Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[Jeff Buchanan]

Yeah, good piece from the Monitor.

Regarding job retraining, I'd be interested to know the cost to that guy. I'm in a disrupted profession; I'd like to get another degree. But universities are just another shark in the tank. The American-capitalism style commercialization of education is exacerbating the problem.

On the cost of retraining ...... I think one of the displaced in Spain in that article, payed $90us with a portion of the bill picked up by the government.

For me, one of the major points made was how the Europeans have always had a sharp focus on trade schools. It never occurred to me though how important that focus and those redirection efforts are to maintaining a sustainable middle class - an absolute requirement, IMO, to sustain capitalism and free markets as underpinning concepts to a nation's economy.

I'm also in agreement with you about the "shark tank" aspects of educational programs, of all types, in the US. That's because, in the US, there appears to be a disconnect between the work place (industry) and training (educational) institutions compared to other countries.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Jeff, I don't think its a 'referendum' like the talking heads claim.........

I'm skeptical about that. The media in general is whipping this story up.

The outcome of this particular district election is going to depend, as usual, on how many voters show up. In the past, district elections like these have something like a 30-40% voter turnout.

Most Dems figure since Hillary Clinton is not now sitting in the WH, voters didn't come out and vote, thinking her election was a forgone conclusion.

They've really started actively trying to displace sitting Congressmen even in districts that have been R territory for decades. This is one of those circumstances and if the wonks are talking about anything correctly it is that this particular election is a gauge of how effective that Dem effort is going to be going forward.

Even a close loss by Ossoff, a real newbie on the political scene, is going to energize people who believe it is this kind of grass routes work that is going to neutralize Trump and at some future point, end his presidency.

As I've said up thread, its my view that the country is much better off, for a lot of reasons, doing this sort of thing than it is conducting an impeachment process. I will say that if Mueller puts forth evidence in his investigations that Trump either broke the law or acted in such an egregious manner as to support the impeachment process being undertaken, I'll support that.

[hack]

Cart before the horse. You can send quality people to Washington, but if Washington is broken there's not much they can do on arrival.

[Da Geezer]

Jeff: As your friendly local conservative capitalist, I have a couple of reactions to your article.

An interesting statistic, to me, was that youth unemployment in Germany is 6.5%, France 22%, Spain 40%. The difference is attributed to the Germans' view of their apprenticeship program as "noble". What is implied is that the Germans view all work as good, in and of itself. The US used to view it that way, but not so much now.

I honestly have never met a person who did not favor more and better training programs for what I'll call blue-collar jobs. The question, to me, is how do we get the point across to students and parents that all work is of value and honorable, like the Germans have done. The cheapest thing we can change is the mindset.

The undersupply of folks trained for blue collar jobs is partly because we generate an oversupply of "college-educated" ie. white-collar-trained workers. Theoretically, in a capitalist economy, an oversupply of, say, lawyers, would drive their "cost" down. An undersupply of plumbers would make their "cost" greater. Why doesn't this happen?

1. There is a massive subsidy available for white-collar training in the form of student loans. That's why I believe the colleges should be responsible as a "co-signer" of the loan document, and if the student doesn't repay the loan, the college has to. If you think it through, this would also discourage colleges from awarding "feel good" degrees in areas like Women's Studies or Sociology because those students have a poorer chance of repaying their student loans.

2. Europe's historic answer is for the government to "hire" the excess supply of college-educated students for a make-work job pushing paper and writing regulations. That is a cause for their low growth rate over the last 30 years in Europe. White collar work can be non-productive, or even counter-productive. The plumber who unclogs your sink either produces or he might not get paid. In general, it is easier to measure outputs of blue-collar jobs.

3. The most disruptive and harmful "innovation" in my lifetime has been the advent of public sector unions designed to force higher-than-market payments to persons who do foolish jobs that would not even exist in a more capitalistic system. Note here that firemen and police are the blue-collar workers of the public sector because they produce something of value and something that can be measured

I've never seen a disruptive technology, once adopted, that creates fewer net jobs. In the 60s I read a short story called R.U.R. (Rostam's Universal Robots or something like that) and it dealt with robotics replacing humans. Nothing new today. Same debate.

Entropy correctly criticizes me for overly broad statements, and I've tried to do better. I am well aware that we all had a teacher who changed our lives, or a policeman who ran toward the trouble. Nothing I've said is meant to convey "allness". Like health care, there are many moving parts in this debate. Again like health care, the problem here defies a one-size-fits-all solution.

