[adamnemecek]

> A strong welfare state and job security can break the cycle, but who is willing to pay - in taxes - for that?

Don't get me wrong, I fully agree. But I think that if I were to pick a single element of a welfare state that can bootstrap the whole thing, I'd pick education. It seems like a lot of the largest country growths were bootstrapped by betting on the educational system (Finland, Singapore and South Korea come to mind).

[noir-york]

The process starts earlier than education. Education needs to be valued in the first place. And then, not only valued, but the parents need to have the security to afford their kids to have an education. And that means healthcare and job security.

I am all for a national health service and cheap/free college; it was what enabled my parents to afford an education for us in the first place.

[internaut]

I really really disagree with this.

I think the evidence is against you. The economics research shows that the 'best returns' come from early education, with diminishing returns the further progress is made.

It is counter intuitive I know, but mass education is similar to macro economics. Helping everybody can help nobody.

South Korea and Japan put a lot of focus on education, work insane hours for comparatively low pay, pay stupid rents and are also in a wage stagnation.

Put it like this:

You get to a middle income economy by doing 1 thing. You get to a high income economy by doing another thing. It is unlikely getting to a very high income economy is accomplished by replicating the former process that took you up a step originally.

[adamnemecek]

> I think the evidence is against you. The economics research shows that the 'best returns' come from early education, with diminishing returns the further progress is made.

There isn't a single country where majority of the population does some sort of research. And guess what, that's what people in the future will have to be doing for their jobs.

> It is counter intuitive I know, but mass education is similar to macro economics. Helping everybody can help nobody.

You need a new system though. Fundamentally I think that one of the issues of the system is a lack of exploration. Like there are so many areas where you can go to extreme detail but people don't explore them because the educational system limits your worldview by limiting your choices. I guess it does get slightly better in college but not by much.

> South Korea and Japan put a lot of focus on education, work insane hours for comparatively low pay, pay stupid rents and are also in a wage stagnation.

I think that some of these issues are somewhat cultural though. To me it feels like both SK and Japan still cling to old social structures to a detriment of the society. The recent president Park scandal highlights quite a few of these issues.

[internaut]

> that's what people in the future will have to be doing for their jobs.

We'll have to agree to disagree.

Most post-2008 grads today are living hand to mouth in the cities. They are the new working poor. This isn't going to change. The market is saturated.

It is just that nobody wants to believe this. Not the teachers, not the parents, not the students.

> Fundamentally I think that one of the issues of the system is a lack of exploration. Like there are so many areas where you can go to extreme detail but people don't explore them because the educational system limits your worldview by limiting your choices.

We certainly agree on that.

Interdisciplinary pollination is all but forgotten. There's a cheap source of growth right there and few are picking up those dollar bills on the street.

If we lived in a world of economic growth (I'm convinced we're not, you see. I think ex-computation there is no real growth in the developed world for a long time) then we should see a flowering of new fields, new explorations, new businesses. What the GDP statistics say is only tangentially connected to reality.

The solution I would throw out is the use of AI, particularly agent based AI capable of nudging researchers and regular people along interesting lines of inquiry. I know that sounds vague but unless you think radical government reform is possible (you know: the other half of the workforce that has never seen genuine automation)... Almost any reform would probably spark a civil war.

What solution would you put forward?

> I think that some of these issues are somewhat cultural though. To me it feels like both SK and Japan still cling to old social structures to a detriment of the society.

Maybe. Maybe they're caught in the same trap we are.

I think 'Japan' is our future unless we solve for X here. They've been caught in a stagnation for decades. They don't have much social unrest, I doubt the United States would be so lucky.