We stopped building new housing, which turns housing into a transfer of wealth from those who don't have it (the young) to those who have been holding it (the not young).
We have eliminated entry level positions, saddled college graduates with massive amounts of debt by defunding universities, and created great security for older people by taking away opportunity for younger people.
Anyway, increasing supply isn't going to solve our many problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity, but the Ezra Klein dunces aren't ready for that conversation yet.
Prices are set through a combination of supply-demand and cost of providing housing. Almost all increase in housing costs are coming from land price increase, due to land shortage from planning policies that limit land use density.
Housing has been made into an investment first, and a home second, by creating housing austerity and shortage. The only way to prevent housing from being an investment is to stop the artificial shortage of housing.
Houses are lousy investments.
I bought a townhome in 2004; it took 17y to get back to what I paid for it due to the economic fallout of 2008. When it did go positive, it went positive in a big way and I sold at the absolute height of the post-COVID market.
Now I moved to an area that has the number 1 district in the state and own a single family home in a neighborhood without a HoA; the house has already appreciated >10% in one year.
You may very well be right. However, everyone I hear saying how much money they made off of their house neglects to mention any of the expenses I listed.
Why not?
(I guess I'm a "dunce", but I'm one that's ready for that conversation)
"increasing supply isn't going to solve many of our problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity"
It would just help with some of them.
But that's a statement that's obvious on the face of it - cheaper housing costs buy time if you lose your job, and makes it easier to have a bigger emergency fund, but it isn't an infinite reprieve. So. The charitable interpretation still hits a wall because that would be acknowledging that supply would help with some of them, and the "dunces" nonsense suggest that they wouldn't agree even with that.
(In some states in particular, though, home ownership is uniquely protected in ways that would help fight homelessness, so increasing supply and incentivizing selling-to-an-owner vs being a landlord could be very helpful too.)
It really is housing and scarcity at the bottom of all the other symptoms we see.
That’s so obvious it’s nearly a truism.
Rate of new houses is below the rate of new households, and it’s been that way for years.
Sure, as with every other good.
But there’s a long way to go between current property prices and raw construction costs.
If there is a reckoning, the most pain will be the demographic here on HN, living in the suburbs. Not the billionaires living in the Hamptons or Napa.
The fuel of this fire is white collar high earners. Its also why not much is probably going to change, because these people also vote a lot. It's not billionaires and Black Rock driving up home prices, that's for sure...
Group Wealth Income/yr Spending/yr
50–95% ~$75–80T ~$11–13T ~$9–11T
95%+ ~$95–105T ~$7–9T ~$5–7T
75–85% ~$18–22T ~$2.5–3.0T ~$1.4–1.8TOr join an existing one.
The society you desire can’t exist unfortunately as much as I’ve thought it could and worked for it
There is increasingly becoming more of a divide between haves and have nots, and it has a temporal component because of how equity has appreciated over the last decade or so. Both housing and stocks.
People from a decade ago have seen absolutely unsustainable appreciation in their assets while doing nothing. That is putting them at structural advantages against younger generations that will not see those same appreciations. It's like the bus has left without them. No matter how hard and fast they run, someone asleep on the bus will always be ahead of them.
The lowest quartile of income have had the highest growth the past four years.
It creates austerity which means the wealthy do just fine while those with less suffer and overpay and transfer what little they do have to the wealthy.
Degrowth is a fundamentally unequal program which causes massive inequality and suffering. Only with growth does power lessen for those with the most.
Inequality is the result of allowing economic growth, i.e. freedom.
What is this supposed to be implying and how do you square it with the massive amount of money being poured into "disruption" and VC investment, etc, in the US?
Where is degrowth being practiced at scale, and how has that caused more of a divergence between the wealthy and the rest than the opposite pro-economic-growth, pro-efficiency policies that brought us Walmart, Amazon, etc and happily shit-canned all the displaced workers from the less-efficient-but-more-evenly-distributed businesses they replaced?
