A new idea? No. But technology that makes it available at scale and with reliably, without having to abstain from sex? It's hard to a imagine that there was ever a time in history when birth control was more widely available and as un-invasive, and where those benefits were enjoyed by more people.

For the vast majority of human history, having children was an economic positive. It was an investment, but it was a pretty damn safe one - children contributed to the household at varying levels, eventually capable of doing the work of any adult by the time they were in their early teens. If you weren't careful you could have too many kids, sure, or you'd have problems if there were a famine or a crop failure, but people have known both why and how to avoid having too many kids for thousands of years.

Capitalism gave us contraceptives that are more pleasurable to use, and certainly they're more effective, but it didn't give us family planning. What it did, economically speaking, is make it impossible to extract any surplus from our children. And why should we be allowed to extract surplus from children, when we aren't even able to extract surplus from ourselves? That belongs to capital.

Which, of course, is the problem. We're expected to pay for the next generation of laborers and get nothing in return for doing it. Rationally speaking, all it is now is excess unpaid work. Today you have kids because you irrationally desire to have kids, and only if (and when) you can afford to do so.

...You can't think of anything else that might have happened since 2007?

Sure, and I'm on board with the idea that it's responsible for some of the decline in birth rate, but definitely not all of it, and I believe it's not even responsible for a small fraction of it. "Three kids and an accident" vs. "three planned kids" isn't much of a difference to me.

Wait, what could children to around the house in pre-capitalist societies that they can't do in capitalist societies? We could extract value from children by having them do agricultural work. But we also extracted labor from children because we needed children to do that work. It was necessary. In a capitalist society (at least on this side of the 20th century), we don't need children for labor. So they get to go to school and improve themselves.

"Pre-capitalist"? Agricultural work? What a dim view of history.

Children can contribute economically in a lot of ways, assuming society is not structured against them doing so. Children used to contribute to cottage industries, and it was pretty common for them to learn about and assist with their parents' businesses. None of this is time wasted, neither for the parents (rationally or irrationally) or detrimental to the future success of the children. It's still pretty damn normal for parents to make their kids work in their store or shop or whatever, the part that's gotten strange is parents owning a business.


"Go to school and improve themselves" isn't even what's happening. What's happening is "do unpaid labor so a corporation can extract your human capital later". The money that you spend to feed a kid, the taxes you pay to send that kid to school, the help you give that kid with his abusive amounts of homework, that benefit is going to his future employer. Not him. Not you.

This is really the key idea. You can choose your gender (okay, it's not really a choice, but you get what I mean), you can choose your flair, choose your preferred soda, choose your preferred automobile brand, but what you can't do is choose not to participate in the capitalist behemoth. It's freedom within a mold. Like the individuality you experience buying clothes at Hot Topic.

Generally when fedora libertarians talk about individual freedom, they interpret individual freedom to mean "**** I want to smoke and jerk off to and I guess it's cool to be gay I have a cousin". They're also the ones who get suspiciously antsy about black people getting uppity. It's all just bull****, people everywhere just profess a bunch of stupid bull**** all the time and it's really all ****ing stupid.

That's also why the teacher strikes were so positive. Those strikes were the opposite of bull****, and was an expression of real freedom.

Which, by the way, are still expanding, and have won massive concessions. Take note everyone: organizing and working together achieves things.

At least until they send in the national guard, am I right?

Maybe they could jail them and instill a prison labor system, where they just do the job they did before as prison labor. They can kill the rowdy ones.

Ha ha, seriously though. The Rockefellers are monsters whose lives and legacy were built on the corpses of the innocent. Never forget.

Speaking of labor rights, seeing Elon Musk's absolute hysteria about UAW speaking to his factory workers is a trip. Anyone who doesn't believe class war exists needs to look into how billionaires with no brain-to-mouth interlocutor speak about these things.

