed. The free market would not put sprinkler systems in public schools without a law mandating it -- I am not a pure laissez-faire adherent; however, the Government does tend to muck things up despite good intent.

Most of today's labor, anti-trust, monopoly and union laws are archaic. The federal farm policy is a horror of pork politics . Minimum wages are neither: 1) real wages or 2) the real minimum. On and on.....

Regards,
Feltan

[jeff]

Thanks Feltan, I absolutely agree with you. (There's a lot of use of slogan masquerading as thought, and your response is far above that level.)

I agree with pacer too - but I think plumbers make good money!

[jBirch]

Originally Posted by Feltan

Indeed. The free market would not put sprinkler systems in public schools without a law mandating it -- I am not a pure laissez-faire adherent; however, the Government does tend to muck things up despite good intent.

Most of today's labor, anti-trust, monopoly and union laws are archaic. The federal farm policy is a horror of pork politics . Minimum wages are neither: 1) real wages or 2) the real minimum. On and on.....

Regards,
Feltan

Arguably, labour movements are a direct result of market competition for labour. Consolidation in the labour supply end of the market, as it were, to combat growing consolidation in the demand (management) side of the labour equation. In fact, just like any other good, where possible supply always approaches a monopsony.

James.

[Inquartata]

Originally Posted by Feltan

Indeed. The free market would not put sprinkler systems in public schools without a law mandating it

Ah, but that's because they're public schools, ie state run---precisely the sort of government interference that warps things. No point expecting the free market to work properly in a public setting. In a private market, demand ( from parents, no doubt ) might well prompt installation of such a safety system...

[PeterGustafsson]

Hi!

Originally Posted by Feltan

Ahhh fooey.....OK, a serious response.

Your premise is, I believe, flawed. You seem to suggest that the labor market is static......

Poinst #1-3 in my post #8 should show that I do not believe that the labor market is static.

Originally Posted by Feltan

that once plenitful jobs cosisting of manual labor have reduced and hence the under educated workforce is is seeking a smaller and smaller pool of available positions.

Now you are contradicting your assumption right above about what I think.

Originally Posted by Feltan

In essence, the bar gets raised over time. The manual laborer of today probably has more education than a skilled worker of yesteryear, and the skilled laborer of today is probably more educated than a professional employee of a few generations ago.

I agree. My point is, I do not believe that this century´s not-smart people are any less dumb than the not-smart people on the previous century. When do large parts of the population become too dumb to the manual laborer job of their time?

Originally Posted by Feltan

In fact, the problem of an over-educated workforce in the States is accute -- we have to import unskilled labor. In the States, there are literally millions of undocumented illegal immigrants fully employed at low skill jobs.

Now you are conflating (at least) two issues. Immigration can be seen as a response in differentials (in this case, d/dx) between countries. My original topic is what happens over time (d/dt). When (admittedly, a long way off) all countries have access to the level of education present in today´s 1st world countries, the world as a whole will still have not-smart people.

Importing unskilled labor is not a solution to the question "What should we do of the unemployed unskilled people that we already have?" The importation of other people neither makes them employed or more skilled.

Originally Posted by Feltan

Regards,
Feltan

P.S. And no one drew the conclusion that the only difference between being a prositute and working for the ACLU is how ugly a person is......I'm disappointed.

What the heck is your beef with ACLU? You know, one day you may need them yourself. Just philosopically against civil liberties in general?


Have a nice time!

Peter Gustafsson

[Inquartata]

Originally Posted by PeterGustafsson

I do not believe that this century´s not-smart people are any less dumb than the not-smart people on the previous century. When do large parts of the population become too dumb to the manual laborer job of their time?

When the manual labor jobs become more intricate due to advancing technology, for one thing.

A good example is auto mechanics. It used to be possible to do almost any repair on a car with only a few tools and some basic nonintellectual know-how. No longer. Now one needs computer diagnostic machines, due to all the microchips and pollution controls in your average engine.

Importing unskilled labor is not a solution to the question "What should we do of the unemployed unskilled people that we already have?" The importation of other people neither makes them employed or more skilled.