GDP growth rate, for instance, in the US doesn't have a significant inflection point around Reaganomics and its increases in deficit spending + "pro-growth" lowering of tax rates on the wealthy. We've never really gone away from that philosophy despite not seeing increases in growth + seeing a LOT of increases in inequality and the elites thriving while everyone else gets squeezed.
Perhaps "growth" is driven primarily by cultural and technological factors (especially the latter!) and inequality is driven primarily by whether or not a population has the balls to say "even if economies of scale suggest that wealth will concentrate in big mega-players, we want to fight that"? And the US had the will to do that 90 years ago, but was successfully brainwashed into giving up on it *despite the 50s in particular being still seen even by those on the right as a "golden age" of both growth and "everyman" quality of life?
If the PC revolution had started seven years earlier and the Iranian revolution had occurred seven years later how would our views of Carter vs Reagan (or some other Republican in 1984 instead) change? But which of those things did they actually cause personally?
A rising tide raising all ships sounds great and all, until you notice the tide seems to only be rising on one side.
People say that right up until someone wants to do something and then it's all "not in my back yard" and "won't somebody think of Alex Jones and his gay frogs" or whatever their line is.
I'd say nobody is willing to put their money where their mouth is but it's not money. They'd made more money with growth. It's speculative bullshit "what ifs" that could be mopped up easily if they happened. The problem is people's beliefs, ideology, religion, whatever you want to call it.
The idea "oh but a richer person than me benefits" becomes the reason for blocking housing, eliding the fact that a poorer person benefits, the true thing the NIMBYs try to prevent.
At least, that's true in my area. People that already have housing, are comfortable, start to rail against all this economic growth and say that we should block all change to buildings to prevent it.
Anybody who is actually serious about providing more opportunity to those with less realized that we need more housing, where the jobs are. It's the homeowners and well-established that pursue degrowth and austerity.
The only thing it does to be anti "NIMBY" is aid in unchecked price hikes on "low cost" high density housing that none of us can afford.
EDIT: I live in one of the 10 fastest growing metro areas of the US. In the last 4 years my county added over 60,000 homes but about 130,000 new people moved here. I drive around and see new development after new development. But more people move here because of the good jobs, schools, etc.
I can drive 2 hours away to some economically depressed areas. Houses are a lot cheaper because the population moves away to the bigger cities for jobs, education, etc. So sure you can have a cheap house in an undesirable location.
In my downtown area, there has been a trickle of a new building with a few hundred apartments per year for the past four years, and people are freaked out at that tiny amount of new housing in a city of 50,000 people. in reality we need at least double that amount of housing per year, but that small amount has people shocked and thinking we're building way too much.
It's been far too normalized that we shouldn't build housing, and it's hurting society at a very deep level and causing massive inequality while blocking access to opportunity.
If you build some, but not enough vs what's actually needed, you get both:
- expensive new market-rate construction that most people can't afford
- localized bumps in rent for increased relative desirability
- overall prices that continue to rise across the city because the new construction was just a drop in the bucket compared to the need
And then it's easy to point to "they built that building AND our rent went up!" as a reason to oppose construction, even though in the long run they'd go up even more if that building wasn't built.
I feel that only works so long. Without new emerging areas offering high wages and decent cost of living, the new grads look at the old areas like SF (no hate just e.g.) and see a financial bridge too far and a tight job market anyway.
Building new clusters of expertise and economic opportunity is extremely hard, nearly impossible, everybody has been trying to replicate the Bay Area's tech success for decades and even with the housing problems it simply hasn't happened anywhere else.
It's far easier to remove the law on the books banning housing than it is to build an ecosystem of any economy from scratch in a new area.
We don't need any new cities, we need to allow existing areas to grow. If every city blocks housing, then even that new area is going to be blocked from growing as it grows.
We must stop everybody in their tracks that thinks it says "I don't want new housing or neighbors near me" because that is the literally robbing of our young people and of society of opportunity.
