Europeon Debt Crisis: There isn't another option EXCEPT austerity.

[Scoobes]

HappySqurriel said:

Akvod said:

HappySqurriel said:

Akvod said:

Yes. Let's go back to the old guild days in the middle ages. You're sound like a classical socialist.

I don't understand your point ... Skilled trades are (probably) the most entrepreneurial and purely capitalist field within our economy and are becoming far more important as fewer people learn how to do the work themselves.

Here is a good video for you to watch:

I'm not watching a 20 minute video. Trade skills are worth shit, they aren't what made America into an industrial nation mass producing cars and machines. Now we need to transition from having tangible assets into having high human capital (which we're doing amazing, despite what critics of America say. What country has as many prestigious research universities as us? Where are Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, etc located at?).

It's fucking theoretical fuckers like you, who are weirdly mixing up the philosphies of anti-federalists, socialists, libertarians, and objectivists that are dooming this world.

 

I guess you are the embodiment of the statement "Ignorance is Bliss" ... If you would have bothered to watch the video you would have gotten the point

The economy needs both knowledge based jobs and people in the skilled trades but for decades there has been a massive push to emphasize "higher education" and de-emphasize the trades. To make matters worse, the emphasis has not been on getting higher education to give you valued skills but to get people to follow their passion. The net result has been that we're graduating an excessive amount of people from Universities with no skills, while we're failing to graduate enough people from tradeschools with skills that are already in high demand.

Outside of Engineering, Computer Science and Nursing I would not recommend anyone get a university degree because they will be no more qualified to work in a knowledge based economy than a highschool graduate.

Years ago I remember reading an article about the typical millionare in Canada and it wasn't what people expected. It was an individual in their mid 30s who worked in the trades, owned their own business, drove an 8 year old Ford F150, had no debt and lived in a modest house. I have seen this in my own life several times as the people I knew in high-school that are living the "good life" are in the trades, while most university graduates are struggling to get by. Believe what you want, but for every college graduate who is really using their degree there are (currently) dozens who are underemployed because they failed to even consider the trades.

This is true in the UK too. We've been pushing people into university, but many of them come out with useless degrees that don't have any relevance in the workplace. The result is a lot of debt and a job in which they don't actually need the degree they studied for.

My brother-in-law on the other hand left school with the bare minimum qualifications at 16, worked as a painter/decorator for a few years and setup his own business. Now? He owns a bungalow worth nearly £1 million, drives a Lexus 4x4 (which he paid for upfront), can afford to send his daughter to extra theatre lessons (on top of extra private tuition), and hollidays twice every year. He's earning about the same amount in a year that I could just about scrape in 3 with a PhD in Biochemical Engineering.

Not sure if I'd have done anything different even knowing what I do now, but it was never even seen as a viable option when I was younger.