In interviews, the second most common question I get asked is, "Why don't you have a degree?" followed by "Are you planning on going back?". More than often, the questions have a strong No True Scotsman feeling to them. My experience is solid and my personal projects are fun and reflect passion. Yet, not having a degree is a detriment to me somehow still. Why? I can't think of a single good reason why so many employers would think that way.
Hell, friends and family still try to get me to go back to school, too. I've yet to find a good way to explain why school isn't useful and an enormous waste of time for me. It's always, always followed up with the argument that I have less job opportunities, which is fine. I wouldn't want to work at a company that would limit me like that, anyway.
If it happens to me with a good background and strong skills set, then it happens to others, but worse - especially if you're just starting out.
>Yet, not having a degree is a detriment to me somehow still. Why? I can't think of a single good reason why so many employers would think that way.
Since employers can't give IQ tests any more, they have come to rely on your college alma mater as a proxy for an IQ test. If you don't go to college, they don't know how you fit in with other candidates.
Employers will learn soon enough that the best and brightest in IT think actually think critically and know that university education is a negative, and probably will be for at least the next 5 years to a decade. Tech schools and accomplishments are where it's at.
I disagree. What makes you think that the best and brightest don't go to college and do a PhD? Not everybody wants to make as much money as possible as soon as possible.
The employers I worked for that did know that are no longer in business. No accusation of correlation here, just that this once was not at all uncommon.
Strangely, even after publishing books in my field, people still ask me if I'm ever going back to finish my degree.
Stranger still, the US government gave me a genius visa (O-1) despite my not having graduated.
I think it's one of those "If I had to do it, you have to do it" type situations. Or people are just curious and wonder if I'm ever going back to school. It's hard to tell sometimes.
Yeah, both definitely happen. A majority of it feels like it's the former, though. Usually it's the same crowd that has huge knowledge gaps and gets offended at being corrected.
I apply at a lot of places and have a lot of interviews since I prefer to do contract work nowadays. For a while, a lot of that included practice interviews for places I wasn't really interested in, but wanted to get a better feel for the job market. Interest vs a lack of interest doesn't seem to change the education question sets.
But that's not really the point. The point is that surface level things trump all else. Companies in all flavors - big, small, startup, medium, etc - all do it.
What America needs are institutions similar to that of the apprenticeship programs of Western Europe. I came out of a one year job training program operating out of a non-profit with corporate partners (similar to the way it works in parts of the EU) that consists of college credit classes and industry experience. This lowers the barrier to entry for most young adults (like myself) to get into the job market and jump-start a career without going into debt.
After three years of graduating this program, I've now gone full circle working for a startup that supports the process of grant-making for foundations. That all being said, I recently put my income into fusion.net's millennial wage gap calculator to find that I come out into the top 6% of my generational cohort at a gross wage of 72k (at 23, I realize I'm an outlier). When I take into account that the majority of my friends around my are are still working service/retail jobs, I feel like something in our system needs to change before we experience a reckoning with a generation of kids with dead-end jobs.
I went to University back in 89-90 in Munich Germany while my dad was in the military. When the first Iraq war broke out he went and I ended up heading home. I did some night schools, but never got a degree. In 96 there was a program in Columbus, Ga, called ICAPP. It was sponsored by Synovus, Aflac and Blue Cross Blue Shield. Thousands tried out for it, and after much testing, interviewing, etc it came down to about 60 of us making it in. We got paid to go through a program that taught us Assembler, COBOL, IMS, DB2, and other mainframe development skills for 6 months. After that we were guaranteed a job at one of those companies. If you worked in Georgia for 4 years your loan was forgiven. I took a job in Atlanta at Total Systems, a company owned by Synovus. 20 years later I'm an application architect making $155k at a different company in Atlanta. I have no degree. When I finished the program it counted as college credit and I was 11 credits shy of a Bachelors, but I don't see what that will do these days. I have 20 years real world experience, and in case you're wondering, the latest project I'm leading is a NERD stack app (Node, Express, React, Database). I quit the mainframe job back in 99. I wish there were more programs like that.
The American story, reinforced regularly with research and articles like this one, has no category for professional or vocational training. The story is simply "how much university education do you have". If you go and train to be an electrician, you're the same as a high-school graduate.
So yeah, I agree, this is a big cultural problem the US faces.
It seems like skilled trades are kind of ignored in tech circles, largely because we rarely use them. (Calling the HVAC repairmen is the landlord's job.)
