11-17-2016, 09:36 AM
(11-17-2016, 08:14 AM)Odin Wrote: One problem is that a lot of places are not going to hire the 55yo "retrained" guy who sounds like a country yokel anyway when there is a 23yo computer literate college graduate available.
But the 23-year-old college graduate is almost never a truly skilled worker and may have thrown away the opportunity to be a skilled worker by attending college instead of participating in an apprenticeship in skilled trades. The 55-year-old "retrained" guy might be.
There are jobs that people cannot do after certain ages. Professional athletes exemplify the pattern: reflexes slow, body strength diminishes, and eyesight weakens after about age 30. If one gets diabetes, one's career crashes. Nagging injuries sap abilities one once had. People who learn the fine points of the game might get new careers in coaching or managing -- but that is not playing the game. Some jobs have typically been nearly-pure athleticism, and those as a rule have not been skilled work. Military service is one such example. Look for someone approaching civilian retirement in the military, and you can often call that person "General" or "Admiral".
People will need to make their adjustment, and so will business. Really-good "people skills" develop over time. They require maturity and learning that people generally lack at age 25 or so even if they have much formal education. Caring about the customer and the bosses while neglecting oneself ? That's a rare combination of traits, which explains why (along with abysmal wages and few opportunities to advance within the firm) retailing has such a high turnover. Transforming a warehouse worker into a retail clerk may be a wiser course for job development, with unskilled workers eventually becoming 'service' workers.
I expect Donald Trump to have no clue about this. For him, it is all about getting maximal rents and paying as little as he can to those who work for his sort of business. He may know one business, but I doubt that he can learn anything about medicine, energy production, metalworking, food-production, transportation, mining, or textile industry except what fellow "winners" tell him that they want. Few Americans get to be "winners"; they at most can struggle for adequate pay for what they do, which includes paying off costs of preparation for the work that they do.
Almost all of us are "losers". The economic order of course depends upon "losers" to do the real work But those "losers" do what makes life possible. They run the trains, change the oil, drive the tractors, drive cattle through feed lots, milk cows, clean everything commercial, teach school, do hair, do military service, manage the library collection, keep the ledgers updated, drive vehicles... When they have a stake in the system, things go well. When they have no stake in the system they want blood of those who earn much yet do little to earn what they get.
America is becoming more rigidly a class society, increasingly fitting a Marxist stereotype. If the choice is between watching one's children starve while knowing that some elites whose sole virtue is luck in being born into the Right Family enjoy sybaritic excess and on the other side, overthrowing those elites and having a Socialist commonwealth -- people will do what is best for their survival.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.