Hmm, I just did a cursory reading of the Wikipedia, to remember more about that family:



Why am I not surprised that the school responsible for the birth of neoliberal ideology has funding roots in one of the wealthiest robber baron families?

Don't forget about the American fascist movement.

BuT riCH peOPLe HaTED tHE nAzIs

****, it's always a step worse than I thought. Whenever anyone points out billionaire philanthropy, that needs to be countered with billionaire "philanthropy".

https://www.npr.org/2018/05/21/605012795/supreme-court-decision-delivers-blow-to-workers-rights?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

So looks like the GOP is succeeding in its tactic of wrecking labor rights through the courts. Basically private employers can force any employee into individual arbitration, preventing collective legal action and making it basically impossible to seek recourse against e.g. wage theft.

So not only is ICE separating children from their parents for no reason other than Trump wants to prosecute them all criminally, because, you know, racism, ICE basically just gave away the children, and:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/29/us/politics/us-placed-immigrant-children-with-traffickers-report-says.html

Yeah, a good deal of them ended up in the hands of traffickers. So, good job Trump, good job America.

Whenever I think the future might have some potential, I look at what mainstream Democrats are saying and feel it's all hopeless:

http://thehill.com/homenews/house/389492-dem-lawmaker-to-melania-your-husband-separating-immigrant-children-from-their

I can't parse who would write this article. Who ****ing cares about Melania, who ****ing cares about who said what about what, the only thing which matters is that Trump's directives are breaking up families! How morally detached do you have to become where anything else matters but that fact alone? This constant stream of "owns" people try to serve up against Trump is so ****ing stupid.

Democrats have their heads up their asses so far I would not be surprised if they lose 2020.

I should add, this is in context of ICE literally losing 1500 kids. Just losing them. Like, "OOPSIE WOOPSIE!! Uwu We made a ****y wucky!! A wittle ****o boingo!" losing.

Sounds like it's working as intended.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/26/american-liberals-politics-left-messaging

Some operative paragraphs:



And then the TL;DR:

You realize that this article describes something that happened during the Obama administration, right?

That's what Donald Trump did. People didn't like it.

Yes; Donald Trump gave the directive to prosecute all cases of border crossing criminally, meaning that this kind of thing we can expect to increase.

ICE has always been ****, affirmative action for the high school bully/police academy dropout demographic.

So something just clicked for me. The reason all of these people are pushing the "college is bad" narrative, and to get more vocational training, is just to offload skilling new workers onto the school system so it's cheaper to find skilled employees. For some reason this video made it apparent.. thanks random moron youtuber.

The US is not sending their best. Some, I assume, are good people.

Well, college is kind of bad. It's a broken system, with post-secodnary education being primarily designed to produce more academics, which is a dead-end, broken profession anyway with zero prospects, and it in no way provides skills that are necessary for a job, despite requiring young people to take out massive loans that they spend the rest of their lives paying off. And it's a hoop that increasingly people are hobbled for not jumping through, despite being so financially onerous. If an industry is willing to hire people who don't have a credential that is largely useless and insanely expensive, there's an alignment of interests there between the industry and young people. I mean, if a student is driven enough that they can get an education through udacity courses or a coding bootcamp that enables them to secure a lucrative clear, it might not be a bad choice.

you just paraphrased the same shtick every hack op-ed writer has been saying for the past 10 years now

And you just responded with an ad hominem attack, so... good discussion?

Good discussions don't begin with shaky rhetorical points you picked up from reading too many op-ed pages. A good discussion on this topic would involve some research and effort, and I've done that and explained on here before why the anti-college lines are weak. You're welcome to read those, or come up with something original on the topic. Otherwise we're just doing the same ring around the rosie, and I'm determined to not repeat any more pointless discussions with you.

Lol ok pal I'll let you keep posting your well researched memes

If jobs don’t “require” university degrees, then why are degrees listed requirements for most jobs? Why are employers willing to pay a premium for a university education?

This situation is a lot more complicated than your posts imply.