I'd add more nuance here, SF and many of the surrounding areas said we don't want population growth but they didn't say they didn't want economic growth. And that's a nasty combination for cost-of-living because if you have new higher-grossing, higher-paying businesses displace older ones, you're going to see a crapload of residential displacement and housing inflation.
SF didn't want to be Manhattan residentially, but they didn't do much to try to avoid being Manhattan industrially.
People who rented in SF got screwed because of that.
People who owned property didn't. They made out wonderfully. They kept their property, with the existing characteristics in many places so that they still had a nice big SFH instead of living in a condo like in Manhattan. And the fact that it's worth ten times as much is hardly a downside to them!
Sure, that plot of land would be worth even more if you could build a giant tower on it, but that increase in value is much less marginally useful or desirable to them than their home and neighborhood staying more or less the same shape.
If you want to change that, you have to be really specific about the incentives and the motivations of the current players. "Economic growth" as a sales-pitch alone doesn't resonate against entrenched non-financial NIMBY interests. Or necessarily promise anything to change the property-owner-vs-renter power imbalance.
Sure it did. And Silicon Valley is just the current nexus.
In the mid 1800s, Pittsburgh was the startup technological nexus for chemistry and engineering around steel. In the early 1900s, Detroit was the startup technological nexus for car and machine manufacturing. In the 1960s, Silicon Valley became the startup technological nexus due to Fairchild and the Traitorous Eight.
The "trick" to creating a startup technological nexus is for the price of a startup to be in the range that experienced, generally young (roughly 25-35), mid-level technical professionals can fund.
Temecula would happily grow but they can't just repeal their laws and say "go for it" because in order to get their citizens tax money back in the form of grant money (with strings of course, because that's how grants work) they have to have these laws because these "we will mandate parking, and then we will create beurocratic hell for anyone who wants to pave anything" in order to check some sort of "municipalities shall implement..." type law.
And it's not just the clean this or that act, it's every goddamn issue and area of regulation.
So basically SF not only gets to eat its cake, but it gets to prevent every other city in the state from doing something drastically different from what they're doing.
And you can run this example in any state, just change the cities. And it happens federally too.
> And it's not just the clean this or that act, it's every goddamn issue and area of regulation.
> So basically SF not only gets to eat its cake, but it gets to prevent every other city in the state from doing something drastically different from what they're doing.
> And you can run this example in any state, just change the cities. And it happens federally too.
I don't think you can run this example in any state.
Maybe Mansfield, TX; or Waxahachie, TX (both south of the DFW metroplex) would love to grow. And there's not much stopping them regulatory-wise there. Yeah, car infrastructure and parking is necessary, but that's literally true everywhere within a few hundreds of miles, and isn't really restricted at the state level or by geography anywhere in the area, including the places like Frisco or The Colony on the north side of the Metroplex that have grown like crazy in the last 30 years.
But the Metroplex "proper" - which now includes the popular new surrounding cities - has gotten a lot more expensive over the same time frame.
There's a demand aspect that means some places can build into the growth, and others can't. What's the old saw? Location, location, location. There's all the land in the world to grow outwardly in the area, but it doesn't happen uniformly in every direction, and it hasn't prevented rising costs in the popular areas. It's less acute than SF because the raging single-family-zoning NIMBYism isn't accompanied by being landlocked, but the combo of NIMBYism + popularity/demand constraining where new construction happens mean that supply hasn't kept up with demand. And the money you'd save by living somewhere else, for many, doesn't justify giving up the location they want, so those other areas don't have a strong economic case for growth (why invest in a project there instead of a project on the north side?).
(THAT part is universal, and part of why I wonder just how much Temecula would actually want to grow: would growth just look like Riverside or San Bernadino? Folks with means aren't choosing the inland locations first... and unlike in TX, the weather is enormously different.)
I still think the solution involves rapid transit (which could be cars maybe) - you need the outlying towns where there is space and room to be directly connected to the economic centers in a way that makes them practical.
