Real GDP per Capita is not dependent on civilian labor participation.  Technology has made this so, especially with the IT revolution and automation in production.


The Future of Jobs




Super Trends:  the Changing Future of Jobs

Without watching either yet
There is nothing new under the sun
There will be no new anything that will suddenly employ the non-never worked.
The only thing maybe would be prison builders and prison gaurds, oh and healthcare workers...to care for all the Maury watchers who have bunyans and rumatism that can't  work....they still gotta shop ya know

Don't forget prison tailors.

I hear there's been a recent up-tic in openings for them.

Watch the videos.

Many things will be new, and some things will never change.

Jobs are a recent anomaly in human history, as is automation and the information revolution.  Keep in mind we are on the very beginning of the tidal wave of information revolution.

From the 20th Century, we can see a lot of mistakes were made along the way as we innovated.

In my opinion, the concept of retirement was one of them. Government funded retirement made it even worse.

The biggest one though, was progressive "education", where instead of education happening, the developed world has been dumbed down something horrendous.  Both of those need to go away in the 21st Century.  

Public schooling is a distraction from true education.  That is the first obvious lesson you can see when you look at what has happened, and kids nowadays are waking up to that reality.

I see education as the most critical factor in all of this, and not in the framework people are used to thinking of education within.

as usual, good post, OP.  i found this video very apropos to the bolded above.  worth your time to watch (runtime 4min34sec):

Yup.  One of the things progressive "education" accomplished was elimination of classically educated professors.  You know, the ones who learned:

* reading and writing in their L1
* Latin
* Greek
* an L4
* grammar
* geography
* then history
* arithmetic
* geometry
* trigonometry
* calculus
* scientific method
* at least one of the natural sciences  (biology, chemistry, physics)
* philosophy
* religious studies (familiarity with other religions' tenets and belief structures from an academic perspective)
* critical thinking and logic
* music
* musical instrument playing and mastery
* art
* literature

By the 1960's, most of the classically-educated professors were gone.  You still had a minority of hold-outs, but the progressively-"educated" new era of teachers, who had been schooled starting in the early 1900's, slowly became the majority.

All these terms of common core, standardized testing, etc. date back to then.  We just get them re-advertised to us every generation, and this can be documented rather easily.

Anyway, I don't mean to go into a dissertation on how bad education has been ruined, but if you were to compare what was being learned in the 1700's even by American colonists, as well as their descendants in the 1800's, it was much more substantial than what is taught today even in universities when it comes to the subjects I mentioned above.

All that you need to recognize is that the general populace is so dumbed down, that there are skilled labor job shortages in the millions, with projected increases in those skilled job markets, even with unemployment what it is.

Our biggest hurdle is unleashing innovation in education to meet the needs of the 21st Century.

i posted this in another thread recently posted:



not sure if i am fully on the money w/ the above, but i think it hits somewhere close to the mark, & aligns w/ your post above.  the thread is here:
Rome as allegory to the United States


it's a shame to think on the years i spent on getting educated, & how they were misused/wasted, studying the wrong things.  and i was lucky, i think, in getting a more traditional education than most.  however, i can remember wanting to take Latin in high school, & it no longer being offered.

DK-ProfCollege is for chumpsDK-Prof

My cousins are 10 years younger than me and they were learning advanced math in middle school that was not even available until my high school years as a honors program.

Hmmm.  I didn't know "technology" was another word for "Mexican."

His post is about 187% bullshit and anybody with even a passing knowledge of the ACTUAL history of education in our country could probably write a masters thesis on all the things he has wrong.

Until the institution of our public education system, it was common for schoolmasters to not know much more than their students.  Functional literacy (a minimum level) was widespread due to the need for long distance communication, but scholastic literacy was highly limited to the wealthy who could afford private tutors.

Math beyond simple functions and fractions was rarely taught outside of colleges, as was multilingual literacy.  Latin was limited to religious scholars or university students, all of which came from monied family.  History from primary and primary-derivative sources was essentially inaccessible to those who had not been taught Greek, Latin, or Hebrew.

