[dropit_sphere]

Status, status, status.

Another way to think of it might be: How much would I have to pay you for you to walk around with a small amount of shit on your forehead all day?

We have somehow gotten ourselves in the position where manual labor relegates one to be a social untouchable. This means that anyone with a shred of self-interest gets out ASAP, which means the political power of labor is disproportionately weak in comparison to its size.

It's like how Stranger Things HAD to be set in the 80's---because you can't have sympathetic characters in small towns in the modern era, because anyone with a head on their shoulders gets out as their first order of business.

[DanAndersen]

The "everyone should go to college" attitude is a big contributor. Once our society got this idea that having everyone do the 9-to-5 40-year office career as an ideal, and started measuring the quality (and funding) of high schools based on how many students go on to college, you start getting career advisers telling students about how they should all be going into debt because "you don't want to be like those icky dumb construction workers right?". Then the market gets flooded with bachelor's degrees which are little more than an expensive status symbol to most.

[bsder]

> We have somehow gotten ourselves in the position where manual labor relegates one to be a social untouchable.

Hogwash. If the salary rises high enough, people will do the jobs. Why do people only seem to like capitalism when it suppresses wages?

I guarantee you that if the farmers paid $30/hour, they'd have plenty of people to fill those jobs.

Every time I hear about one of these job "shortages" I always sympathize quite deeply: "Yep, I have a similar problem. There is an acute shortage of supermodels willing to have sex with me."

Amazing how that puts things into perspective really quickly.

[jbigelow76]

I think you are really reaching on the Stranger Things connection. The main protagonists were about 13 years old, even a 13 year old in today's times that is aware they might not be in a location with a lot of social mobility does not have a lot of choice in the matter. Even the show's high-schooler supporting characters in the same demo would most likely wait until college to make a move to a different area.

I think Stranger things had to be set in the 80s cause if you were about to be killed by an inter-dimensional monster you'd be live streaming it on Facebook to the very end which throws a kink in the narrative.

[dikdik]

If farm work paid 200,00$/year, farmers would all of a sudden have status. Status follows money, not the other way around.

[dragonwriter]

> If farm work paid 200,00$/year, farmers would all of a sudden have status.

Farm workers would have status. (Of course, farmers would also have to make a lot more than they do now, or require far less hired labor, for farm work to typically pay $200k/yr.)

[thaumasiotes]

> We have somehow gotten ourselves in the position where manual labor relegates one to be a social untouchable.

To be fair, this is an incredibly common view historically. It would be extremely unusual for a society not to believe that manual laborers were a lower class than non-manual-laborers.