I agree. There were many kids in secondary school who would typically have the attitude of "when am I ever going to use this when I get a job" so they only half heartedly put any effort into school --more or less thinking they'd get jobs through friends, friends'' moms and dads, etc.
So, agreed, not everyone has the aptitude and need some vocational funnel. The problem with a place like the US (but not in Japan or China or to a lesser Germany) is that people will begin to ask why so many kids of this or that group are overrepresented in a vocational tract --given that disposition may be determined early on to be effective.
Still worth a try. And, to add, a system to help long-time workers transition into new jobs --through some kind of (un)employment insurance or mechanism with the same effect.
Curiously, the breakdown of degrees by demographic doesn't include employment. The article seems to make the case that people should seek institutional education. Broadly, that makes sense, there are pretty traditional(ancient) precedents for apprenticeships and there are newer alternatives in the education system. Vocational schools were mentioned, and are also a good way to learn a skill.
The weird thing about the article, or at least, with a title like It's a Tough Job Market for the Young Without Degrees is it seems to imply that the job market is tough for people without degrees, but is otherwise healthy. That doesn't seem correct, and there does not seem to be any information in the article indicating that Vynny Brown's (interviewed in the article) 20 year old peers are faring much better than he is. So, the article isn't incorrect in some points it makes like retraining the workforce is important, university education isn't the only type of education, ect, however it doesn't really explain the meta-problem.
The job market is tough because there is increased outsourcing in physical/human-centric work and simultaneously(even in manufacturing) improved technology, step-changes in process engineering and the electronic automation of simple tasks have removed a lot of jobs from the economy and for some that do exists, significantly limited the perceived value society has for them, limiting earning potetnial.
> Among 17- to 24-year-olds, just over 10 percent have completed college or achieved an advanced degree.
This seems like a weird statistic to highlight. Even if everyone were going to and completing college, wouldn't you expect that most of this group (eg those under about 22) to have not yet completed their degree?
I don't understand the 17 to 24 age range for the college degree statistic. Isn't the percentage for anyone under 21 practically zero? Seems like that would be skewing the statistic pretty dramatically.
They didn't take a study specifically to find out how many people have a college degree, they likely did a study of studies tracking all the studies (of which there are many) that somewhere ask people their age and education level.
Mapping all that together gives you this result.
Most studies that aren't about age-specific tasks or topics will gradiate on 17-20 / 20-24.
Remember all those studies that look at teenage pregnancy rates in the 17-20 age? Heh, studies of studies.
For another perspective, Mike Rowe (of "Dirty Jobs" fame) has a foundation to promote blue collar jobs. They even provide scholarships for training in a trade: http://profoundlydisconnected.com/
A college degree is the new high school degree. You pretty much top out in the upper teens per hour without a degree: and that's if you're lucky.
I've been on both sides. Since getting my undergrads in Comp Sci and MIS I make more money than I ever thought I would. Before this I got a job driving buses for the city making ~$10.50/hr and I thought that was all the money in the world.
Same boat here. High school dropout, semi-professional musician / food-service worker, then got my CS degree at age 27.
Being on both sides is interesting, and in some ways I'm thankful I lived off a low without even a high school degree just for the life experience. I still ride the same bicycle, drive the same car, etc. I try not to forget how much a dollar is worth but it can be hard sometimes.
My life back then was far harder and far more stressful. It's hard being in front of people (food service worker) and dealing with customers for a lot of us -- it takes an emotional toll. I have a fairly lax schedule now and make almost eight times as much money. I hope that someday anyone can make a living wage if they work hard, whether they flip burgers or write enterprise Java spaghetti code.
Surely flipping burgers is a step up from Java coding? Asking if they want fries with that is better than having to endure the shit-fest of eclipse, and the horrors of Java development
I'm lucky enough to love the people I work with, have a consistent 40-hour work week, and get paid a decent wage. It's GWT development so it's a mixture of Java / Javascript / Sass.
And yes I use IntelliJ which makes Java very very bearable.
This is right on the money. Going to uni felt like an extension of high school -- same students, same teachers. Nobody ever seemed like they wanted to be there; they just wanted to grind out their Bachelor's: an educational milestone no longer seen as optional.
Of course, it goes without saying that things are a little different in technology. Many job listings I came across required a BS, but an equal amount did not (or added the caveat 'or equivalent experience'). I'm currently happily and gainfully employed with no degree from a university.