No, but the fact of importation does address the basic question indirectly. The fact that industrial economies are net importers of unskilled laborers indicates that there is a shortage of native unskilled laborers. This could be due to one of two reasons. (1) The number of citizens suitable only for physical labor, ie "uneducable", has decreased. (2) The number of jobs requiring such labor has increased---the opposite of your premise that modern economies actually produce fewer of these jobs.

What the heck is your beef with ACLU? You know, one day you may need them yourself. Just philosopically against civil liberties in general?

Maybe he believes that their name would be more accurate if it were changed to the American Selected Civil Liberties That We Choose to Believe In and to the Devil with the Others Union...

[jeff]

Originally Posted by Inquartata

In a private market, demand ( from parents, no doubt ) might well prompt installation of such a safety system...

Might, but might not. Let's just leave it to chance, then, shall we? Only the children of the best-prepared parents, who have researched all the possible danger vectors to children in school and are aware of all significant risks to their children, get to be protected from burning to death?

The private market has always done a poor job of providing safety features. The recent mine tragedy is an illustration of mines where the regulations were flouted, and before the regulations existed, mining deaths occurred on a regular basis. SImilar history can be shown with automobile safety (the shameful record in which auto manufacturers resisted safety features and lobbies against regulations mandating them), food safety (going back to Upton Sinclair), flammability of garments and many others. In a less life-and-death context, look at how the unregulated stock market was an unsafe market for fleecing wealth from the unconnected.

The market is a good and efficient vehicle for all pricing an product or service, and for fostering competition, but it's horribly ineffective at initiatives that add cost while not directly increasing profitability in the short term - and that includes safety.

[Feltan]

Peter,

Inq inserted a stop cut, and said much of what I would have...so I'll do us all a favor and not repeat what he wrote.

Perhaps I am confusing one issue however. You are using smart/dumb and educated/not educated in an interchangable fashion. There are differences, as I am sure we all know people who are smart and poorly educated, and dumb well educated people. I was making a point of education not native intelligence.

Regards,
Feltan

[jBirch]

I do think though that Peter's conjecture is valid: if 1st world economies have a shortage of unskilled labour, for whatever reason, then what happens if wealth is equally distributed and all countries operate as 1st world countries?

If technology reduces the demand for low skill, and public schools reduce the supply of unskilled labour, then the question becomes the relative velocity of each. If d1 is the demand for unskilled labour and d2 is the supply of that labour then we have three cases: d1/d2 > 1; d1/d2 < 1 or d1/d2 = 1.

In the case of d1/d2 = 1 we can expect wages to rise in line with inflation. In the case of d1/d2 > 1 I propose that wages increase and so does risk (or else d1 would increase with skilled workers taking unskilled jobs). In the case of d1/d2 < 1 I propose that crime increases and wage decreases.

The most interesting conjecture is what happens socially when there is significant population well below the poverty line with no hope of recovery into prosperity. When d1/d2 is really small as it were. Economics says that the people in this condition operate as failed economic actors (which in a functioning market are canibalised and absorbed by the other actors).

Inq, I'm out of my league on this question, but what happens when people are failed economic actors? That they can provide no value to the system? What happens with the human garbage, as it were?

James.

[PeterGustafsson]

Hi!

Originally Posted by jeff

Peter, to your original topic: this has been a dystopic future widely portrayed in science fiction, where for decades the suggestion of "labor saving devices", or robots, would put most people out of work. (Parenthetically: I remember long ago seeing charts of how many telephone operators would be needed - back when human intervention was required for every call - the number of operators grew to the size of the population. But direct dial fixed that). Even knowledge workers are not exempted in these futures, though, I'm not so worried about AI putting knowledge workers out of business - that's been a busted promise for decades.

Today we have automation in manufacturing and in the office (you don't have armies of clerks hunched over ledgers, or secretarial pools). "Computer" was originally a job title: somebody whose job it was to manually compute figures, all day long. In some cases, automation freed resources from drudgery to be used in higher value-add jobs, in other cases, large swathes of population saw their livelihood evaporate. All this is preview, as I'm sure you know all this quite well.

Yes, I have read "brave new world" a long time ago.

The argument goes that large-scale unemployment has been avoided by a combination of more education, new services, and new jobs tending the new machines. What I am wondering if we are coming to the end of this renewal process within my lifetime, as more and more jobs require more and more skills.

What happens when the supply of smart-but-not-yet-educated Indians and Chinese dries up?