Then the area that is low density can grow - connected to the city center but not contributing significantly to vehicle traffic.
In Canada - not so much
Also, yes lots of housing has unbelievably expensive deferred maintenance and many sellers are trying to act like their homes aren't huge money pits.
No, the problem is that the universities are too bloated, not that we need to take even more in taxes from working people to feed the bloat
Looking like the DMV was no longer accepted as you needed to actually attract students, which means supporting an ever wider array of different things. Daycare, job placement, etc etc individually get tacked on and before you know it administrative overhead has gone wild.
You see similar effects with housing where people buying stuff with major loans are simply less cost conscious. Saving even 1,000$ on a kitchen is a big deal for most people if you need to write a check for it today, split it over 30 years and suddenly it seems largely irrelevant.
How can you transfer wealth from people who don't have it?
> saddled college graduates with massive amounts of debt by defunding universities
The debt came from rising tuitions due to the government making it too easy to get loans.
> created great security for older people by taking away opportunity for younger people.
???
Worth expanding on these ??? I think - old people have less security if young people have less opportunities. The opportunities of the young is the surplus generation that creates the resources to support free riders (like old people).
In the extreme case, if the young literally don't have any opportunities at all, eventually they're going to have to just let the old people die off horribly because there aren't enough resources for everyone to make it to the end of the year.
Aside from housing, every professional sector has been taken over and hollowed out by private equity or big tech. My grocery store, vet, plumber and doctors are all PE.
That seems to have dried up, nobody is building massive employment centers far from the existing major cities.
"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children."
This has led to administration bloat and majors that are completely useless when you graduate. Federal loans should be eliminated and universities should back the loans themselves.
The government has a history of inflating anything they offer cheap money for. Housing, healthcare, education.
In our area parents can get several thousand for opting out of public school. That can be used to offset private school tuition. What happened? Private school tuition rose by about the amount the government was giving. It’s no more affordable, the government is on the hook for money, and the private schools have less incentive to compete since they got a 50% bump for doing nothing.
Any time the government offers handouts fraud, waste, and inflation will follow.
Asking those who have only been able to vote for a few years to have solved the problems, in a system where power is gained only through the accumulation of decades of experience, is, well blaming the victims.
The greed of older generations, their lack of compassion and understanding, and their narcissism are all to blame.
Young people are entering a system built by others with the ladders already pulled up. Violent revolution is the only way they could have changed the system in a short time, and nobody wants that.
You correctly indicate that all of this is a transfer of wealth to those individuals who are already wealthy. Where you're mistaken is in suggesting this is a generational transfer when it is corporations and by extension the 0.01% of the wealthiest individuals in our society that are the clear beneficiaries.
However it happened, the absolute maniacal obsession with job experience has ruined the market. Yes the more involved jobs in information security do require widespread knowledge that can't necessarily be taught on site. A lot of the entry jobs in tech though are not complicated and can easily be taught on site but even then, companies have defaulted to requiring years of prior experience even for those positions.
My spouse knows a recent grad who took this path through an undergraduate program at the University of Maine (https://www.uma.edu/academics/programs/cybersecurity/cyberse...). As you said, he was unhirable in this field and now works in a completely unrelated job in a hospital.
Universities, local governments, local legislatures, the federal government, and whatever industry lobbying orgs that pushed for this are at fault. The apocalyptic narrative warning of a dire skills shortage are still being pushed out by industry:
Cybersecurity workforce shortage reaches 4 million despite significant recruitment drive (2023) https://www.csoonline.com/article/657598/cybersecurity-workf...
It's led to an expensive, unforgivable mess for a lot of young people and their families.
It’s an industrial complex that uses students as fuel and when the winds shift, they get left holding the bag. Schools want revenue from student loans, employers want the best talent at the lowest cost without expending any resources to train and develop talent. Colleges are also desperate for students due to structural demographics and an ever shrinking pool of potential student customers, so they’ll sell whatever dream students want to buy. Cybersecurity? Sure. AI? Sure. Whatever gets you into the pipeline. Give us your money and we’ll give you a piece of paper of little to no value.
