There are a fair number of comments dismissing this issue with a "retrain or get left behind" and expressing not a lot of sympathy for those who don't.
Remember, the average IQ in the US is just below 100[1]. Exactly what kind of jobs do you expect to retrain these people for? And how are they equipped to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps?
Most of these jobs provided on the job training or apprenticeships so it's not even a matter of "they did it once they can do it again".
Also, many are battling obesity and related illnesses such as diabetes or struggling with mental illness and/or addiction.
We need a systemic overhaul of the economic system and soon. Self driving vehicles will put 3-5 million out of work in the next decade.
To me, the economic difficulties of the millennial generation are an indicator that primary-training through college doesn't really pay off as well as it used to because the margins have been eaten at both ends. Schools cost too much with debt individually loaded onto the student, and the wages from jobs that are available have been optimally minimized by years of corporate 'efficiency'. I don't think this is a fundamental problem of people choosing low-paying majors, it think it is a fundamental problem of our economy not knowing how to productively employ enough people trained at some level of education regardless of major (and really it doesn't know in large part because it accounts for wages in a way that incorrectly captures the relation to optimize ofr system-wide economic improvement).
The limits for displaced workers are similar but worse, the margins at both ends for re-training are even smaller, and the payoff periods to provide return on training-investment are much shorter. Companies have basically divested themselves of in-house training because they themselves can't/aren't building financial models to justify the training investment. But somehow individuals with some level of minimal gov't 'help' are supposed to pickup the tab to do it?
In our economic philosophy, there needs to be an a channel that allows for optimization in ways that conventional economics cannot account correctly. E.g. we have to start to differentiate between capital power used to lock-in markets vs the use of power to be competitively offer value to society in the long term. If the profit accounting is wrong, then the optimizations are wrong for society or the physical world and we collectively make a mass of individual decisions in a bubble of financial rules that don't pay off for the whole system.
That's the only to fix economics in the long run in mature economies - otherwise the imbalance of power between capital and labor creates downward pressure on wages that drives the long term destabilization of the entire system.
The issue isn't just driving jobs, or at least that's only part of the more complex issue.
In reality, it's more like a "death by a thousand cuts".
To give you a concrete example, I work in e-commerce and part of the automation we're building will eliminate 2 full-time jobs on the side of the manufacturer - people who are just entering orders manually, instead of using some form of EDI that forwards the order from the customer directly to the dropshipper. While that sounds insignificant, consider that this is only for a single business relationship between 2 fairly small companies.
There are tens of thousands of companies like this in the US and once those automated systems are in place, those jobs aren't coming back.
Believe it or not, there are still lots of things being done by hand in small and medium-sized businesses, my guess is automation could easily shrink their required labor by 10-15% over the next decade as well.
Yeah, driving is only an example, a large one to provide scope of the problem. It's a lot of people and they can't all be retrained for new jobs ... there isn't that many new jobs for them to train for.
If the two options are retraining vs an overhaul of the economic system, I think retraining is much more likely.
No one wants to change careers. I certainly don't. But the economic realities are what they are. It would be nice to change the economy with basic income or government work programs, both of which I'm in favor of. I just don't see how that will realistically happen in the next 10-15 years.
So we need to make retraining great again. Invest time and money into making the process easy, affordable and open to as many people as possible. Maybe we need more schools, or organized apprenticeship programs or maybe teaching robots. This is a problem that has to be solved with innovations in business and/or technology. At least until we can gain the political position to make major changes to our financial and economic ways of life.
How to do you "retrain" to get abstract "skills in areas like critical thinking and problem-solving"? When I think "retraining" I think training to perform a different kind of routine job in a different domain or industry. For example, decades ago, the NYT retrained its Linotype operators to a similar computer data entry job[1].
Retrain for what exactly? If driverless trucks and cars eliminate a several million truck drivers and taxi cab drivers where do we find jobs to replace those lost occupations?
We have millions of underemployed people already, working 30 hours a week at Walmart and similar jobs. It's not like there are millions of jobs just looking for trained people to fill them.
How do you make retraining great again? It's easy to say, but I have never heard anyone ever actually suggest a way, or for that matter suggest anything that people can be retrained for.
me too. i also think it's more likely to fail, because there's no way in hell that we can muster enough resources to effectively retrain millions of people in the current political climate-- or the one of the past two presidencies here in the US (just trying to get in front of the partisan bickering, as it's not my main point at all). a half measure isn't going to work here.
>But the economic realities are what they are
agreed. the economic realities are going to be that the people who we end up not retraining due to political inaction are going to be impoverished as they grow older, resulting in their children becoming more impoverished as well. sure, they might try to retrain on their own, but that's a tiny, tiny minority.
>I just don't see how that will realistically happen in the next 10-15 years.
not under our current levels of distractedness and passiveness, no. a tipping-point crisis will crystallize the problems caused by the slow burning of an obsolete workforce. i don't know when that will be, but it's coming.