An undergraduate degree is a class or status signifier? Undergraduate degrees generally correlate with certain soft skills like dedication and an ability to see tasks to completion? College students are socialized in a way that makes them desirable employees? Some of the stuff you learn as a CS student actually is useful for certain projects that require a deeper knowledge of the abstract concepts? What's your take?

I'm curious: how many of these people who are advising young students not to get college degrees are actually hiring an appreciable number of people right out of high school. I suspect that they still prefer hiring college grads over high school students. But as I said, if they're willing to hire high school students, that might be a good thing. But I suspect they're giving bad advice and dissuading people from getting an important credential.

I'd add that, from what I gather, a cs degree isn't entirely useless, and it does provide knowledge that is useful for a job in the industry. But can a person get a job in the industry without one? It happens all the time. I know plenty of people personally who've done it, some of whom have undergraduate degrees either in the humanities or in scientific fields, others who have no undergraduate degree at all. So I can see how it might actually be a good decision for a high school grad not to go to college, and instead taking AP CS in high school and using that as a foundation. It simply might not be worth the debt to some people. Others might make a different choice. But either way, it doesn't seem like it's a no brainer.

From what I've read, bootcamp graduates have some skills that are mored honed than CS grads, and vice versa. Does that mean it's useless to get a CS degree? It probably is if you want to be a front end engineer. For other jobs, a CS degree or some other quant heavy degree is probably much more useful. But undoubtedly Jon has a more informed opinion than I do about this stuff. I really know jack all about it, aside from some anecdotal stuff, and whatever they were saying on Hacker News 2 years ago.

TL;DR: It's happening because labor can't organize anymore.

Yep. A bunch of cool things happen for billionaires when average people in first-world countries stop going to university:

- There's a glut of low-skill laborers, so wages and onboarding costs get driven down.
- You get to use the glut to convince the government to train your workers for you. (e.g. "these high school grads are unemployed because they can't [x]", and then the taxpayers - your current workers - are made to pay to train their eventual replacements to do [x] and you get those benefits for free.)
- There's a shortfall of high-skill labor, so they get favorable labor certifications (labor market opinions) for exposing that position to international competition, and wages get driven down.
- High-skill labor churn drops to zero because legal immigrant workers are functionally slaves.

Of course, a society that discourages aspirational endeavors (like post-secondary education, new business starts, status-signifying consumption) have a huge down-side for billionaires too, and occasionally they're sophisticated enough to comprehend that, but they don't individually see themselves as part of the problem.

That makes sense. But I'm curious: What the answers to these questions?



And with this:



Why does having a college degree make someone not a low-skill worker, when they have, in many cases, no additional skills that prepare them for work? Is the primary reason why it is beneficial to have a college degree merely that it is a qualifying credential? Or do the generic/soft skills one gains from attaining a college education make an appreciable difference?

I want to get in front of this first. There are tons of jobs which absolutely require a post-secondary education. Sometimes this is legally required, but usually it isn't, and unless you have some exposure to the field you might not even understand why.

Skilled trade apprenticeships are post-secondary education. Electricians and machinists spend half of their apprenticeships inside a classroom, according to the journeymen I know. I don't know about other trades but I imagine it is similar. I know this isn't a university degree, but I wanted to point this out because there is a very big difference between "jobs that don't require post-secondary" and "jobs that don't require university degrees". (This extends to most other vocational programs, which are either legally required or are obviously beneficial training for employers in need of those skills.)

Professional schools require all or part of a university degree, which varies from school to school. Accounting schools typically prefer a mathematics, business, or finance undergraduate, but some will take an undergraduate transfer once they've completed enough math credits (per accountant I know). Nursing programs usually take undergraduate transfers. Actuarial sciences require a completed undergraduate mathematics degree. Law schools require a completed undergraduate degree, usually from the humanities (proof you understand how to argue effectively). Medical, dental, veterinary, and pharmaceutical programs all require a completed undergraduate degree, usually in the biological sciences. There's no reason you specifically need to have a degree, but you'd need to do most of a degree in order to satisfy the prerequisites anyway. Professional school is usually legally required to practice those professions, so if an undergraduate degree is required to enroll in the professional school, effectively the profession legally requires an undergraduate degree.