Edit: If you need a sure thing, go into healthcare. The world is going to keep getting older, and the demand for care will not end in our lifetime.
(day job is cybersecurity and risk)
Unfortunately, cybersecurity was a hot topic in the education market and people got sold on the idea that they could get a six figure job with nothing but some theory and an entry level certification.
Then what was the purpose of sitting for a degree?
Security, qa, devops, data emgonerkng, the list goes on and on.
Infosec also adds the angle that you want someone with actual grey or black hat hands on experience
That was one long ass day!
I graduated with an AS in programming in the mid-late 1990s. I continually sent resumes for 18mos and got back 2 replies.
I had 2 major strikes against me. I was a new coder. I worked in a region that was reluctant to consider new hires (even for no-skill jobs) w/o an introduction.
My scholarship came with job placement but the entire program was axed by the Contract With America prior to me graduating. Apparently the animosity toward helping folks off the bottom rung outweighed any platitudes about jobs.
I eventually eked out a living doing local IT work but I never did reach a living wage.
It's quite good. Zoe is really interested in this stuff. The reporting isn't confrontational, it's just how things unrolled.
The problem isn't necessarily with job _experience_. It's the acronym. Most employers seem to believe that YOE stands for years of _employment_, which has effectively cut off anyone who wasn't previously employed at a relevant position. You can gain experience in almost anything by working hard at home (and 90% of that would absolutely carry over to a FT position), but you can't do the same for employment (unless you accept fabricating your job history). Cybersecurity is actually a field where hacking away at home, messing around with codebases, doing ctfs can actually give you TONS of experience, but barring you coming up with major zerodays, no one cares.
Colleges seem to be producing tons of the first, hardly any of the second.
It certainly can, companies just don't want to pay for that training. That's really where the "maniacal obsession" with job experience comes from. Companies just want to save money on training.
The only thing keeping security companies in the business is compliance/certification. If you've been around these compliance programs for long enough you know: they're box-checkers. But, sometimes you need to check that box, begrudgingly, annoyingly, so most companies will prefer to just outsource that security work to some managed security services provider, then think about it once a year when audit time comes around.
99% of cybersecurity in the commercial sector is a box checking compliance exercise.
They are doing the bare minimum for cybersecurity insurance requirements, thats it.
I lived through lots of "offshoring frenzies" that never went very far in the past, but things are different this time. Like in the fallout from the .com bust in the early 00s, there was all this talk about how we'd ship all software development to India, and a lot of companies did try to do that, and it was kind of a disaster. And top companies were still paying crazy high salaries for entry level top talent in the Bay Area because they knew it was worth it.
Now, though, I feel like companies are smarter. They know time zone overlap is key, so I've seen a lot more offshoring to Latin America, Canada and Europe where there is sufficient overlap with US time zones. Since even US folks spend so much of their time on Zoom etc. anyway, it doesn't really matter if your Zoom colleague is in your same city or thousands of miles away. I've worked with excellent colleagues from Argentina, Costa Rica, Poland etc. before, and the network speed was good enough so that videoconferencing quality was great. And this is a far cry from the early 00s when I was on choppy voice-only conference calls with a team in India.
So new grads are not only competing with other new grads, they're competing with highly competent, experienced grads from all over the world, most of whom have salary expectations much lower than US new grads.
I'm thinking lawyer, since legal skills aren't as portable across international borders?
Or make enough money to retire in the next couple years.
Really regret not doing that myself.
That shifting distribution would somewhat reduce the advantage of a college degree against the average member of the labor force.
In the U.K. youth unemployment is about 2005-6 levels. It was far higher by 2010.
We will likely have a similar concept in our country as China's "lying flat" movement unless we make a big shift.
The news here is how much it's changed.
2011 and 2013 were the years most tilted in the other direction since 1991 (unemployment rate 2 percentage points lower among new grads than all others). Only since 2019 have new grad overall had a higher unemployment rate, and it's climbing.