This isn't entirely true. People have been making good money for ages in specialized trades (electricians, plumbers, etc). However, it's arguable that their apprenticeship is equivalent to a degree. In addition, there are plenty of people in technical fields who manage to make up for education with self-teaching and real world experience. This probably becomes an obstacle when applying for jobs through automated HR systems, but I've noticed that those aren't nearly as useful as networking and knowing people anyway.
We're rapidly approaching the point where the utility of an untrained, low-skill worker is less than the cost of technology to replace them.
Self-service checkout lines for retail are already an improvement - how long until fast-food restaurants simply turn around the POS systems at the counter, and you have Siri or Cortana taking your order at the drive-through?
The floor for employability is getting higher, and I'm worried for the people with low ceilings.
Current self service checkouts are far from what they should be. Ideally we'd have an rfid gate which you pass through that scans all the items in your cart without scanning them manually.
What a goofy thing to think. Effective minimum wage(that is, min. wage adjusted for inflation) has been slowly declining for decades. Minimum wage isn't getting higher, it's getting slowly lower.
> Effective minimum wage(that is, min. wage adjusted for inflation) has been slowly declining for decades. Minimum wage isn't getting higher, it's getting slowly lower.
This is simply not true.
Minimum wage was introduced in 1938, and was for a whopping $0.25 per hour. This is about $4.22 per hour in 2016 dollars. Federal minimum wage is currently at $7.25. Some states have even higher minimum wages, with California coming in at $10.00 (soon to coast up to $15.00 per hour in the next few years).
So no, the purchasing power of minimum wage is not getting lower, quite the opposite.
In
1969 the minimum wage was 1.4$/hour which works out to $10.34 in 2012 dollars. You can go back to 1956 and see eq $8.29 or forward to 1972 @ eq $9.10 vs now at less than 7.25$ in 2012 dollars. More recently it peaked in 2009 and has fallen every year after that currently it's down 15%.
PS: In fact you need to go back to 1949 to find a worse year than 2006.
What you are tracking (and cherry picking) is the inflation rate, which naturally goes up and down over time. My point was, and remains, people are paid more today on a minimum, than they ever were intended to be when this program was created in 1938.
Minimum wage was intended as a baseline for unskilled entry-level jobs. Our issue today is we have a tremendous amount of folks, more than ever imagined, attempting to survive on minimum wage.
The solution is staunchly not to just give folks more money; we've been trying that for 78 years and we still have the same problem.
The solution is to enable people to support themselves off and above a minimum wage. We do this by empowering folks to get higher education and/or highly skilled job training.
We should not have 50+ year olds working the cash register at Walmart. That's a failure of society... and we're not working on solving that problem. Instead, we just want an easy out; toss cash at them so we don't have to think about this for another couple of years, never-mind that same 50 year old is still working the cash register at Walmart! That's a flat cop-out.
Inflation rate is just that a rate, not adjusting for it after 7 years because fuck people with limited mental capacity is sick.
As to trying things for 78 years we have very different problems now vs 78 years ago. To pretend otherwise is to simply act the fool.
There are many popular ideas that simply don't work. Pretending everyone is a healthy, intelligent, well educated, and they can just make everything better by working harder is one of them. People have been working harder, productivity keeps growing but for a huge chunk of the population things have been getting worse over time. And that my friend is a very dangerous trend.
> because fuck people with limited mental capacity is sick.
Handing people more money for nothing does not solve their problems in the long term. If anything, 78 years of minimum wage has definitively proven this.
When inflation goes up, as it does, they'll all be right where they are today. Why solve today what you can solve tomorrow? Now, that's truly sick.
> we have very different problems now vs 78 years ago
We don't have different problems. Minimum wage was implemented to help prevent folks from working all day only to not be capable of affording life... this is exactly what we're debating today. So, 78 years later, we still haven't solved this issue...
> People have been working harder
Have they? Working harder today is a different notion than working harder in 1938. Today, we require education and highly skilled workers. Yet, we have a major shortage of exactly that. Why is this? Well, many reasons, but among them is our societal indifference to encouraging or mandating folks get high skilled training or a higher education. There's a big push today exactly against folks getting education and/or high skilled training, and you seem to be arguing this as well.
More money is a short term solution. It doesn't solve anything long term. It hasn't worked for 78 years, and it won't work for another 78 years. To use your words... "To pretend otherwise is to simply act the fool".
Your confusing politicians letting inflation kill minimum wage with having minimum wage fail.
