New Year's Rant

I've been reading a lot about Communism in Eastern Europe over the holidays. And I have to say that it's gotten me to thinking. Then I came across some articles online discussing hipsters and the value of college education. While I don't agree with anywhere near all of it, this commentary was rather thought provoking.

So, what ties communism, hipsters, and college educations together? Industry, more accurately, the kinds of jobs that industry provides. Mostly in that the kind of jobs that Eastern European Communists were desperate to create in order to create an ideologically correct ascendant working class don't exist. Hipsters don't have jobs, and likely never will because the jobs the things they have trained to do don't exist, either because they cannot exist or have not been created. And college educations are plummeting in value relative to what they have been in the past, partially because all the knowledge and skills those degrees supply are available through other means and partially because so many more people are getting degrees than before. Yeah, yeah, but what's the point? Well, I'm afraid that all this political campaigning about jobs, the lower tax receipts, the hostility towards immigration, and the very question of a welfare state are all signs of a fundamental change in our economy, one that most of us aren't even thinking about. The fact of the matter is that there are fewer things that can be jobs.

As modern farming techniques replaced peasants with machines they went to the city and became the proletariat. Marx saw this clearly and projected this out all the way in his theories. Factory work has been a conveyor belt to wealth from a persistent unemployed/underemployed group to higher and higher levels of education and levels of income. But since the 1960's we've seen much the same thing happen to factories that occurred in farm fields, sons cannot follow in their father's footsteps because those jobs no longer exist. What did people do? Well without really discussing it we simply decided that the children of all those factory workers would go to college. The problem is that no one really defined why.

In Eastern Europe we see what happens when we push a simple, elegant idea without accounting for reality. Not the totalitarian dictatorship, but the unhealthy economy that failed to effectively recover from the devastation of depression and war for almost half a century. Is going to college a bad idea? Well, that depends. Why are you going to college? The Last Psychiatrist's point that those unemployed hipsters are unemployed because their degrees don't help and likely never will is valid. Jobs aren't rationed. A degree isn't a ticket to a job. There are thousands of other people getting precisely the same degree, you aren't made unique by that piece of paper. Those who benefit from college, those who earn double or more, are those who have a reason to be in college.

I'm just afraid that hipsters are here to stay. Not the style or attitude, but the highly educated people who are not employed. I'm afraid that they will remain systemically unemployed. I end up paying in taxes for them to live, and so do you. They're a currently unaccounted for problem that feeds opposition to immigration, that strains our social safety net, and otherwise don't contribute. So, why aren't they accounted for, why are they assumed to be capable of getting jobs with medieval poetry degree whereas a high school drop out is not capable? They have precisely the same useful skills. It's just that the degree in medieval poetry was a big expenditure not just for the person, but that person's family and the community at large. The decision wasn't a good one, much like East European insistence on steel foundries at the expense of clothing and glass which would have been better industries to develop. Overfilling the five year plan was a problem, even though no one in a position of authority seemed to realize this. Too many people getting less useful college degrees is precisely the same problem, are there generalized benefits (positive externalities) to higher education? Possibly, but not at these prices.

So, we need that next step. That next thing that we can pour people into doing that generates not just wealth, but new KINDS of wealth. Healthcare isn't it, because it's about preserving and improving life, which will never grow faster that population. You don't need teams of programmers to craft each and every app sold in a store, and those who make them are closer to architects than bricklayers. Even retail is facing increasing automation.

What we need isn't to encourage existing business. No existing industry promises the growth we need right now. What we need is new business. We need to encourage those hipsters to make a job for themselves, rather than waiting for me to make a job for them. I haven't the slightest idea how a degree in medieval poetry can be helpful, but maybe someone who better understands poetry can. If anyone can make a job for a hipster it is a hipster.

What we need is a pool of money that supports art, not managed exclusively by a government or a corporation, but one that is controlled by local communities, individuals, and community organizations. We need the ability to support people who have inventions and business plans with however much we feel it's worth. We need crowdsourcing for new concepts, to allow pitches to made to people at large and manage risk by keeping the amounts being risked by any one source small. We need to find the reasons why people who have great ideas don't follow up on them and make them real. We need to find why people with great drive when it comes to crafts and hobbies don't turn around and make that into something they can support themselves off of. We need to figure out why people who are driven to help wind up wasting their time and energy on empty "awareness campaigns". Those barriers need to be reduced or eliminated. Rather than telling people to go to college do something and then work for someone else for forty years before they can do what they really want to do, we need to figure out how to get people to do what they really want in the beginning and profit from it.

Our theories are old, out dated. They don't work any more because they are simplified or are built on the assumption of factory work rather than that of the internet and robot. We need new ones, ones that were born in the realities of the 1840's and 1960's.

I need new ones. I need to help. I need to make those jobs. I need to make that pool of money. I need to get artists to make art, and craftsmen to make crafts and introduce them to people who want arts and crafts. I need to do this, but I don't know how. I need to do this, and I'm beginning to worry that college isn't going to teach me how. If not college, then where? If not me, then who?