There are opportunities, but they require a deep understanding of risk and security. A livelihood with day-to-day low-level insecurity and volatility is actually far more stable and secure than the cartel-state one that claims to be guaranteed.
The burdens of Fed manipulation and the cartel-state rentier arrangements will come home to roost between 2015-2017. Those who are willing to seek livelihoods in the non-cartel economy will likely have more security and satisfaction than those who believed that joining a rentier arrangement was a secure career.
There is a price to joining a parasitic rentier arrangement, a loss of integrity, agency and independence. Complicity in an unsustainable neofeudal society has a cost.
Read the whole thing.
(Via Lex and ZeroHedge.)
The myth of a secure job dies hard, but it is dying. People getting college degrees these days are all to frequently making a tragic misallocation of resources.
That’s pretty much what my daughter concluded – that she was wasting time, energy and her GI Bill benefits continuing with college, and it would be better to partner with her best friend and set up an independent small business.
That article is spot-on. When the writer described a rentier economy “health care” came immediately to mind.
Have a good friend I would call the top 1-3% of programmers. Will always have a job (unless we happened to get another Great Depression) – He never finished college.
Still amazes me to think of people who went into debt (with govt-guaranteed loans) 6 figures to get a degree in sociology – and now they are angry that they can’t get a job.
For yet another shock – I was going though my old tax records of 1999 – looking at my interest earned – what a joke today.
My daughter graduated yesterday from U of Arizona. Her degree is in French and I OK’d it because she, after a promising start in science in high school, is not a candidate for a STEM degree. She is pretty and personable and her first name is only three letters. I’m told that last attribute is the most important. She has been working as a waitress while in college to help pay for it but the costs are so high that kids have no chance to make a dent.
She is applying for jobs and has had a couple of good interviews but no success so far. Tucson is a college town and the economy is pretty limited. She has done an internship for about six months with a hotel-resort and her boss wants to hire her but she fears she will be stuck in Tucson with few better prospects.
She wants to move back to California and I agree.
Her cousin was there and he is a freshman in engineering at UA. We were talking and he mentioned that chemical engineering is attractive to him and he was hoping to get an internship at Prudhoe Bay. I told him to try to get a roustabout job instead. It would be good experience and he would make some money. He’s a big good-looking kid and should be able to handle the work if he can get the job. Take an internship as a trial run if he can’t get the other. Petroleum engineering is going to be big the next 25 years. He didn’t know what “fracking” is and I told him.
I had dinner with his parents last night and told them my ideas. His father was very interested. He is a retired Marine fighter pilot and airline captain and his older son is going into the Marines. They have a younger son still in high school. His mother, of course, asked if it would be dangerous and I said, “some.” She was married to a fighter pilot in the Gulf War so she knows danger and danger.
I think these kids will be OK but they are more realistic than kids were ten years ago.
I think there is a huge gap in providing information to kids about what the job/career opportunities ARE, what the work is really like, and what one needs to do to prepare for them. Books on the subject are mostly boring and superficial repackaging of BLS reports. TV programs tends to focus on cops, crooks, doctors, nurses, lawyers, and murder-committing businessmen. Parents in many cases don’t have much knowledge outside of their own fields. High school guidance counselors mostly have little experience of the real world. College professors, even with the best will in the world, will tend to oversell their own fields to promising students.
Not clear how this is best addressed, but I think there’s an opportunity here.
“an unsustainable neofeudal society”
I’ve noticed that some people are frankly nostalgic for feudalism, desiring security and a wise benevolent ruler who will take care of everybody: “A place for everyone and everyone in their place” and “change is scary, choice is scary, the future is uncertain, so please protect me from all these things.”
It looks like the only worthwhile college degrees are in the engineering schools and even those are being diminished by the costs of obtaining them.
I can’t disagree about the rise of neofeudalism.
However, many people are feeling not only a dissatisfaction with modernism, but an outright betrayal and a disintegration of the ideals of the Enlightenment such as rationality and progress and science.
You might be confusing popular nostalgia for feudalism with the desire for a return of chivalry.
That is, a moral ethos of personal honor founded on natural law and devotion to God
that directly translates and propagates into the society as a whole.
Practiced by a warrior elite bound by personal bonds and tradition whose power is derived from merit and reciprocity (not purchased or bestowed)and
motivated by the desire to do right instead of achieving rank or advantage.
Speaking as a Neo-Victorian myself, I wouldn’t mind a revival of the 19th century Victorian notion of chivalry; courtesy and consideration for others’ feelings, care for the less-fortunate, public-spiritedness and all that. Might be a good thing, all the way around.