Saturday, January 25, 2014

Educational Absurdities

The argument that education can solve our economic problems, demonstrated by the fact that well educated people make more money than uneducated people, is unconvincing. It has been true for individuals. I got to live a somewhat middle class life because I went to college and graduate school. But what if everyone had my education? 

To put it bluntly, our current economic system makes it cheaper to buy a robot than to hire a human. Let's say that 200 million people in our work force go to graduate school. How much impact will that have on the fact that we don't have enough human jobs to go around? Soon you would need a master's degree to flip burgers. And human work with a living wage is even harder to find in most other countries. And no political leader is addressing the problem.

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