Engineers are also legally required to complete an undergraduate degree.

Then you have all of the jobs that don't legally require a university degree, but really do in practice. That includes every kind of research job, whether working for academia or industry. Research assistants really must have an undergraduate degree in a relevant field, otherwise they won't be effective assistants. Researchers must have a doctorate in a relevant field, otherwise they won't understand how to identify, evaluate, or document an original innovation (this is the purpose of a PhD).

Then you have all of the jobs that don't technically require a university degree, but require knowledge that you are only likely to obtain while completing one. This includes any job that requires any sort of quantitative analysis, because the necessary skills are not taught anywhere at a high school level. Due to the depth, breadth, and abstractness of the necessary skills I also do not believe they ever could be taught at the high school level (in particular, the prefrontal cortex - responsible for abstract thought - isn't fully developed until you're 25). Financial firms hire quant 'generalists', so they snap up anybody with a physics, statistics, mathematics, or computer science undergraduate. Other firms require quant specialists, who need to have additional specialized knowledge you aren't going to see at a high school level (more about this later).

Then you have all of the jobs that don't at all require a university degree, but which employers have good reason to prefer. BFA or MFA for design and illustration jobs shows you have practice, peer approval, and experience dispassionately reviewing your work. Psychology for HR. Psych, sociology, BComm, marketing for marketing and advertising, which at least shows you understand the trade language (and sometimes means you're a quant specialist). And speaking of language, a linguistics degree or an undergraduate language degree makes it a lot easier to hire you if you're a translator.

So what are the jobs that don't require a degree? Non-professional jobs with no legal degree requirement, that don't involve original innovation in a particular field, don't require knowledge you can only obtain in an undergraduate program (particularly don't involve any sort of quantitative analysis), and don't involve any tasks for which you performance improves with a degree.

Help me if I missed any, but from what I can tell this leaves exactly:
- Unskilled manual labor
- Retail and customer service
- Light clerical work
- Management (iff you're managing the above)
- Skilled trades (still post-secondary, just not a degree)

The last destroys your body. All of the skilled tradesmen I know are looking for ways out and they're only in their 30s. But at least it's good money as long as the cartilage in your knees holds out.

From personal experience I can tell you that the first four are ****ing horrible jobs. I'm glad I lived in a country with relatively cheap tuition, but even if I didn't there's really no amount of debt I wouldn't have taken on for even a chance to escape them. Those jobs don't pay nearly enough to be worth doing. Ignoring the labor side of things, though, the demand crunch that would happen if kids actually listened to these know-nothing do-nothing billionaires, and chose these four jobs over getting an undergraduate degree, would make our entire society collapse overnight.



Anyhoo... you had a question about computer science. I'll answer it now.

The issue is competitive advantage.

You can definitely get a software job without a computer science degree. Lots of companies need light custom software work, like someone who can write an intranet app to run a database query, or a new Wordpress theme. Mostly jobs where software isn't the core competence of the company. Where the software needs to exist or otherwise improves efficiency, but isn't a major product differentiator or a source of competitive advantage for the firm.

A red flag for me is when a software company hires a lot of people without degrees. Companies where the software is the product, or a major differentiator, or a major source of efficiency for the company.

The thing people don't really understand is, a computer science degree doesn't teach you how to write software. It doesn't even try to. Computer programming and software development are works of art and creativity, and there's nothing in a computer science degree that can help you achieve a higher art form the way a BFA would - the concern is always correctness, not the artistry. The same goes for the imo purposeless software specializations, like software and computer engineering.