One of the interesting aspects here is that bad economies generally favored new grads because the unemployment baseline was higher and employers were picky and favored "any degree" over "no degree". I wonder how much of the change is from less of a preference for "any degree but not much experience" to "experience regardless of degree" in work that doesn't exactly need a degree. And how much is from job availability shifts eating away at entry level roles combined with the ever-present "get a degree to get a good job" pro-college marketing for most of recent US history.
https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...
While it is new, since 1990, that recent college grads are doing worse than all workers it's not the case that the degree is no longer a buffer. If you compare Young Workers(7.5%) to Recent College Grads(5.6%), i.e. the same age range, or All Workers(4.3%) to All College Grads(3.1%) as of today there's still a buffer.
Edit: They point this out later in the piece themselves
No, you miss that "lying flat" is only possible when cost of food/living is low and housing is abundant.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10559184/#aoi230067...
Even in STEM, post graduate is the minimum to make the degree count for anything
That’s why I tell people family isn’t #1 in America it’s like #3 or 4
So while I'd assume that yes, some graduates are more selective (as they should be, as they usually need to pay off student loans), a huge number of them are taking jobs that don't require their degrees.
College doesn’t prepare you for work as effectively as work, but it also teaches interesting things and prepares for academia (graduate school).
> New grads have not fallen behind their peers who skipped college, either. Young workers without a degree sit at 7.2% unemployment, well above the grads' 5.6%. A degree still beats no degree. What it no longer does is beat the average.
1. Pessimistic, harsh, etc: the quality of US graduates has been falling. Reading comprehension has been on a downward trend over the past decade. Mental illness, depression, and attention disorders are on the rise. Grade inflation, social media, AI availability, we spent years talking about how all of these things would be bad, and now the experimental cohort of kids growing up in this world are graduating and can't find jobs; maybe its not a coincidence.
2. AI automates processes. It doesn't just "do stuff" broadly speaking. AI has increased the leverage that process experts bring to the table: Doing 100x more of the right thing is infinitely more valuable than 100x more of the wrong thing, and with AI proliferating at the rate it is, the differentiator actually isn't in the 100x; its in the driver. Companies need senior talent; its like low-background steel.
I doubt we will see reversal on this in the near term. If anything I expect the "unemployment in their field" chart for every seniority bucket to continue up-and-to-the-right, just lagging behind new grads. But, whether that surfaces in general unemployment remains to be seen: Generally, I think the value of a college education is just going to drop.
Like, legitimately: AI automates college for 85% of college graduates and degrees. The true benefit of college was always immaterial and unrelated to the degree you got; it was in the liberal arts, unfurling your wings, making social connections, just stressing your brain out, hard, for four years to build neuroplasticity, that was always the point. But at some point along the way college became about the little piece of paper they gave out at the end and the words it said on it. All of our capitalistic forces beat college into "the optimal pipeline for that degree"; kill liberal arts, online classes, screw social connection, grade inflation, maximize enrollment, make it easy. Great. And then AI comes along and makes that one thing we optimized everything around pointless.
I'm very much a "it'll all work out in the end" kind of guy, and I think in this case: the societal benefits of a college degree being available for $25/million tokens will far outweigh the societal costs. But we're doing a very bad job of managing those costs, and the first thing we need to be realistic with on this cost management is: about half as many people who currently attend college should actually be there.
Is your assertion that if fewer graduates struggled with these things, companies would post more jobs? Asking because there aren't enough actual¹, realistic² jobs to employ the current pool of job seekers.
¹ Not ghost jobs, not fakacancies, not agendas that are anything other than hiring as advertised.
² Qualification requirements that align with what the position actually needs.
This doesn't mean there aren't great candidates.
This could be less on the individual and more on: colleges are getting worse at instruction/preparation (I'm bullish on this explanation among my colleagues; colleges never adapted to computers, let alone AI, the impacts of this just took a decade or so to shake out, which you should expect given the 16 year latency on education most students undergo) (though, again, ultimately its very complicated. multiple factors at play.)