>This is a problem that has to be solved with innovations in business and/or technology. At least until we can gain the political position to make major changes to our financial and economic ways of life
political positions to solve slow and quiet problems don't tend to materialize before it's too late to do anything meaningful...
my main point here is that a lot of political capital needs to be built regardless of proposed solution. as it stands, the common people are serfs who stand to lose their ability to work the land... i think that it's likely that the concept of american "democracy" itself will enter into a severe crisis as a result of the economic/jobs problems that we're having.
I agree that a big part of the solution lies in retraining -- as a new way of life. In the future, no job will last long. We all must retrain continuously.
But making training the new norm will require big changes to the status quo of how companies retain skilled employees.
First, we need a much better model for skill credentialism. College degrees are way too slow, too broad, and rarely meet the specific immediate needs of business. Some sort of microdegree equal to 1-4 college courses (and more substantial than today's pop MOOCs) sound about right. But their instruction model also needs to be much more flexible and time-insensitive, so working people aren't locked into semester-based schedules. And student social interaction in MOOCs needs to be much improved over the 1990-era forum message chains I've seen.
Second, we need to encourage employers to spend money and time for retraining. And in return, we need to assure them their newly-skilled employee won't soon take their newfound skills and hop to a better paying job. This requires a contract like those between employees/unions and employers in Europe, but largely absent in the US.
Third, employees probably will have to change jobs more frequently. Thus the system needs to make these job hops smoother, steadying employee cashflow to support long-term debt like mortgages, and minimize risks like making health care coverage liquid and independent of employers.
Unfortunately such big changes will require all involved -- employees, educators, insurers, and employers -- to discard their venerated focus on short-term ROI and cost reduction. Unfortunately existing US practices seem almost perfectly unprepared to act gracefully and quickly. While in contrast, Germany, with its longstanding state support for low-cost education, mobile health insurance, union-business partnerships, and skilled jobs that don't require college degrees, seems ideally positioned.
And of course all this has to happen pretty quickly, while we John Henrys can still compete with the machines.
I agree with your diagnosis, but I fear the knee jerk reaction to solve it with government programs. In my mind, we need to do more lateral thinking on what can make value for the economy and why.
What's a better idea than gov't programs for adult education / job training? Most companies aren't interested in investing the resources to retrain employees unless training lasts a few months at most.
Even market solutions will require a lot of gov't interference to work imo (things like job "mortgages" i.e. student loans for adults).
Job training and retraining programs don't work very well, which is why you see so many interviews with people who have done 5-10 of them. There are a number of studies that show this, and none (that I am aware of) which demonstrate good efficacy (and I would expect the programs to trumpet the latter result).
Perhaps some sort of improved retraining program would work, but I don't think we should be dumping money into the existing programs. I should also add that I would very much like these programs to work, and am very disappointed that they don't, as I believe that skilled jobs help the worker lead a happier, more fulfilling life, as well as helping the people who benefit from the work product.
> as I believe that skilled jobs help the worker lead a happier, more fulfilling life, as well as helping the people who benefit from the work product
I can't really speak to the second assertion here, but I wanted to chime in from the other side of the first.
I'm a mid level developer (late twenties) and if I could find a job that was 'routine' that paid what I make now, and kept me from having to deal with the public, I would take it in a heartbeat. Programming is interesting, sure, but the days that it's an absolute grind are awful. I'd gladly take a job that would let me stay out of the way of the people who are very much passionate about our shared profession.
Second. Time flexibility and total compensation are the only things that make software development more appealing to me than any number of low-skill jobs. They're biggies, but the job itself is energy-draining and inherently unhealthy (yes you can compensate with exercise, but that's the point—you have to) at best. I'd take one of those sorts of jobs where you can read/write/study during copious down time, or a semi-creative job with a fair amount of gross motor skill work (certain construction and landscaping roles, for example) over it any day, if the only concern were the work itself.
If you are interested in learning more about the history and failure of US job training I recommend "The Job Training Charade".
Essentially it is one of those policies that sounds good and appeals to both sides of the aisle. However decades of experience with different programs has shown it doesn't work.
There is even a study mentioned in the book showing a statistically significant negative impact of job training on employment.
I think my main point is we can't keep solving this problem with "more training and education" (regardless of where it is coming from). An individual can only learn so much and only cares so much about whatever widget you put before them. What we need is more work the unskilled but capable can do with little new learning.
The best thing for education and job training is for an individual to have a vision of what it is they're working towards. Teach men to build boats by loving the sea, yadda, yadda.
Companies should have an incentive to invest in the training of their employees - it seems they're always claiming that the people they're looking for just don't exist, and it comes off like they want people to emerge from the head of Athena fully-formed and ready to work to the company's specific needs.