Second you completely ignored millions of people who can't be significantly educated or handle significant responsibility, but can hold down low skill repetitive jobs.
Put down your blinders and try looking at the real world.
> Second you completely ignored millions of people who can't be significantly educated or handle significant responsibility, but can hold down low skill repetitive jobs
You seem to, at the core of your argument, have little faith in people's capabilities.
> Put down your blinders and try looking at the real world
I've done just that. We have an evolving economy, and we need to put things in place to enable a successful transition. Handing people money for nothing is not part of a successful transition; it only postpones the proper solution. That's wrong.
2.2% of the US population has an IQ below 70.
8.9% of the US population has an IQ below 80.
Not all of these people are capable of being even minimally productive, but some are on the line where they are productive but only in a limited fashion. IQ is of course not the only limitation, intelligent people also often have issues.
> Not all of these people are capable of being even minimally productive
IQ is a horrible indicator, and while influenced by genes, it is also biased by a number of factors, including upbringing environment.
As the son of a teacher, I refuse to accept the notion that our "dumbest" folks aren't capable of learning great things. It's attitudes like the one you're presenting that keep these folks down in the dirt. "They just aren't capable of complicated things!"... what hogwash. Even a person with diagnosed learning disabilities can accomplish great tasks given the proper guidance and training. You would have us just give up on them!
The devil in me questions the point of life if you just sit around and exist... nothing more.
Even the Army has long held minimum standards for mental capabilities. This is backed up by a lot of research.
I am also a son of a teacher, but that's very different than an actual teacher. I can't picture using that to try and argue from authority. Especially when the lowest end of the scale is segregated from everyone else.
Though, I guess wallowing in your ignorance is par for the course.
> I guess wallowing in your ignorance is par for the course
I don't know why you choose to be so hostile? It's a bit condescending, and your position is not any more correct than I.
> Even the Army has long held minimum standards for mental capabilities. This is backed up by a lot of research
And the same was said about women serving in combat roles... until recently.
I also happen to come from a military family, and can attest to the bar being very, very low regarding mental capabilities. I grew up around these folks. It's actually who the military seeks for low rank positions - not independent thinkers, they want compliance without question. You don't get that with highly educated individuals. I know this is anecdotal, but it does have value.
Change your outlook, because it's awful. Having zero faith in people's abilities to rise to meet new challenges is odd, to say the least. You seem content to keep people poor, dumb, and useless. A new economy requires higher level of skills and thought. The time to start brewing that ecosystem is now, not later.
Someone who makes into the Army is a high achiever.
A friend's child is sufficiently handicapped that at 20 he is incapable of speech more complex than grunting. He is still capable of relativly simple tasks. But to asume there is a binary choice where every person is either totally disabled or capable of becoming a fortune 500 CEO if they just worked harder is both idiotic and common.
There are many people with hopes and dreams who are worthy of respect, but simply can't function at a high level. Increasingly we simply throw them to the wolves as even if they can hold down a simple job that's not enough for rent, which starts a cycle of homelessness and often prison.
A living wage is about human decency even for those who have trouble with tasks more complex than mopping a floor.
> Someone who makes into the Army is a high achiever
This is a laughably absurd statement. Majority of enlistees are there exactly because they are not high achievers... A major benefit of the military is the opportunities it provides. They hammer into you responsibility, education, and highly skilled training. Even the lowest performers learn very complex tasks, making the military a fantastic example of what I'm advocating. Perhaps we need programs like this for the general public.
> A friend's child is sufficiently handicapped that at 20 he is incapable of speech more complex than grunting
I feel for your friend, as this is truly an awful thing to have to deal with. However, this is a false dichotomous claim. This scenario does not apply to any majority of folks in this country (or the world), and you're transforming this into a black and white scenario. In addition, certain types of ailments will permanently necessitate assisted living, even in adulthood, which makes your anecdote even less relevant to this discussion.
> is a binary choice where every person is either totally disabled or capable of becoming a fortune 500 CEO if they just worked harder is both idiotic and common
Of course it's not a binary choice. I never asserted as such. What I have asserted is, the future of the economy will depend on highly skilled and/or highly educated workers. The idea of the "working class" must shift - otherwise there's no purpose for them... and an economy cannot function with 50-80% of it's workforce only consuming via funds not earned nor supported (via taxes, because taxing a BI is sort of a ridiculous idea) by them.
