[quote=no_such_reality][quote=bearishgurl][quote=no_such_reality]The world fundamentally needs to change. Automation is, and will continue, to largely make 90% of the population irrelevant from a labor standpoint.
The vast majority of the population, not only don’t have the education, they don’t have the family dynamic, they don’t have nutrition, they don’t have the raw life enrichment experiences necessary to develop the raw mental horsepower needed to be part of the creative class.
The question is how will we get over the hump before we rip ourselves apart.[/quote]
The emphasized portion of this statement is a very “elitest” attitude, IMO. Regardless of a job applicant’s educational level, only a very small portion of jobs available in the US are “creative.”[/quote]
BG, you’re missing the point. The point I made, that you then reiterated is that few, of the total, jobs are creative. Creative as in make something, create, not assemble. In LAUSD, a 1/3rd of the students don’t graduate. That’s not elitist attitude on my part, that’s a fact from LAUSD. Even farming is becoming ‘creative’.
Will we always need farmers? Yes, but as we’ve discussed in a previous thread, the machines on the farm now make it so that a family of four can do the work of 100 from as little as 40 years ago. That’s my point, we need 4 now, no longer a 100. That’s the dynamic I’m worried about. It also requires a lot of a knowledge. And the raw horsepower is that willpower you mention to do it, everyday. Research and find answers, to build the marketing network to sell their product.
It’s also not elitist to recognize that it isn’t just genetics or the child’s stick-to-it-ness. It’s family support, teacher support, it’s having parents that provide a lifestyle that provides safety and experiences to grow from. Can a completely average kid from the ghetto make it? Sure, but let’s be honest, it’s rare, not because there anything inherently wrong with the kid, but because his environment (on average) has stacked a much higher and steeper mountain to get there.
The mental horsepower, or to borrow a phrase from some guys from Harvard and Yale, cognitive load carrying capacity, is large. Environment, training, experience and safety net determine how quickly stressers burn up your cognitive load. There’s a very recent interesting study about cognitive load and how it doesn’t really matter if you’re rich or poor, if you’re given stressors, like financial difficulties, that take up your cognitive load, you start to make bad decisions, rich or poor, you make the characteristic decisions that lead to being poorer.[/quote]
nsr, that all depends on what you define as “family support, teacher support” and “having parents that provide a lifestyle that provides safety and experiences to grow from” and where you are defining “the ghetto” to be.
I have a sneaking suspicion that I see the former to be a much broader array of “support people” for kids (who may or may not be related to them) and I see a broader array of successful “family compositions” in America than you do. And in the latter, I likely feel there is a broader range of suitable areas to raise a family in than you do.
After all, wasn’t Barack Obama raised by a grandparent?
Ivy league academics aside (who likely have never been employed in the “real world” themselves), I really believe it is all up to each individual kid how much drive they have to succeed. It is not uncommon for three siblings, all who grew up in the same home with the same parents have vastly different levels of “life success” from each other.