But LRRPF52 has an established penchant for seeing conspiracies and machinations in anything he dislikes, so i'm not surprised he sees a liberal plot in the entire history of accessible education in our country.

I agree.

The biggest problem we have with education, is it's stuck in an old paradigm that just doesn't work anymore.  In the old paradigm you went to school as a child, learned to follow instruction, and the basics.  At 18 you entered post secondary education where you learned your life's profession.  You graduated worked for 30 years, were given a gold watch and retired and waited to die.  

That doesn't work anymore.  The idea that what you trained for in your early 20's is going to carry you through to retirement doesn't work.

Our education industry needs to adjust so that a person can obtain education throughout life.  Instead of catering only to unmarried 20 year olds who can take 4 years out of reality to live on campus and immerse themselves in an ivy rich academic environment, we should be working to make education accessible to the married middle-aged father, or mother.  The student who can't go play "college student" full time.

That also means cutting out the fluff.  We need degrees and credentialled programs that are laser focused on the required skills, without wasting time and money on those areas of study which aren't required.   High School should be the "liberal arts" basic training ground.  I'm not saying we should eliminate traditional programs, just that we need something else.  Something that is quicker and more focused.  

We need more programs like these microdegrees http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/techtank/posts/2015/02/23-mooc-google-coursera-butler

when you strip down the programs to a tech diploma, you lose innovation from individuals recognizing the underlying reasons for their observation. sagacity + serendipity = innovation

I don't disagree with anything you said. The items you say we need are all readily available now and being used by many in my area.

 

Latin is not taught today because it is a useless language

Latin will teach you a great deal about the origins and evolution of your native tongue.

Yep. "thoroughly discredited" would put it nicely.

you realize that, with a few exceptions, you just described a basic undergraduate career, right?  there are some differences--degree plans tend to emphasize either foreign language or advanced math (usually at least 4 courses of each), but virtually every student will be required to take basic coursework in art, literature, writing/rhetoric, cultural anthropology/comparative religion, philosophy, at least 2 physical science courses, at least 1 social science, and at least 1 math course.  an awful lot of arfcommers consider many of these these things to be a waste of time.

at graduate levels, the world is just a lot bigger than it used to be, and no one can pursue everything.  i've spent the last 3 years buried in nothing but geography, and i've only bitten off a tiny piece of it--the field covers everything from geophysics to philosophy to political theory to history to economics.  when i graduate, my expertise will be limited to an exceedingly narrow application, because it's impossible to do otherwise.  there's no way of mastering geography without at least a basic competence in those other fields, each of which would take several years to develop.  give me 10 more years of school, and i might feel comfortable discussing the entire discipline, but i'd still only have a surface grasp of those areas that aren't immediately relevant to my specialization.

so the aspiring academic (ewww) is forced into a choice of knowledge base: broad but shallow, or deep but narrow.  this isn't the result of progressivism--it's the result of an ever-expanding corpus of knowledge that no human mind can contain.  if you're going to be an actual expert in one area, you're going to be a dilettante in others.

anyone who thinks otherwise is fooling himself.



and this is coming from a guy who is a strong advocate for generalism.

a quibble--english is a germanic language, not romantic.  there's definitely some romance influence through french (which contributed ~20% of the modern english lexicon), as well as substantial latin/greek etymology.  so evolution, yes, but its origins are rather different.

Actually a more likely reason is simple.

In the past, most all scientific nomenclature required a knowledge of Latin--there is some Greek, but the Romans trumped the Greeks with preserving and passing forward that knowledge; but since the 60s (really starting in the 20s or so) this has become less and less needed. As most scientific discoveries have been made since the 20s (with American being far in the front), knowledge of Latin for nomenclature is no longer needed.  It was simply superfluous knowledge used to torture students and resulted in weeding out some potentially bright people who were bight enough to see it was not needed.

