anotherlife
Gold Member
Insofar as most people are economically irrational and don't have the sense to exit an unprofitable labor market and enter a different profitable one, I must answer by saying that jobs will depart first.Will Jobs or People be Faster to Flee?
Need evidence of that irrationality?
- Look at all the folks who think the coal industry is going to somehow resurrect -- either resurrect itself or, worse, have the rest of us subsidize it -- and again pay as it did 40 years ago.
- Look at the the folks who some 20+ years ago, in spite of seeing the coming of the "age of high tech" used none of their resources to prepare themselves or their kids to obtain decent-paying jobs ($120K - $200K per year) in that age.
- Look at the folks who want to work in a "put the square peg in the square hole" manufacturing jobs, and who yet remain in the U.S. where such jobs are few and far between enough that there will not ever again be as many of them as there are people hoping against all hope want there to be. Quite simply, for such folks, if that's how they aim to make a good living, their "oyster" will not be found in the U.S. They need to go elsewhere, yet they won't/don't.
Yes, jobs will flee faster, but no, people can't make the provisions that you are listing, to bring themselves from irrationality to rationality. This is because people are not programmable computers but rather like geographic entities. So, like geographic entities, some of them is suitable for doing one thing, some others another thing, but never all things.
Automation has greatly reduced the options of what people have an opportunity to do. If you need to develop a genius IQ before even searching for a job, then the high tech on your list did not replace the coal miner and the Charlie Chaplin factory laborer.
But why not, that is why crime rises and we open construction job opportunities in prison construction and prison services and court services and police and all these jobs.If one needed to do, then I wouldn't have written what I did. Having hired, worked with and myself being a non-genius [1], I can assure you that very few high tech jobs require tacitly that one be a genius in order to ably perform them. [2] Moreover, there are few (maybe no) jobs that explicitly stipulate among their qualifications that one be a genius. What one does need to do is comprehend a particular set of information and become adept at performing certain very-learnable skills and techniques.If you need to develop a genius IQ before even searching for a job, then the high tech on your list did not replace the coal miner and the Charlie Chaplin factory laborer.
Doing so requires will and only an average to slightly above average sum of wit. One need not even know about any specific individual's innate acumen to see that is so. Simply look at the distribution of IQs across a population.
It'd preposterous to think that only something fewer than 2% of the people in the U.S. population are able to perform the types of good-paying jobs ($120K+) available in the U.S., be those jobs in the tech industry or some other industry.
Remember, the tacit/contextual crux of my assertions is that one needs to either obtain the skills to do the jobs that are on offer or move to where the skills one has are sought. While these days few and far between are jobs that do not call for one to be able to use "this or that" form of technology, many are the available jobs whereby merely using technology is the limit of tech skill one must possess. Put another way, in the U.S., one does not need a degree in computer science or engineering to get a good job; however, having no facility for at least using technology, one is unlikely to get a good job in the U.S.
Notes:
- For simplicity's sake, I'm using an IQ test score of 140+ as the dividing line between genius and non-genius. I realize that Mensa grants admission to individuals who in certain years scored above 1250 on the SAT. I and scads of others "pass muster" in that regard; however, for myself and among my classmates for whom I know that to be the case, it's only because we "busted ass" to do well in school and learn (not memorize) the content we were taught.
I may have a mistaken understanding of what genius is, but in my mind, it's what my classmate Chris was and remains. Countless were the days and nights when I and my roommate in high school poured over our assignments trying to make sense of "this and that" and find the relationships among ideas, matters and techniques, and Chris would come knocking to see if we'd finished studying and wanted to play a game or get into some sort of mischief.
With utter amazement on our faces, we could only respond with something like, "Man, we're still trying to prove Euler's formula. When we get done or give up, yeah, sure we'll join you in doing something worthy of a demerit or two." Chris, ever the gentleman, simply said, "Okay," and offered to help us. We weren't as gifted as Chris, but we weren't so dimwitted that we declined his offer. To this day, I owe a material share of what I learned in high school to his generosity and the good fortune I had in having a roommate who, like me recognized and appreciated Chris' intellect rather than, as was so among most of the rest of our class, despising him for being thus blessed.
Chris just "gets it," so to speak. The guy has a seemingly eidetic memory and regardless of the nature of the topic -- arts, sciences, math, history, whatever -- everything just seems to "click" for him the instant he encounters it. Of course, as does everyone else, he has to invest time gathering information, but he requires markedly less time than does damn near everyone else to comprehend it. I, in contrast, have to gather information, take notes, formulate questions to ask myself based on the information, review the information to find the answers, and so on. (Obviously, as one learns more and more over the years, it takes less and less time to comprehend both completely new content and content related to information/ideas one previously mastered or encountered. Such is the impact of frames of reference.) Thus in my mind, genius and non-genius are distinguished not by what one can and cannot master, but by how long it takes to do so.
- While my firm (global management consulting) doesn't explicitly test applicants' IQ, it's a safe bet that most people we hire will score somewhere in the 120 to 140 range. That, of course, should not surprise anyone for our starting salaries for newly minted undergraduates having no management-consulting-related prior work experience ranges from ~$65K to ~$80K. That said, most of our positions and career paths are not specifically technology roles, but rather business/information analysis and sales jobs.
If I understand correctly what you are writing here, the competition is in dynamic structures that people individually develop in order to process information. This still supports my point though. In addition, this may not even be a finite system, because information explicit and implied are different in different languages.
I live in an area where 3 languages are regularly spoken everywhere, French, German, and even English in offices. The more various implied structures and inferences you need to go through, the slower you progress with it. Even more challenging is when incoming material is by people who never learnt in school how to structure paragraphs and information in general.
This can be even harder than being a maths student with the wildest analytical problem.
So, the problem remains, natural selection and time makes it harder to survive even in your business. Time itself can reduce your ability to adapt to information. So a strategy of moving becomes self depleting too.
Maybe I am misunderstanding your point. Looking at your bell curve diagram, the survival zone seems shifting graduall to the right.