Originally Posted by jeff

Prediction is hard, especially for the future (reference: Professor Yogi Berra). Does the bar get raised so people are marginalised due to their inherent inability to attain necessary skills? I don't think so. I think that the bar falls far short of doing calculus. Literacy - to the extent of reading an instruction manual or job application, core math skills far short of calculus, a smattering of science background, and fundamental problem-solving capabilities will still do for most.

Well, that is your prediction. Mine is otherwise, and time will show whom of us is closer to truth. In the meanwhile - do you have stats to back your prediction up? If one reads the job placement ads, one can see (at least here in Sweden) that demands for interpersonal skills go up. Those skills will become, and are already, a hurdle for some people who have the purely cognitive skills that you listed. Furthermore, they are more difficult to learn than ordinary knowledge or simple "follow-a-given-path" skills.

Originally Posted by jeff

My take is that the number of people inherently incapable of being educated to a level suitable for today's world is dwarfed by the number of people that could be educated to that level, but aren't. Whether due to sociological reasons (ethnic segments without a tradition, experience or examples of education) or resource distribution (population segments not getting adequate educational resources and social services to foster education), I think that the number of people that potentially could have been educated but were not dwarfs the number of people simply incapable of it.

Maybe so, but that just postpones the issue. Let us assume that education is fixed and that all people are educated to their potential; that will not stop technological advances leading to more demanding jobs - on the contrary, it will probably hasten it.


Maybe we are - in the long run - going to a bimodal society. The middle class will dwindle in numbers, its lower part becoming what is now known as working class, and its upper half becoming part of the upper class. Charles Dickens, here we come!



Have a nice time!

Peter Gustafsson

[PeterGustafsson]

Hi!

Originally Posted by Inquartata

We have also not reckoned with the underground economy: hard to measure precisely and not entirely populated by the uneducated. But I doubt that even Sweden has no criminal class, no itinerant peddlers, no day laborers...

We have a criminal class, but probably considerably smaller than in USA. We have both peddlers and day laborers, but both - especially the latter - are so few as to be statistically insignificant.


Have a nice time!

Peter Gustafsson

[PeterGustafsson]

Hi!

Originally Posted by Feltan

Peter,
Perhaps I am confusing one issue however. You are using smart/dumb and educated/not educated in an interchangable fashion. There are differences, as I am sure we all know people who are smart and poorly educated, and dumb well educated people. I was making a point of education not native intelligence.

Regards,
Feltan

I must be expressing myself less than ideally. Of course I know the difference between those two characteristics, and I have seen examples of both your groups. However, te 1st group is world-wide much larger than the 2nd. It is mostly a matter of resources to make a smart but uneducated person a smart and educated person. However, there comes an education level where any further increase comes much more difficultly, and that level depends mostly on innate smartness, IMO.


Have a nice time!

Peter Gustafsson

[PeterGustafsson]

Hi!

Originally Posted by Inquartata

When the manual labor jobs become more intricate due to advancing technology, for one thing.

A good example is auto mechanics. It used to be possible to do almost any repair on a car with only a few tools and some basic nonintellectual know-how. No longer. Now one needs computer diagnostic machines, due to all the microchips and pollution controls in your average engine.

Good illustration of my original post.

Originally Posted by Inquartata

No, but the fact of importation does address the basic question indirectly. The fact that industrial economies are net importers of unskilled laborers indicates that there is a shortage of native unskilled laborers.

Only if the importation is demand-driven, as is the case with importation of goods (oil, raw metals, foodstuffs, etc.) Importation of unskilled labor is, on the contrary, supply-driven - some dirt-poor Mexican decides that life as an illegal in USA can not be worse than his present life, and it is worth a try to come in.

Originally Posted by Inquartata

This could be due to one of two reasons. (1) The number of citizens suitable only for physical labor, ie "uneducable", has decreased. (2) The number of jobs requiring such labor has increased---the opposite of your premise that modern economies actually produce fewer of these jobs.

I believe that the USA imported more, not fewer, people (in relation to its own population) a century ago compared to today. If that is the case, my premise is not threatened.


Have a nice time!

Peter Gustafsson

[Inquartata]

Originally Posted by PeterGustafsson

Only if the importation is demand-driven, as is the case with importation of goods (oil, raw metals, foodstuffs, etc.) Importation of unskilled labor is, on the contrary, supply-driven - some dirt-poor Mexican decides that life as an illegal in USA can not be worse than his present life, and it is worth a try to come in.