What computer science does teach you is that quant stuff, which you pointed out. Quantitative analysis is a very important but casually neglected aspect of commercial software development. Algorithm and data structure analysis are only a small part of this toolset. A computer science degree gives you all of the tools you need to model and evaluate every part of your software system, including product development and even your engineering processes. In effect, computer science graduates are quant specialists in every part of software design, project management, marketing, operations, and support.

Software companies that don't discriminate between software developers with and without CS degrees probably don't see the benefits of an educated engineering workforce. That either means they aren't working on problems hard enough to need systems analysis, or they simply don't allow their software developers (read: code monkeys) to participate in the company on the productivity improvement level. As a software developer myself, it's a red flag because I know I'll never get to do my best work at that company. As a customer and potential investor, it's a red flag because I know this company has no competitive advantage. Their 'moat' is hours worked, and that's not good enough. That's the kind of company that will get disrupted by a lone genius working in their garage.

The up-side for non-degree-havers is that you'll be the last person to get laid off, I guess.

I think my previous post answers these questions. There aren't as many jobs that don't require or benefit from a degree than you think. Those employers who really don't care about degrees don't hire people who have them (because they are overqualified).

Yeah, thanks, it answered most of them. It goes without saying I wouldn't have asked if I knew that post was on the was on the way. (Your description of why a PhD is valuable was really striking. I'd never thought of it that way before.)

Except I still wonder why so many of these jobs require bachelors degrees. I suspect that many of them didn't 50 or 70 years ago when there weren't as many college graduates out there. Is a college degree now a necessary qualification for so many jobs because there are so many college graduates, an employer has no reason to roll the dice on someone who's only a high school grad? Or back then did the same jobs require college degrees, but they just made up a much smaller portion of the jobs out there? What I'm getting at is: why did a college degree become an indispensable credential? In some cases it's obvious, because the knowledge required is directly applicable. In others, though, it's less obvious.

Let me answer that with a pertinent example:

In practice, the Computer Systems Analyst job title is dead. Your company uses it at the US border to get foreign workers across, and that's it. The title is dead because software companies don't actively recruit or hire systems analysts. They don't actively recruit systems analysts because they don't know who a systems analyst is or what a systems analyst does. It's literally not a question they've ever even asked. It's a shame, because that job title was invented for a reason. Software companies are mismanaged to hell though, so nobody ever bothered to learn it.


5 people visit this forum, so I'll share a little secret here. A computer systems analyst is what the software industry calls a 10X engineer.


Basically, this is what happens in software recruitment today. You "know" 10X engineers tend to have high quant skills, so you resume screen for people with CS degrees and then behave as randomly as possible. Some small percentage of people you hire will have the skill, predilection, and initiative to be your team's systems analyst. A good manager, even if they don't understand exactly why this person is effective, will give the more authority over design or other engineers, which will enhance the entire team. A lucky clueless manager will just be happy that this person is super productive.

The thing is, you don't actually need that many people with CS degrees. What you really want is 1 computer systems analyst generating innovations and driving a team of developers to success. The rest of those developers don't use their CS degrees at all, and don't actually need them. But because you don't know what you really need, or the correct language to describe what you need, your best play is rolling dice on CS undergraduates. And that's why they throw candidates through the ringer so hard, too. Because they're looking for people who might be systems analysts (but, again, without understanding what that means).

The same goes for most of the other examples I pointed out. Not everybody who works in marketing needs an advanced degree. Maybe for the most part all you need is boots on the ground. But if what you need is some ~magical wunderkind~ to drive those people to success, well, you're gonna have to hire all people with BComm degrees because you aren't gonna find that person without rolling the dice as many times as you can. Employers don't have the right language or tools to hire the people they really need.


That's why I blame the (intentional, malicious) destruction of organized labor. No two workers are perfect substitutes, but labor unions smooth over those differences. If all you really need is programmer generalists, well, going through a union would be a great way to do that. Then you're forced to think about your actual hiring problems, instead of letting random chance solve them for you.