Anything that can be taught, can be replaced. Even jobs that depend on soft skills and physical presence can be replaced by telepresence and remote controlled robots. Hundreds of years from now, the only real jobs might be jobs like art, acting, writing and homemade crafts. An interesting reversal. I think it is at the point that anyone who can't build a "brand" and anyone who can't build a market for himself, can lose everything.
Maybe the baseline for an advanced economy like the U.S. is:
20% of people have good jobs,
50% of people, mediocre jobs
25% of people, lousy jobs,
and 5% of people, no jobs at all.
And when I talk about things like this in the real world, I often get answers like, we need to improve school, or we need to think about technical or trade education like we used to have.
Sometimes I even get answers like, well, you need to have a resume which really highlights your attributes.
That is, people are almost incapable of seeing the social justice dynamics. Or, it's as if people need to believe in the just world hypothesis in order to effectively engage and maneuver in their everyday lives.
And a meritocracy is not enough. Even if it were a meritocracy, which we know it's not, or even if it's a creaky meritocracy which some might argue is good enough, how is it morally acceptable to have good jobs for only a fraction of the adult populations. And how is 5% unemployment morally acceptable at all? Well, European countries have even larger than 5%, probably in considerable part due to the wrong regulation or clumsy implementation of regulation. It's a feature of the world. In a sense we have to accept it. But I think we should question it.
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Okay, one thing, if we could move to a more multi-path world rather than a single-path world, I think that would be a big improvement. You probably know what I mean by that, but I'd be happy to explain it some more.