Education helps the young, at least as our systems are built.
The people vocalizing their opinion by voting for Trump are beyond the age where education can be the key (old dogs and new tricks, etc.). There isn't a will to go to an educational program. There is a will to work and support yourself, but no work for them to do...
/because we can't get our shit together and fund infrastructure programs
> The people vocalizing their opinion by voting for Trump are beyond the age where education can be the key
I hate seeing this meme. It is ageist and makes older people less likely to be hired for even their same jobs.
Old people can still learn to do new things. The problem I see is that a lot of older people do not want to learn new things. Also, old people tend to have obligations such as family/child expenses, residence costs, etc. that they want to be compensated for even at an entry level.
Rural conservatism has a lot to do with preserving tradition, that is, making sure things don't change from the old status quo you loved before.
I didn't mean to imply that older people are incapable of learning.
However, there are substantial barriers to that demographic to return to an education program precisely because it is a "return". Those barriers are far more social than anything else, yet they remain.
I'm not sure which meme is more offensive. That old people can't learn or that old people don't want to learn.
The real problem is that for many old people it's certain they'll never be able to get back to the status (financial, social and professional) they have now if they have to start all over again. As long as there is any promise of them being able to keep doing what they have experience in, that's what they'll aim for.
I speak from anecdote here from my time traveling around middle America, not from an armchair, but I agree that the statement was probably a little too broad.
> As long as there is any promise of them being able to keep doing what they have experience in, that's what they'll aim for.
That's the real education that needs to happen. That job is gone and they're not going to get there. It's gone because the world has changed, the economy has changed. Holding out hope is holding that person back. I had to learn this early in my life, and now I live in two different countries depending on where I'm finding work.
The biggest tragedy in all this is that technological advance harms those it help the most by eliminating unnecessary work. For humankind it is progress, for individual humans it is ruin.
I'm German. My grandfather was a professional photographer. Pictures he shot covered the front pages of major magazines in my country. He wasn't a celebrity but he worked with several who were.
At the peak of his career he realized technology would kill the industry with the quality of amateur photography improving and technical skills becoming less important, he would often compete with people with barely any talent and be undercut on price. It was still sustainable at the time but he was sure better cameras, film and postproduction processes would kill his business.
He went back to school and became a homeopathy practitioner. My personal opinions of homeopathy aside, I have to acknowledge he was an expert at what he was doing and he was even regularly invited to give lectures. He kept doing that until the day he died, almost twenty years ago.
It's never to late to switch career paths. The bigger problem in the US seems to be that it is amazingly hard to do so unless you've built up a fortune to cover the cost of doing so.
Even someone approaching retirement age can start over and be productive if they have the chance, financial means, mental health and determination to do it.
> The bigger problem in the US seems to be that it is amazingly hard to do so unless you've built up a fortune to cover the cost of doing so.
That's... really just not true at all. US labor mobility is higher than in pretty much any other developed country by pretty much whatever metric you want to pick. Measures like those in Germany (or whatever else you pick) would help at the margins but they would not do much to change the labor demographics of the midwest working class white community, which by broad historical standards are fairly good already.
Fundamentally this was an election about identity. Nate Cohn said it best in a tweet last night when he pointed out that working class whites (and not their minority compatriots who share the same economic problems) had suddenly started behaving like a minority group and skewed hard for one candidate from their historical positions.
It's about racism, and social change, and fear, and maybe sexism. "Economic Anxiety" is a myth that needs to die.
Trump lost support slightly among whites relative to Romney. In the northern and midwestern working class areas where Trump made big gains, Obama did well and won many areas that HRC lost. Obama won non college educated whites in Iowa by a substantial margin. Those people didn't vote for Trump this time around because they're now racists.
What about the angle that sexism is actually a stronger driver of all this than sexist? It would certainly make the Obama->Trump conversion more explainable.
You are persistently trying to come up with a narrative that tars nearly half the voters in a democratic election as stupid and evil.
If rayiner proves it cannot be racism then possibly it is sexism...
Talk about spreading hate.
I'm no big fan of Trump but I have reason to be thankful for Americans.