> A living wage is about human decency
No it's not. It's about making folks as yourself feel good temporarily. A living wage is never enough. Why not make minimum wage $30 per hour today? It surely would postpone other necessary measures for longer! Inevitably though, we'll have to re-address this issue in a few years time, as we have been doing for 78 years. We have got to figure out a better solution, because the one we have right now is simply not cutting it. Even you agree to this, surely.
So no, I won't accept your defeatist attitude. Give up on the poor and stupid because they'll never amount to anything. Don't bother increasing education and training, because they'll never be capable of anything more than mopping floors. Just give them money and don't think about their problems for a couple of years.
What absurdity.
With this said, we really should end this. You will never agree with me, and I the same with you.
> Of course it's not a binary choice. ...the future...
This is clearly cold comfort to people who went homeless despite multiple full time jobs.
Minimum wage can be tagged to inflation just like Social Security and like all laws it can be changed in a few weeks. Your projecting a future that does not currently exist and many never exist and ignoring millions that are at the border right now.
So what do you propose? Small business should front this enormous burden because society won't install a better solution?
Small business make up 99.7% of all companies in the US, and account for 65% of all jobs created since 1995. [1][2][3][4]. But that's not to say big businesses aren't impacted by this.
The more expensive you make human labor, the more of these unskilled and low education jobs disappear (McDonald's automated kiosks, for example). Small businesses just can't afford to employ as many people, and big businesses turn to increased automation... which is the exact problem you're describing.
This seems to pivot your point to suggesting a BI. If so, then you'll need to adopt the plan I've been advocating this entire time - increased (and/or mandatory) higher education and/or highly skilled training. Otherwise BI falls apart as it won't be a self sustaining economy. Federal revenue is paid for by the workforce in majority (payroll tax + income tax equal about 80% of federal revenue[5]). If the workforce shrinks (and it doesn't make logical sense to tax a BI), then we have a problem.
The plan I've advocated can be adopted and be successful with or without a BI economy. I don't see a better plan coming from you, however.
Purchasing power is going down even faster than inflation for housing, child care, and education. Even if minimum wage was keeping pace with inflation, the very things low income earners need most are outpacing inflation.
It has been getting lower until these increases have kicked in (as they should! without them, everyone else is getting labor at an artificial discount).
The higher the stated minimum wage gets, the lower the real minimum wage gets. You can be certain all other expenses will increase and job benefits will decrease to compensate.
> We should do away with it and replace it with basic income
So instead of encouraging (or mandating?) young folks get trained or educated (or both!), we simply give them money for existing? I don't see how that solves the bigger issue.
We, as a society, are very good at band-aid solutions (like minimum wage from the get-go). We're not good at solving the real hard problems. The real hard problem here is folks are getting neither a good education, nor are being trained for highly skilled jobs. Folks want to have a cake, and eat it too.
This dwells into the highly debated economics of a BI economy, however we do know (and mostly agree) that a shrinking workforce will not be able to sustain a BI. Rather, we need that workforce to evolve into higher level jobs, but this requires even more education and/or highly skilled job training.
There simply aren't enough jobs to go around and automation is wiping out entire career tracks faster than they could possibly be replaced. Example: in the area I grew up in if you weren't headed off to college and didn't want to join the military you always had the option of working on a pulp wood crew. The work was back-breaking, the pay wasn't great, but you could get by and turnover was so high that if you stuck it out for a few years you'd end up running your own crew. Fast forward a couple decades and the work of 60 men with chainsaws, trucks, and manning equipment at the lumber yard has been replaced by three or four heavy equipment operators, a truck driver, and a couple of engineers at the sawmill that monitor the line for faults. That's work that isn't coming back and nothing new has popped up to replace it.
> The real hard problem here is folks are getting neither a good education, nor are being trained for highly skilled jobs. Folks want to have a cake, and eat it too.
Or there are aren't enough jobs? What are you going to do? Will good jobs into existence? That's not going to happen.
> however we do know (and mostly agree) that a shrinking workforce will not be able to sustain a BI.
Completely wrong. We already harvest enough food to feed everyone. We're well on our way to 100% clean, renewable energy. We're already well on our way to self-driving electric cars. The rest? We're on our way to automating that as well (doctors and lawyers first, the most expensive skillsets, and then quickly down from there).
Basic Income is easy when automation and clean energy are doing the heavy lifting. I don't need to take from you to give to someone else because what you offer (your labor) would no longer have value.