We used to rib the O-chem grad students that whatever they were working on, some German chemist already did the synthesis back in the 20s or 30s.  A knowledge of Latin is nice, but only for a trivial number of naming of things, and not really needed today.  An understanding of computer code is vastly more important than Latin--and yes, I learned Latin back in the day.



 

free MIT courseware

free harvard courseware

free yale courseware

the "education industry" puts an incredible amount of completely free education at the fingertips of that married middle-aged father.  and there's far more of it if the old coot is willing to pay something in order to improve himself.  that's what post-secondary education is--self-improvement.  doing it right is the student's job.  the professor is there to provide a standard, and to help the student meet that standard.  the student has to do the work.  the collapse of secondary education is directly attributable to the idea that it's the teacher who does the work, and the student who evaluates the teacher.  this is exactly backwards, and it has a corrosive effect on all future education.


the 'industry' concept is everything that's wrong with contemporary education.  students (and students' parents) want to think of themselves as customers, so that they can blame someone else if things go wrong.  "come fill my head with useful things", they say, "and if i fare poorly, it's because you didn't fill it properly, or with the right things."

those kids get all wide-eyed and indignant when they're confronted with the idea that the responsibility to learn is theirs.

Might be helpful in medical and lawyering fields.

Getting that knowledge is great but I don't know of any employers that would accept "I took free online classes from school xxyyzz", they want to see a degree.

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-commuter-college.htm

accredited online degree programs

Autodidactism will almost get you nowhere with an employer.  I'm sure there are some out there that will take the time to evaluate a candidate's knowledge, but most require a degree or certification from an accredited institution.  I suppose I should have said that there needs to be a more efficient way of "certifying" knowledge.  

We push kids - and yeah, I said "kids" - into college too soon.  In a great many cases they're really not ready for it, and a lot of time and money has been wasted trying to teach those who aren't yet ready to learn.

ok, that i can accept--something akin to a GED for the college level.

business opportunity for an education entrepreneur!

eh--it's either school or real life, for most of them.  they may be kids and unready, but you have to leave the nest sometime.

i think it would be less of an economic problem without the student loan racket.

Absolutely... I vote for 'real life'.  A few years of scraping by, learning to pay bills on time, being independent... it all gives a much more accurate perception of what the world is and where your place in it might be.  Then consider more advanced education if it suits you.

It's not one-size-fits-all, of course.  Some are indeed ready for college right out of high school, make it through fine and move on to productive careers.  Too many, though, treat it as a $30K/year party paid for either by Mom and Dad or borrowed money, and spend a good portion of their adult lives paying for mistakes they made long ago.

 
This, *public / state* schools should not be a for profit scheme. The fed shouldn't garuntee loans at 6.75% interest!

there is more than "some influence" of Latin on the English language.  in fact, some would say it is a majority influence.  70% of English words having a Latin etymology was a figure bandied about in my schoolin' days.  a source below indicates that ballpark may be a bit low.



link


in the hard sciences, knowledge of Greek & Latin is a huge leg up, as you are trying to assimilate the vocabulary.

even earlier & more broadly (see pie chart below), a strong background in Latin will allow you to assimilate new vocabulary words as you read general English literature, as you will have seen the word roots before.

to the poster "1Bigdog" above, having a child w/ knowledge of basic Latin/romance language vocabulary roots is a huge advantage to knocking the verbal SAT & ACT out of the park.

it's been many years since i took Latin, but it still pays off every time i read a book & encounter a new word.  half the time, i can suss it out b/w context & the knowledge of what the root actually means.

i believe LRRP's list above should be accomplished by the time secondary school is completed.  languages, both spoken & written, are best learned early, & math up to the pre-calculus or early calculus also should be broached prior to entering the undergraduate years.

generalism is best accomplished in the establishment of a base for the well educated man (i.e. elementary to highschool) & college would be a time to begin to focus on the area(s) of interest/career, once the breadth/foundation has been firmly established.