[hack]

The undersupply of folks trained for blue collar jobs is partly because we generate an oversupply of "college-educated" ie. white-collar-trained workers. Theoretically, in a capitalist economy, an oversupply of, say, lawyers, would drive their "cost" down. An undersupply of plumbers would make their "cost" greater. Why doesn't this happen?


I think it does. I think the average plumber has greater earnings power than I do -- certainly I've met a few. The going rate for magazine feature writing has been $1/word for the past 20 years or so. And there are fewer places from which you can get that rate.

[froot loops]

I have a feel good degree in a Social Science major, I have never applied it in a direct application in a career and yet the degree has helped in every step of the way.

[hack]

The Big Four are swinging back that way -- beyond the numbers crunchers they want people who can think, and believe a general arts degree gets them that.

[THE_WIZARD_]

shaddup

[iam416]

There are ample training opportunities in the US and opportunities to procure an affordable education. Part of it is making these opportunities socially acceptable education alternatives.

[froot loops]

I wonder about the retraining argument and making trade schools more socially acceptable is this a case of playing around the margins. The campaign of 2016 focused an awful lot on manufacturing jobs and jobs like mining coal. A lot of industries that aren't coming back to the glory days of yesteryear. So say you make the trade schools more socially acceptable and people retrain for these jobs. What percentage does it take of those displaced workers?

There are many fields in which at least a BA Is preferrable but we have a shortage, there is a big deficit of tech workers, so companies bring in workers from places like India or they offshore the work. I hear a lot about how the anti-immigration forces want to limit the H1B visas, but they spend little time talking about how they would address a bigger shortage in the labor pool and or these multinational companies just off shoring more jobs because India doesn't have that lack of tech workers.

[hack]

An interesting conversation around the dinner table last Christmas, in which my teenage niece talked about the trades as an alternative to university. My brother-in-law is a plumber and told her to go to college. Forget about the money, he said -- some blue-collar jobs pay well, but you often end up giving your body to it. His point was that anyone who can work with their head and not their hands should not turn up a nose at that. Even if the market is suddenly very mushy for a lot of white-collar soft skills.

Just an anecdote. And, of course, a mass migration away from where jobs are needed isn't going to work for everyone. Will certainly be a solution for some.

I do think that for plenty of people, the line between a rewarding and remunerative career is often set by how much you pay to get the qualification. If you don't have to graduate with a pile of debt, it's a big difference. No matter what happens, university tuition needs to be addressed. It doesn't need to rise as fast as it does. Canadian schools are still laughably cheap, and probably are all better than 80% of US tertiaries. Private schools can do what they want, but the public ones need to be affordable alternatives.

[WM Wolverine]

My experience is those that graduated from a quality 4-year University are more well-rounded than those who go to community college and/or tech/trade schools. Both are similarly skilled in my field (IT) to start however it's [generally] easily detectable who went to a University and those that did will have an advantage at climbing higher in the company...

For tech workers there is a major need to continue education after college to keep up with the latest skills. Plenty of programmers aged 35-50 are falling behind those in their late 20's because they aren't continuing their education in a field where the relevant skills are evolving with evolving technology.

[iam416]

I think with a normal bell-curve distribution of capabilities ought to see a normal bell-curve distribution of educational paths. My visceral thought is that the latter is skewed significantly toward Universities.

Alternative paths isn't THE answer, but they have to be part of any comprehensive education policy. I'd also love Universities to rethink some of their programs and create more cost-friendly options. I don't much care if a Mechanical Engineer grad has a semester's credits worth of arts classes. Streamline some degrees.

But, all that being said, our University system seems to do a pretty good job in the sense of producing enough really talented people to advance the economy (and attracting millions from around the world). The inefficiencies are problematic as are secondary and tertiary paths.

[THE_WIZARD_]

Uh huh huh huh huh....you said tertiary

[Jeff Buchanan]

....... The inefficiencies are problematic as are secondary and tertiary paths.

4y ago, my daughter received her PhD in Biomedical Engineering. I attended the graduation ceremony that included all PhD recipients attending the various VaTech programs (probably 8-10 of them). There were more oldish looking fat professors in stupid looking hats and colorful robes than graduates ......by a 10:1 margin at least. These guys took up over 1/2 the auditorium.

Keeping all these dudes - all of them with tenure, I assumed - on pretty damn high salaries - is part of the reason tuition has skyrocket.

I strongly agree with the suggestion that University training is inefficient but you are never going to unseat these people from their cushy jobs; nor is there going to be any concrete discussions taking place in the halls of academia that involves streamlining curricula as suggested above no matter how important this might be.