That's the thing about higher education and/or highly skilled training. It enables the creation of more jobs. (A job can be self-employed).
And to that end, we have jobs, plenty... but we don't have folks willing (or qualified) to fill them. This is inside the "bubble", but there's very few software companies that are not constantly hiring. We simply don't have enough qualified engineers to fill all the available seats. I'll concede that there are certainly fields where jobs are disappearing, and as you hinted, this is part of the "new economy". We need these folks (and our young generation) to gain new skills that are more useful in this new economy. Sure, many things will become automated, but we need folks to create the automation. (and no, I don't believe doctors nor lawyers will ever fully be automated, as these are not just knowledge/task-based skillsets).
> I don't need to take from you to give to someone else because what you offer (your labor) would no longer have value
This is not how an economy runs. The government can't print money to hand out, so it must come from someplace. This someplace is taxes, paid for by the workforce in majority (payroll tax + income tax equal about 80% of federal revenue[1]). If this workforce shrinks, so does federal revenue, which means not enough funds to support a BI long term (this is part of the reason a BI has never been implemented, even though it's a very old idea. We have to wait and see how it works out for the volunteer test nation in the long term...).
> Basic Income is easy when automation and clean energy are doing the heavy lifting
This goes back to my earlier point. We need fewer low skilled laborers, instead replaced with more highly skilled laborers. We need folks to design and implement the robots that will eventually build all these other things. We'll always have a human workforce - but the landscape of "work" is indeed changing.
> So instead of encouraging (or mandating?) young folks get trained or educated (or both!), we simply give them money for existing? I don't see how that solves the bigger issue.
No, you give them money to pay rent and eat while they go to school if they want to, or learn whatever new skills they might be interested in instead of having to wait tables.
Plenty of people would love to go to school but can't afford to on a minimum wage job.
If every person gets X dollars per month, then over time, everything will cost at least X dollars. We have 78 years of a "grand experiment" to prove this (minimum wage).
Proponents of BI often forget that our economy will not remain how it is today.
Sure, if everyone today had an extra guaranteed $1,000 every month, it would short-term be fantastic. But the economy would eventually adjust, as it always does. Rent would slide upwards, so would goods prices, etc, to the point where we wind up where we are today with minimum wage (perpetually raising it every few years in a never-ending game of cat and mouse, the essential cost of living).
> Plenty of people would love to go to school but can't afford to on a minimum wage job.
We do have programs in place that solve this. Yes, you have to pay it back, and it can certainly add up to a large sum if you decide to not work at all and use your loan to pay for food and rent. Perhaps our universities should change the paradigm, and require students to work at minimum part time, as this yields a tremendous amount more than just money... but I digress.
> Sure, if everyone today had an extra guaranteed $1,000 every month, it would short-term be fantastic. But the economy would eventually adjust, as it always does. Rent would slide upwards, so would goods prices, etc, to the point where we wind up where we are today with minimum wage (perpetually raising it every few years in a never-ending game of cat and mouse, the essential cost of living).
If implemented by idiots, I agree basic income would tend to result in the consequences you describe [1]. It is very important that any implementation of basic income also do away with minimum wage at the same time. If a person is currently working a job which pays them $1500 / month, then ideally basic income would result in (assuming that we agree on $1000 / month as the minimum subsistence-level income) that same person making $500 / month at the same job, and receiving $1000 / month in basic income.
So to be clear, anyone currently getting a wage exceeding the agreed-upon basic income level, should not see much difference in how much they take home each month.
Properly done, the only price inflation you should see are from people who are seeing more money each month than they were before, because they were previously working at below-subsistence wages. But even then, they were probably receiving other government assistance anyway, and with basic income we'd start phasing that stuff out as well.
[1] Which, I admit, means it stands a good chance of happening that way. Difficulty of proper implementation is an argument against basic income, but it is also reflective of our broken, irresponsible government.
I don't necessarily oppose BI, but I am very skeptical of it actually working in practice for any nation. We'll have to wait and see how Finland's experiment works in the long term, but also we should recognize Finland is a small nation (5.3 million population, or about 45% of NYC's population) without a major economy like the US. The successes of one small nation don't necessarily translate into successes for large nations.
> It is very important that any implementation of basic income also do away with minimum wage at the same time.
I would argue, and you touched on, that we would have to do more than just drop minimum wage. We'd have to do away with all forms of social welfare safety nets.
