[dasil003]

How old are you? The social unrest is going to come way before people are walled off in ghettoes. If, like me, you are a programmer earning 6 figures, you may not feel rich,but you are certainly perceived that way by the increasing number who are struggling.

[melling]

Are these the same people who ignored all the warnings?

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O_TjBNjc9Bo

Bought cheap stuff from Walmart so middle class manufacturing jobs were sent overseas? Refused to get a STEM education so we're required to import 100,000 engineers ever year? Didn't develop a better immigration plan so now we have 11 million undocumented people, many who will work for far less because life is better here. That'll keep wages down.

[api]

... because in the wake of an extremely noisy and well publicized dot.com / tech market crash, everyone would be completely reasonable to choose an expensive STEM degree.

Professionals are routinely wrong about predicting economic trends. Random teenage kids from average high schools should not be expected to be better than, say, the Fed chairman in this regard.

[burntsushi]

> Professionals are routinely wrong about predicting economic trends.

But you're not, right?

There isn't an ounce of uncertainty in any of your comments despite the fact that you make several outlandish claims about the future.

[api]

I believe in having definite but mutable opinions. I'll change my mind if someone can present a compelling argument with evidence, but so far I haven't seen one (here or elsewhere).

"It's always turned out that way in the past" is a poor argument IMO.

[burntsushi]

I didn't make that argument. Stop shifting the burden. You're the one making fanatical claims with precisely zero evidence.

The world isn't binary. Disagreeing with you doesn't automatically mean I believe "well, in the past it happened that way so it must continue to happen that way."

My only point is that you should be applying the same litmus test to yourself that you're applying to everyone else. You're balking at the certainty of others seemingly without acknowledging that you're suffering from precisely the same flaw in your communication.

[dasil003]

Blaming the individual for emergent economic phenomena with a finger-wag and an I-told-you-so will do little to keep the pitchforks away from your door.

[melling]

The idea is for people to learn from past mistakes. I've identified some of them. We should take a deep dive to understand what we've done wrong and what can be done to fix the problems.