No, it's still demand-driven. By most estimates the US economy is going to need all those immigrant workers, and then some, to run the economy as its native population ages and grows slowly or not at all. ( Which is why I am in favor of substantially increasing and streamlining the opportunities for LEGAL immigration; the current process is nighmarishly restrictive. ) If there were no jobs here, the word of mouth would not go back south and the tide of illegals would slow to a trickle. But jobs there are, and in plentitude.

I believe that the USA imported more, not fewer, people (in relation to its own population) a century ago compared to today. If that is the case, my premise is not threatened.

I don't think that's the case. Immigrants did not threaten to become the majority in several states a century ago, as they are doing now. Moreover, what occurred before was primarily legal, controlled immigration, not a tidal wave of illegal border-crashers...

[PeterGustafsson]

Hi!

Originally Posted by Inquartata

No, it's still demand-driven.

What do you mean by that? By supply-driven, I meant the immigration decision is made by the individual person outside of the USA. Importation of goods, OTOH, is decided by the buyer in USA - which is what I mean by demand-driven.

Originally Posted by Inquartata

By most estimates the US economy is going to need all those immigrant workers, and then some, to run the economy as its native population ages and grows slowly or not at all.

According to stats I have seen in Newsweek, the USA has the highest birthrate among all 1st world countries, and that by a substantiable margin.

Originally Posted by Inquartata

If there were no jobs here, the word of mouth would not go back south and the tide of illegals would slow to a trickle. But jobs there are, and in plentitude.

OK, then this depends on the fact that many people think that the possibilities are substantially better in the USA - so much better so that a move is worth it.

What then when this is not the case? What to do when the economies in Latin America are good enough so that most people can live reasonably comfortably there? Do try to take the long view - do not focus solely on this century! What you are focusing on is immigration, which only shuffles people around the world, it does not (in general) educate them.

Originally Posted by Inquartata

I don't think that's the case. Immigrants did not threaten to become the majority in several states a century ago, as they are doing now. Moreover, what occurred before was primarily legal, controlled immigration, not a tidal wave of illegal border-crashers...

Immigrants becoming a majority? Seems questionable to me. Do you have links to stats? Strange thing that the strongest country in the world can not control its borders - I guess that employers like it that way, and do not want the illegal immigrant flow to stop. Dems, OTOH, have to think about their Latino voter block.

Back to original topic - I think that your suggestion about public works projects is the best one so far in this thread.


Have a nice time!

Peter Gustafsson

[Inquartata]

Originally Posted by PeterGustafsson

What do you mean by that? By supply-driven, I meant the immigration decision is made by the individual person outside of the USA. Importation of goods, OTOH, is decided by the buyer in USA - which is what I mean by demand-driven.

I mean that there is a demand for the workers here. If there were not, the supply would not keep flowing as it does. The jobs drive the decisions to come north, the drive does not simply spring fully armed from the foreheads of the peons...

According to stats I have seen in Newsweek, the USA has the highest birthrate among all 1st world countries, and that by a substantiable margin.

And why? Because of the millions of immigrants from more prolific cultures who have come here and are having children...who then become citizens automatically by virtue of being born here.

If your county's natural birth rate is about 1 child per family, and you have a sudden influx of families from countries whose natural birth rate is, say, 6 per family, what happens to your average rate?

OK, then this depends on the fact that many people think that the possibilities are substantially better in the USA - so much better so that a move is worth it.

They don't just think it, they are correct in thinking it. And they are told that they are correct in thinking it, by friends and relatives and even their own governments. They are told it because it's the truth, and it's the truth because there are jobs here. Jobs which for one reason or another aren't being taken by unskilled native workers.

What then when this is not the case? What to do when the economies in Latin America are good enough so that most people can live reasonably comfortably there?

Call me a pessimist, I don't believe that's very likely ever to happen. There are too many obstacles to industrialization there, from poor resource endowments to political instabilities to the fact that those whom the status quo favors act in ways which preserve the status quo.

Do try to take the long view - do not focus solely on this century! What you are focusing on is immigration, which only shuffles people around the world, it does not (in general) educate them.