There is a good argument that government would actually save money annually by shifting all forms of social welfare into a BI, due to reduced overhead of management, number of concurrent (and sometimes redundant) programs, folks who abuse/scam the system, etc. With a BI, that would be it, nobody gets any more or less, and you're free to spend it how you see fit.
> the only price inflation you should see
I'm not an economist, however I do believe some inflation is natural. This would mean, that over time, BI would have to be increased, just like our current-day minimum wage program. If we can somehow generate a self-sustaining feedback loop on a BI economy, maybe that works.
The best thing I can see about a BI system that replaced the myriad of welfare programs we have now is that it (if implemented correctly) would remove a lot of the perverse incentives that keep people at the edge in dependent situations. Anecdata, but I've known people that turned down work or dropped out of the workforce because the extra income would be enough to put their households over the top of certain income "cliffs" that are built into some of the crappy welfare systems they took advantage of - a small bit of extra money wasn't worth crossing that Rubicon of whatever multiple of the poverty line, and losing their heating assistance, or free healthcare, and whatnot.
The real meta problem is that if you don't work, you don't eat. Who cares if they have a job or they just sit at home and play videogames.
Basic Income would allow people the freedom to pursue the things that truly interest them. It will be a golden era of video games and movies and art. A huge percentage of the population will be only concerned with pleasure.
Overall, we produce more with less labor and robotic automation only accelerates that. It's not just factory workers and cashiers either. Many white collar tasks, bookkeeping, simple accounting, simple contracts, simple law are being swallowed by automation too.
I see a future where everyone is in a play or a movie, making a game, working on a novel, reading a metric ton of fan-fiction.
What's probably true is alot more porn, video games and arguing on Reddit about porn and video games.
Either way, it's better than millions doing jobs they hate, badly as they watch automation swallow them up like an ocean does an exhausted overboard sailor.
> Overall, we produce more with less labor and robotic automation only accelerates that.
I recently visited a reconstruction medieval village museum on the outskirts of Berlin. It's almost unimaginable how labor-intensive simple subsistence was for our ancestors. Try running a scratch-plow behind a team of oxen, reaping wheat with a sickle, grinding flour with a quern, spinning wool into yarn by hand with a spindle, weaving that yarn into cloth on a hand-loom, chopping hazel whips with a hatchet, splitting them into withs, and weaving a basket.
Now I can walk into Walmart, and grab a loaf of bread, a five-pack of t-shirts, and a Rubbermaid storage tub for less than an hour's worth of labor.
> So instead of encouraging (or mandating?) young folks get trained or educated (or both!), we simply give them money for existing? I don't see how that solves the bigger issue.
It solves the issue with minimum wage pointed out by jayess, at least. Employers would be able to hire people for whatever wage they like, even pennies a day if they wanted to (or financials forced them to). Meanwhile, the people working for very low wages or unable to find work at all, would be guaranteed enough to live on regardless.
That seems to be a goal of economic policy these days. I don't see anyone arguing that we must - by dint of constrained resources - simply have some people live below the subsistence level (which is another way of saying we must leave some people to die). If that is your position then please show us that we don't have the resources we need to keep our current population alive.
Because otherwise, one way or another, we ought to be providing people with food and housing - simply for existing. We've tried government housing and food stamps and soup kitchens: government housing is a disaster, food stamps seem nearly equivalent to giving people cash anyway, and soup kitchens probably can't scale. We've tried minimum wage and that did mostly work while the supply (and type) of labor matched the supply (and type) of jobs available, but it's not clear that will be the case going forward. And, even if it is the case going forward, basic income might still work better, anyway.
I'm all for educating people, or training them, etc. However it is a fact that some people will fall through the cracks, and it is a fact that not everyone can be trained or educated into a vocation that society actually needs people for. For these cases basic income seems like the most efficient means of keeping them alive, fed, and sheltered. I am open to other solutions.
Data from countries with a high minimum wage show that it's not difficult for people with little or no skills to get a job. Not only that, but they also have a living wage.
This is because we have spent decades conditioning employers to view a college degree as the deciding factor of intelligence and capability. Which is completely and horribly backwards. Now that we have a lot of people with college degrees, employers are looking down on that and saying now you have to have a masters in order to be considered worthy of a job. It's all crap.
When you could walk off the street(with no Highschool diploma) into a Manufacturing job with good pay, benefits, etc.
And if they mistreated you, you could leave and go to another Factory in-town that did treat you well. So they tried to retain employees by treating them well.
