[bargl]

I think the best way to see how society could not see what would happen is to watch any TV show that has ever tried to predict the future ever.

Smartphone? Rarely seen but critical to our society.

Twitter? Ha.

Facebook? People actually spoke to one another.

Global warming? Didn't see that coming...

Flying cars? Nope not yet.

Pervasive Nuclear? Nope not that either.

Humans suck at predicting the future. We're so terrible at it. Market crashes, war, etc. We just have no idea. While what you're saying make sense to an economist, that's not how society works. The best ideas don't always win out the most popular ones do. People WANTED their kids to be better off, so they sent them to success factories that told the parents they'd be better off because in the past people were better off.

Until they weren't.

EDIT: I'm not saying no one saw this coming. I'm just saying a most people (society) didn't.

[rjf72]

I don't really think any of those were comparable. The situation with the devaluing of an education is an extremely simple case of supply + demand. When usable skills are rare, they have a high value - when they're not, they don't. Again the same thing that makes it easy to predict what the longterm outcome of 'get [everybody] in computer science' will be. It'd devalue the skill to the point that it'd be worthless, much the same way that when you 'get [everybody] a college degree' those degrees, in and of themselves, become worthless.

Put another way, I can't imagine how anybody could predict anything else besides exactly what has happened.