It doesn't need to be the whole solution - regular education and training still plays a big part, because many skills are general enough - but there should be some responsibility for a company to help develop the employees that it needs. (Maybe through tax incentives or what-have-you.)
This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of IQ as a measurement. IQ is defined as a normal distribution with a median of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. The average IQ in the US is 100 for any IQ test calibrated to measure the US population. No absolute statements regarding intelligence can be made on the basis of IQs; only relative statements about how an individual fits into the normal distribution measured by the test.
This ignores the flaws in Flynn and Vanhanen's study when it came to calculating IQ scores for different countries. They used incomplete data sets collected at different times using different tests. For 104 out of 185 countries, they had no data available at all. Instead, they averaged neighboring or comparable countries - for instance El Salvador is an average of Guatemala and Colombia while Kyrgyzstan is an average of Iran and Turkey.
I think it is fair to say that the average IQ for $COUNTRY is 100. This is a meaningless statement when it comes to discussing macroeconomics or comparing countries on the basis of IQ.
That's true, but it also seems kinda irrelevant to the OP (the link happens to be the 1st result for a google search of "us average iq"[1], so I think it was just a quickie cite to back up a statistic). Average IQ people (e.g. the welders and bank tellers) don't seem like they're in demand for high-demand knowledge-work jobs, so retraining is probably not the answer to any economic woes they're experiencing.
Exactly. I have read over and over that US IQ rates tend lower than international. The point is it's even worse to try to train up US citizens to jobs requiring higher cognitive capacity.
This completely misses my point as I'm only using IQ as a stand in for cognitive abilities, cognitive abilities that are required to retrain and function in non-repetitive occupations.
By that argument my IQ is 100 because I have the median score of the population consisting of myself. Of course, when using an IQ test calibrated for a larger population, my IQ is something different. Similarly, it makes perfect sense for the average IQ of a country to be different from 100 when using a test calibrated for a population that is a superset of the country's population.
By definition, 50% of the population has an IQ between 90 and 110. While it is plausible that there is a disproportionately low number of HN commenters in the bottom quartile for IQ, I believe that the majority, if not the plurality, of HN commenters will fall in the range of (90, 110).
35% of the US population over 25 has a Bachelor's degree. Assuming that, say, the top 40% in IQ of the total population is capable of completing such a degree and that HN commenters are a randomly distributed subset of that population, that would leave a lower bound for IQ of 104 and a median IQ of 113.
The reality is that IQ is unlikely to be the limiting factor when it comes to whether or not it is possible to retrain large portions of the working population.
Please try not to put words in the mouths of your opponents; it doesn't help anyone. Address their concerns, give them a new perspective, and try to understand why they really disagree with you. Despite your intuitions, you are not a better person than all 61.9 million Trump voters (or all 63.6 million Clinton voters).
I'm not "putting" words in his mouth. I have watched all 3 debates, a few televised rallies he did during the primaries. I also pay attention to his twitter feed.
My "intuitions" indicate that he attacked an Indiana union leader over not doing enough and being laggard. Oh, that's not an intuition, that's a recorded fact.
There's plenty other places I could cite from. But the underlying idea here, is that you don't become a business leader unless you walk on other people, crack some heads, and beat them. And yet, somehow he's supposed to think of the little guy? Which one of the countless people he's screwed over are you refferring to?
I don't think there's anything "garden-variety" happening coming up. And what else is this place, than a discussion about tough topics?
My flagkilled post expands greatly on the sentiment of that commentary. The fact of the matter is, people with low income are not targeted(for the most part) by entrepreneurs. Along the same idea, those very people have little to no input in the economy ~ they are non-entities. I've seen plenty of posts discussing this very fact to people digging around for an idea to exploit... and the general consensus is "stay away from poor people, they have no money".
And yes, I have disdain towards Trump, and a lesser extent, republicans. I've also shared previous disdain towards democrats as well.
But the crux here is, what is to be done with low income people with limited skills? It costs money/time for skills, which they have little of. What's the downside of writing them off? (Obviously, dang is doing his work on UBI, and throwing away millions of people isn't my point in this discussion.)
> And what else is this place, than a discussion about tough topics?
HN is a place for the gratification of intellectual curiosity. Partisan sniping isn't compatible with that—indeed there's nothing that destroys it faster—so we should keep it out of our comments here.
Remember, the average IQ in the US is just below 100[1]. Exactly what kind of jobs do you expect to retrain these people for? And how are they equipped to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps?
Most of these jobs provided on the job training or apprenticeships so it's not even a matter of "they did it once they can do it again".
Also, many are battling obesity and related illnesses such as diabetes or struggling with mental illness and/or addiction.
We need a systemic overhaul of the economic system and soon. Self driving vehicles will put 3-5 million out of work in the next decade.
[1] https://iq-research.info/en/page/average-iq-by-country#