And if Americans who live with American politicians year after year decides Trump is their best hope then A) it must be pretty bad IMO B) it is their choice and I respect it.
My claim is that racism and sexism played a very big part in this election. All the news are full of it. All the twitters are full of it. rayiner did not conclusively prove otherwise. Dismissing the issue as 'tarring' half the electorate as racist or sexist is not very useful. It's like saying 'it can't be true that so many people are sexist or racist' when the swing vote between people who always vote republican no matter what and the democrats who stayed at home because they're pissed is actually not that big.
Honestly I find it very strange how strongly people on hacker news are pushing against this idea, how deeply they are insulted by the idea that Trump has brought open sexism into the mainstream.
>Fundamentally this was an election about identity. Nate Cohn said it best in a tweet last night when he pointed out that working class whites (and not their minority compatriots who share the same economic problems)
I'm not sold on that. I think the main difference is that those economic problems have been felt by minorities their entire lives. Not that it's fair, but that's been the reality for them. So it's not any bigger of an issue this election than any other. But the economic pains felt in the white working class haven't been felt since pre-WWII. They were the middle class of this country but now they are feeling the declines. Even if working class whites are now on somewhat equal footing with other minorities, they've been in decline in comparison to what they had. And that definitely leads to "Economic Anxiety".
How did you get from "whites behaving like a minority group" to "racism, social change, fear, and sexism"? Are these whites racist for "behaving like a minority group"? Or are whites "behaving like a minority group" because they're the victims of someone else's racism? Or is the "behaving like a minority group" a red herring, and it's merely racist to vote against the folks who are constantly demonizing people who look like you?
And that's one problem I'm struggling with. Ultimately a lot of the suggestions I see to help the "left behind" in this thread might fail due to this very sort of politics alone. So many of the social help programs in the US have been demonized in the past by focusing on this in coded terms. Think "welfare queens" and the negative reaction to just the "Obamacare" nickname for some of the most direct and obvoius examples.
"Racism, social change, fear, sexism"... that can be overcome. The real problem is how these emotions are used as a political weapon now. No attempted solution will work if an opposition that hates it can transform it into some sort of identity politics battle. Especially now that we've found out that identity politics through a megaphone is actually more effective than "dog whispers".
It is possible for Donald Trump to surprise me, and one way he could surprise me is if he actually is more friendly to a stronger government with the goal of helping these people out. Donald Trump dose not make the laws, however, Congress does. So I expect no change.
As a side note, in a way, it was a shame it wasn't Bernie Sanders vs. Donald Trump for that reason. It would have been fascinating to see if economic policy really could out-trounce the Southern Strategy this time...
The resistance to safety nets is easy to understand: they are not optional (like an insurance, let's say) and usually the same people are paying for the same other people that are receiving. It is not a safety net, it is a transfer of wealth imposed by law.
The irony is that if he was not able to so easily change careers, a few of his ardent fans might have gotten real medical advice instead and had their lives saved (hypothetically).
Luckily the German healthcare system is solid enough that it's exceedingly rare for people to end up in life-threatening situations because of quack doctors. And in his defence, he did send people to real doctors if they had real medical issues.
Look, I grew up with this nonsense. My grandparents even believed in new age non-sense like "earth rays" and astrology. If you just want to get out some witticisms about how pseudoscience is obviously pseudoscience that's fine by me. But I'm not sure you're adding anything to the conversation by ragging on my dead grandfather.
If you want to be outraged about something, how about being outraged that social public healthcare in Germany actually pays for homeopathic "medicine" (i.e. products with no active ingredients and no valid studies) and that pharmacies are allowed to claim these so-called remedies can actually alleviate specific symptoms.
That's interesting, but coming from the art side, I would argue that while the bottom would continue to fall, the middle & top-end still would need a professional. Running a photography business isn't just about taking the photos. The pre-production, post-production and business/marketing involved is what is necessary for a sustainable photography business.
I think this challenge of the race to the bottom exists in virtually every industry.
Oh, sure. There are still professional photographers but the industry is nothing like it was when my grandfather started in his late teens (post-war Germany, a period of massive growth). And we're talking about a freelancer (with an assistant), not someone working for a large agency. The industry changed a lot for people like him.
