I have to admit every once in awhile the sky-is-falling crowd gets to me. The world sucks, sucks harder every day, there's no way out, blah blah blah...
You get in the rut, and it's easy to be cynical. Ya, the children are back to school, but so what? For what? A jobless future spent either in the army or in jail or some of both?
Well, here's where you have to grab whatever glass is at hand, pour in what you can, call it half full, and make the best of it. It's a shitty world out there, but you can either hide under the bed or go out and deal with it.
So while it's true that the employment prospects awaiting our children are bleak, they are a long way from non-existant. One conceit we would do well to leave behind is this idea that every one of our offspring has got to go to college if they're to be successful. Go to college and do what? We have an absolute abundance of people who have advanced degrees in useless stuff. What can they actually do?
For a few generations now we've elevated education for its own sake onto a pedestal it doesn't deserve. Not only that, but trying to employ everbody who ever got a degree in urban planning or the classics or womens studies leads to an awful lot of jobs that are about planning and reviewing instead of making and doing. With a degree in Olde English poetry and a driver's license you can get a job driving a cab.
Where we're running frightfully short is in people who can actually do real stuff, the so-called trades. People who can keep a car running, keep machinery running, build bridges and subways, people who can wire up a house or a office building in such a way that it doesn't burn down, and of course people who can fix toilets. There's fewer and fewer people who have those skills, and most of the folks who have them aren't young anymore.
In ten or twenty years there'll be unemployed MBA's selling pencils on the street corners, but it'll be a six month waiting list to get a plumber to come to your house. And they won't be working cheap.
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