[me_me_me]

> Why can't more kids get into STEM fields?

Because not everyone is predisposed to be a programmer, engineer or statistician. Not everyone can become a whitecollar worker. This is reality of the world we live in, no amount of though experiments will change that.

What you are really doing is blaming victims of a system set against those people.

Our society should be built so those people can have decent lives too. Ie minimum wage should provide you with above poverty life. Currently in some cities 3 minimum wages are barely that.

I am not talking about giving poor people money for palm beach holidays twice a year. Working in McD should be enough to pay for an small apartment bills and food and sending you kids to school.

What current situation created is that middle class has to subsidize the social welfare for working class people - WORKING people. Ie middle class pays part of wages of minimum-wage workers because they are in poverty while holding a full time job(s).

[baja_blast]

Agreed the idea that "everybody study STEM or get a PHD" is flawed, not everyone can have a white collar job with a high salary. The goalposts will just move, look at SK for example almost every millennial there has a collage degree yet still many of the college graduates that went to less elite schools work at 711.

Also in China art graduates make more than STEM graduates since a STEM grad is a dime a dozen.

[ChuckNorris89]

Are all art grads in China that well off or only the few rockstars?

[hintymad]

Of course not. A random google search led to this: https://www.statista.com/statistics/307262/china-average-ann...

Saying arts major earn better than techies is like saying professional sports are more promising than tech jobs. Both are gross negligence of stats.

[smattiso]

Have you seen our housing stock, our housing supply, our infrastructure? There are plenty of jobs needing to be done. A virtually unlimited amount of progress is possible.

The problem inherently lies with the assumption that the free market will fix all and assuming that some entrepreneurial person is going to lead the charge and redevelop our country. What a joke.

The boom after the Great Depression that made the US into a superpower was driven entirely by government dollars.

My solution would be: * Raise minimum wage to $30 an hour. * Implement land value tax + higher capital gains taxes in order to stem inflation. * Hire 10x the amount of construction workers, civil engineers, etc and provide them with the funding for projects.

Get to work. It's laughable that someone working at Snapchat can make 1M a year while the jobs that literally build our country are paying dogshit.

We need wealth redistribution but not via UBI, via actual development. Let's raze the slums and rebuild with shiny skyscrapers. It's possible. We just have to get away from capitalists getting increasingly rich while the rest suffer.

Also as an aside, my bet is that "programming" reverts to the mean within 10 years as a career. 20 years ago programmers were paid peanuts. Most of the heavy lifting of building software has already been done, AI, low-code, etc. is going to make it increasingly easier. Be ready.

All of this is GOOD, why does it cost 5 million dollars to build a site so that I can reserve a place in line at the DMV (made up example). The tech industry has enjoyed a monopoly on transmitting data. Building an app or a website should be as easy as opening an excel spreadsheet or a word doc. That is coming and your UI coding skills are going to be essentially useless very soon.

[avgDev]

A single contractor will never be able to generate more money than a single software engineer. There is a reason software development pays so much.

I can go work for any company and help get rid of their employees or maximize efficiency. A simple program can save hundreds of man hours.

People who think building a website is cheap have no idea what they are talking about. Sure, a static site is easy. However, once you are building a site that needs to work with a system from the 1980s, you start to hit road blocks....and many many large business run on stuff from 80s. Places like costco, banks, etc.