There's a conflict of interest in the market. Teaching and certification shouldn't occur in the same business.

you're preaching to the choir on etymology--mom hammered that shit into us mercilessly.  we'd be sitting at the dinner table reciting "com-, con-, col-, together."  but that's no reason to learn latin.  lexicon is only a part of a language, and the root/stem structure is more accurately taught as english etymology.  spending a bunch of effort learning the syntax of latin is practically useless in contemporary society--the vast majority of students would be much better served learning a living language like spanish or mandarin.

most people would be surprised to learn how many latin words they know.  but that's different than learning the language.

if you look through the list, you'll note that most of it is covered in public high school.  about the only things that aren't standard secondary fare are philosophy (which i absolutely agree should be standard), comparative religion (which would be vehemently opposed by religious groups), and the fetish languages.  virtually all of these things are covered again--in greater detail--at any liberal arts university (which most of GD seems to hate)

i went to an pretty unexceptional TX public high school, and the math curriculum was exactly as you describe: compulsory through trig/pre-cal, with senior-year option for early calculus.  art/music and physics were optional, based on student interest.

i'm not impugning LRRP's list--i think it's pretty good on the whole, other than the classical languages.  were i designing an undergrad curriculum, i would actually add a few.

i just don't see a vast progressive conspiracy involved.  these things are covered.  if a guy wants to go beyond undergrad and develop some expertise in one area, he is going to have to neglect some others.  that's just the way it goes.

On the subject of Latin and the Germanic languages (which were highly dialect segmented before the Gutenberg printing press), those who say it is useless for the "common man" might have an argument for the ghetto-dweller or the lucky soul who will never be involved in a single court case in their life, as well as those who have no desire to learn the origins of many English and scientific words, medical terminology, etc.

For the rest of us who seem to catch life's curve balls, Latin might just be helpful, even in the 21st Century.  I only listed it as an example of what was included in a classical education, even if it was only to function as a framework from which a highly-educated professor or genuine teacher could help elevate the pupils they managed to inspire.  It is only a peripheral topic to what I am talking about.

One of the biggest problems with the history of education is that the Progressive "Education" model and its proponents has controlled the discussion and content of history taught within the 20th century mental prisons.  Nowhere did you get a realistic picture of what was happening in Colonial America, the efforts of Benjamin Franklin and the Junto, and their creation of the modern public library checkout system, which helped transform the colonial British and eventually American people into a far more educated people than their European cousins within a generation.  For those who doubt that more advanced math was taught to even mediocre students, George Washington first studied trigonometry with his tutor after he had been home-schooled.

Americans in the 1800's, even without formal scholastic regimens, were generally a highly aware, educated people who hungered for good books.  The Bible was a linguistic and literary foundation for reading and in-depth understanding of complex subjects, followed with a list of books that families and friends read together and passed on by word of mouth.  Learning was one of the main pastimes and forms of entertainment, until the emergence of the Progressive, forced schooling system based on Prussian modeling, was adopted by Socialists in order to bring about societal objectives based on ideology, not the goal of increased awareness and ability to independently think.

That is a matter of historical record, and John Dewey openly stated in his Pedagogical Creed as much.  You can read that for yourself.

The links to currently-available micro degrees and online learning portals from prestigious universities are probably going to pave part of the way into the future.

I got my Bachelor's degree in Business online on my time, according to my personal schedule without ever setting foot in a brick and mortar classroom.  I submitted my capstone project from Helsinki while on a summer vacation with my family, for example.

I think one of the biggest drivers of education needs to be the private business sector.  Successful businesses know what kinds of talent they need.  Universities are often clueless about this in many ways.  As skilled labor becomes more advanced, those type of vocational programs need to evolve in ways that make access to the lessons more available.

What I like from the proposed approach from Dennis Stearns is the:

Prepare
Predict
Pivot

Approach.  The shadow economy also stuck out to me in the 1st video by Jon Roberts, as being the most efficient one that is often ignored by economists.