[karmacondon]

If the two options are retraining vs an overhaul of the economic system, I think retraining is much more likely.

No one wants to change careers. I certainly don't. But the economic realities are what they are. It would be nice to change the economy with basic income or government work programs, both of which I'm in favor of. I just don't see how that will realistically happen in the next 10-15 years.

So we need to make retraining great again. Invest time and money into making the process easy, affordable and open to as many people as possible. Maybe we need more schools, or organized apprenticeship programs or maybe teaching robots. This is a problem that has to be solved with innovations in business and/or technology. At least until we can gain the political position to make major changes to our financial and economic ways of life.

[DashRattlesnake]

How to do you "retrain" to get abstract "skills in areas like critical thinking and problem-solving"? When I think "retraining" I think training to perform a different kind of routine job in a different domain or industry. For example, decades ago, the NYT retrained its Linotype operators to a similar computer data entry job[1].

[1] https://vimeo.com/127605643 or https://archive.org/details/FarewellEtaoinShrdlu or https://www.nytimes.com/video/insider/100000004687429/farewe...

[Ensorceled]

Retrain for what exactly? If driverless trucks and cars eliminate a several million truck drivers and taxi cab drivers where do we find jobs to replace those lost occupations?

We have millions of underemployed people already, working 30 hours a week at Walmart and similar jobs. It's not like there are millions of jobs just looking for trained people to fill them.

[zepto]

How do you make retraining great again? It's easy to say, but I have never heard anyone ever actually suggest a way, or for that matter suggest anything that people can be retrained for.

Do you have any answers?

[cryoshon]

>I think retraining is much more likely

me too. i also think it's more likely to fail, because there's no way in hell that we can muster enough resources to effectively retrain millions of people in the current political climate-- or the one of the past two presidencies here in the US (just trying to get in front of the partisan bickering, as it's not my main point at all). a half measure isn't going to work here.

>But the economic realities are what they are

agreed. the economic realities are going to be that the people who we end up not retraining due to political inaction are going to be impoverished as they grow older, resulting in their children becoming more impoverished as well. sure, they might try to retrain on their own, but that's a tiny, tiny minority.

>I just don't see how that will realistically happen in the next 10-15 years.

not under our current levels of distractedness and passiveness, no. a tipping-point crisis will crystallize the problems caused by the slow burning of an obsolete workforce. i don't know when that will be, but it's coming.

>This is a problem that has to be solved with innovations in business and/or technology. At least until we can gain the political position to make major changes to our financial and economic ways of life

political positions to solve slow and quiet problems don't tend to materialize before it's too late to do anything meaningful...

my main point here is that a lot of political capital needs to be built regardless of proposed solution. as it stands, the common people are serfs who stand to lose their ability to work the land... i think that it's likely that the concept of american "democracy" itself will enter into a severe crisis as a result of the economic/jobs problems that we're having.

so, where to begin in the rats nest of problems?

[randcraw]

I agree that a big part of the solution lies in retraining -- as a new way of life. In the future, no job will last long. We all must retrain continuously.

But making training the new norm will require big changes to the status quo of how companies retain skilled employees.

First, we need a much better model for skill credentialism. College degrees are way too slow, too broad, and rarely meet the specific immediate needs of business. Some sort of microdegree equal to 1-4 college courses (and more substantial than today's pop MOOCs) sound about right. But their instruction model also needs to be much more flexible and time-insensitive, so working people aren't locked into semester-based schedules. And student social interaction in MOOCs needs to be much improved over the 1990-era forum message chains I've seen.

Second, we need to encourage employers to spend money and time for retraining. And in return, we need to assure them their newly-skilled employee won't soon take their newfound skills and hop to a better paying job. This requires a contract like those between employees/unions and employers in Europe, but largely absent in the US.

Third, employees probably will have to change jobs more frequently. Thus the system needs to make these job hops smoother, steadying employee cashflow to support long-term debt like mortgages, and minimize risks like making health care coverage liquid and independent of employers.

Unfortunately such big changes will require all involved -- employees, educators, insurers, and employers -- to discard their venerated focus on short-term ROI and cost reduction. Unfortunately existing US practices seem almost perfectly unprepared to act gracefully and quickly. While in contrast, Germany, with its longstanding state support for low-cost education, mobile health insurance, union-business partnerships, and skilled jobs that don't require college degrees, seems ideally positioned.

And of course all this has to happen pretty quickly, while we John Henrys can still compete with the machines.