For a lot of these companies this is all surfacing as: They're posting fewer entry level positions than they normally would (oftentimes not zero; just fewer), and if they have money in the budget available due to that, its going into AI.
Is there any hard data on the number of ghost jobs out there? Even estimates?
Yes but I can't promise Hard Data about Estimates (for anything): https://kagi.com/search?q=data+on+ghost+jobs&r=us&sh=RKCfaG9...
But the people you meet at night school are likely to be even more useful. Connections rule the world.
> By early 2026 recent grads sat at 5.6% unemployment
Which seems very far from your numbers.
https://www.npr.org/2026/04/10/nx-s1-5773327/women-men-jobs-...
> Of the 369,000 jobs the Labor Department says were created since the start of Trump's second term, nearly all — 348,000 of them — went to women, with only 21,000 going to men. That's nearly 17 times as many jobs filled by women as by men.
In short, healthcare is the only field adding lots of jobs, and healthcare workers are something like 80% women. Men who are pursuing non-healthcare educational paths are much less likely to find a new job created for them; they'll have to compete for existing, filled jobs.
This presentation of the stats sounds really misleading to me.
Let’s say there were 10 million quits and 10.369 million hires in that period.
5 million quits and 5.021 million hires among men.
5 million quits and 5.348 million hires among women.
In that case, yes it’s true that employment among women improved more than employment among men. No, it’s not true that an unemployed woman was 17x more likely than a man to find a job.
Regarding the downvotes, I really don’t care about the fake online currency, I think their impact is negative in creating echo chambers in communities, and for some reason bringing men struggles is a taboo despite they suffer far more than women, suicide rates are clear example.
1. To the extent it's standard, it's covered in textbooks which are easily learnable by AI.
2. To the extent it's original, it often is independently rediscoverable by AI from a combination of general intelligence plus workplace training data over which the AI learns.
3. To the extent it's learned (by a human from another human), it'll still slowly be captured by workplace training data over which the AI learns.
4. To the extent it's undocumented, it's up to management to have the processes documented.
medicine will always be the most secure and stable career, still has a shit life-work balance too.
It only is because it effectively has a guild\cartel system preventing an oversupply of doctors and that we have an aging population that increasingly demands medical care.
That was/is the societal narrative for the last forty plus years, yes.
I'm sure high school kids are still being told that today, and it might not be entirely false. Decent-paying jobs have certainly become more specialized for specific college majors, but I still see local job listings on the lower end of the white collar pay scale that ask for a BA/BS without expressing preference for a specific major.
So then everyone decided everyone should go to college - to me that's manifestly not the case, but that's where we are; plumbers doing quite successfully for themselves with a degree in something or other that doesn't matter at all.
This is so very easily said but how else is this supposed to work, exactly?
People have to start somewhere, and McDonalds experience doesn't count for any specialized job. Fuck, the "McDonalds-tier" jobs will often turn down graduates because they'll obviously walk the moment they get something better.
If no employer is willing to take a chance on graduates, then they just can't get any job experience. "A job that will pay for a roof over one's head" really isn't that extreme an ask.
As has been said a trillion times about AI and tech before AI: Senior level staff is going to age out, it has to be replaced or the entire industry gets sent offshore.
In terms of general unemployment across fields, youth unemployment is extremely corrosive to society.
This is already visible in how anti-AI sentiment is starting to boil over and the lurch rightward in politics. If this continues to escalate, the outcome will be nightmarish. Half of them bombing datacenters, the other half cheering as ICE raids the tech workers.
Assuming there are any seniors offshore either
The combined incentive of cost cutting at the outsourcing firm and foolish MBAs in the west opting for the cheapest outsourcing means that the offshore does actually employ juniors, who do build up the experience to become seniors.
But as the graph also shows, graduate unemployment rate was lower for much of 2010s and before, so in some sense it really was "easier" with a college degree.