That nearly every industry developed like that is precisely on point: that your job is currently a safe bet doesn't mean it's something you'll be able to do all your life, no matter how good you are. There may never be a "Bitrot Belt" but the job market simply isn't static and never has been.
The entire point of the anecdote was that he had a successful career doing one thing well past his thirties, things changed, and he switched to a completely unrelated career and was pretty good at that too. The details are just flavouring because it's a personal story.
If you want something more blue collar: my father-in-law had a long career as truck driver, then changed paths to work in logistics/manufacturing. Plus I think he worked as a mechanic at some point. Sure it's mostly centred around working with vehicles but those are still three different jobs before he reached retiring age.
The bigger problem in the US though might be location. The Rust Belt is dead because the jobs went away and there are not enough new jobs in the region to replace them. People actually have to uproot and relocate to find a new job and a new home -- that can be jarring.
Yeah. I expected the populist insurgency to come in the form of a progressive agenda, but this is the way it went instead.
The problem is, people who used to make a livelihood don't want a minimum wage job, no matter how high the minimum wage. They're adults used to providing for themselves and possibly a family, for god's sake! They don't want some elementary retraining program to make them barely capable of doing a modern job. They want to feel productive and useful on their own, like most of us.
do they not bear any responsibility for failing to gain useful skills or education? white people just feel entitled to the past where they could do nothing and be lazy and refuse to learn and still have a nice life.
because we can't get our shit together and fund infrastructure programs
In Trump's acceptance speech he explicitly mentions this:
We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals. We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none. And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it.
I'm just hoping the government becomes more efficient at completing those infrastructure projects. Here in (western) Massachusetts we have simple projects like replacing a 30' concrete bridge over a creek that take 9 to 12 months to complete. They setup Jersey barriers that funnel traffic down to one lane, rip up the barricaded side and then do no work on it. In the 1930's they were able to start and finish a 782' three span iron bridge in one year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_King_Bridge).
Ask the residents of Central Texas about what happened when they privatized the toll system. Personal data leaks, false charges sent to collections, terrible customer service. It was only after widespread outcry for government oversight(!) by Republicans that anything got done about it.
There is never an age where education can't help you. It might not lead you into a new career, but it can broaden and deepen your understanding of the situation to help you make better choices. At it's, education could help the blue collar worker understand why his job is not coming back, and that he does need to do something else. Right now, those people believe Trump will someone bring those jobs back.
While I agree with the principle, I wonder if a harder economic calculation of ROI on rapidly inflating student tuitions bears that out. Higher education wouldn't seem to work out as it's already at the point that students at the beginning of their lives have a difficult time working off the debts acquired in their education - and certainly not in a way that doesn't dampen their finances in a serious way. Slicing time off the returns doesn't improve that calculation any. So you're left with occupational education - and I think that's a lot less clear ROI and employers very unwilling to actually train people.
That's a very idealized view of "education". The value of spending 40 hours in any given class is highly variable based on the subject matter, teacher, and perhaps most of all the other students. Online Ed is trying to change this dynamic but there are many worthless classes one can take that cost more than they are worth. And I would guess the free community classes rank on the low-end of the subject matter/teacher/student spectrum.
Today, for the first time I've heard someone speak about education being the key to Democrats trying to take over. Most young educated voters are left leaning - and I was told today that apparently it's because of the education brainwashing students to become government dependent...has anyone else heard about this before?
A little late, but yes, this is a common complaint among conservatives. Most colleges teach things like science, diversity, and critical thinking, which are at odds with the Christian nationalism that pervades conservatism.
Education, educated IS work, and profitable, but apparently not the kind of preferred work. Just wondering aloud, how will Mr Trump satisfy the wealthy, wall street, and the fiscally conservative to do prevailing-wage infrastructure? The skilled trades were always ready and could have been doing this all along if it was valued by congress. How has anything changed?
The people vocalizing their opinion by voting for Trump are beyond the age where education can be the key (old dogs and new tricks, etc.). There isn't a will to go to an educational program. There is a will to work and support yourself, but no work for them to do...
/because we can't get our shit together and fund infrastructure programs
//Not bitter.