Versus today, where if you can manage to find a Manufacturing job you're under the thumb of the bosses. Because they know you have a mortgage, a family, and other expenses and that you _need_ the job. And they know you can't just walk down the street to another factory because it's not there anymore.
The thing thrown around is that a College Degree is the equivalent of an Highschool Degree 20-30 years ago when finding a job.
> When you could walk off the street(with no Highschool diploma) into a Manufacturing job with good pay, benefits, etc.
This sounds more like a good-ole-days fantasy than reality. Can you quantify when and what good pay and benefits were for someone without a high school degree who walked off the street?
I can't speak specifically to walking in off the street with no diploma/education at all, but I'll share this.
25-30 years ago some of my friends could fairly easily get line jobs at Ford/GM/etc with just a HS diploma. Of course, from what we were told, it wasn't as easy as way back in the 50s, but it was still a possibility in the 80s, and some of my friends did. In addition to direct work, there was a moderately large ecosystem of auto suppliers to work for, and many of them would still hire with a HS diploma.
Friends of mine were starting in 1990/91 at $17/hr with some benefits and usually some overtime available. Min wage, at that time, was... IIRC, $3.35/hr. So.. 5x min wage with just a HS diploma was possible. That's not to say it's not possible now, but I don't think there's many employment situations like that (certainly much fewer than 50 years ago). You'd probably need to be self-employed to pull in $35-$50/hr with just a HS diploma these days, and you're then having to cover your own insurance and perks and whatnot.
I can speak to this. In the early 90's you could walk into an Ironworker's union hall with a GED and be hired as a pre-apprentice with no prior experience in structural ironwork or fabrication for the princely sum of $8.50 an hour (almost double minimum wage). Day 1 you had health insurance and scheduled OJT to step up to apprentice, any work over 8 hours in a day was time and a half. Any work over 40 hours a week was time and a half. Hollidays and Sundays paid double. Guaranteed sick leave. Guaranteed breaks & lunch. Union hall handled 100% of your HR-related nonsense and also filled the role of recruiter to keep you working. If you wanted to travel they'd get you assigned to short term projects in around the country. If you wanted to stay home they'd look for a long term position for you at a local firm. I'm a little hazy on the exact timeline of events but at some point between getting your book and going Journeyman you started contributing to the union pension fund and monies were set aside for a retirement annuity.
TL;DR:
GED = double minimum wage, paid OJT, full medical/dental/vision insurance, retirement, annuity, and job placement services from day 1 in the door.
Anecdote: I've been trying to get a bathroom refurb done for about 6 months now and haven't been able to get a plumber. Certainly, there's a degree of boom or bust with the trades but in a growth area such as where I live, the market is tight.
Yes. 20 years ago if you had a car & could show up for work on time, and had a decent work ethic you were more or less guaranteed a job of some kind that could be converted into a career. The trades, manufacturing, agriculture, and even programming jobs were available without a degree provided you could prove your competence in an interview.
No college? No problem. Google how to make websites and start making websites. There's an infinite number of small businesses, grandpas and grandmas needing a website for whatever reason. Learn html and css, which are probably the easiest languages to know, and you can already start making money. No computer? No problem, go to a public library.
I'm wondering if the purpose of most non STEM degrees is to reduce the supply of labor for the duration of these four years. At an estimated 50 years of work that's a decrease by 8% slightly increasing competition and wages.
Since an increase in labor supply would reduce likely reduce the cost of wages due to oversupply, I can't imagine that would be the reason. Could be wrong, though.
Eventually employers are going to stop valuing college degrees and paying wages that justify the student debt. A new model of education/certification and hiring will arise. Especially if tech becomes the dominant sector (in terms of work).
I've successfully obtained several positions at notable companies as a software engineer and I don't have a degree. Hasn't set me back a bit. Self taught is the way to go if you ask me.
Measuring if someone is able to get a job based on if they have a degree is a meaningless, since generally speaking the fact the someone went to college means that they push harder on average to get stuff done than those that don't get a degree.
Only way to tell what the difference is if applicants and employers were not allowed to ask or require a degree, but instead were only able to test knowledge.
Hell, friends and family still try to get me to go back to school, too. I've yet to find a good way to explain why school isn't useful and an enormous waste of time for me. It's always, always followed up with the argument that I have less job opportunities, which is fine. I wouldn't want to work at a company that would limit me like that, anyway.
If it happens to me with a good background and strong skills set, then it happens to others, but worse - especially if you're just starting out.