[exporectomy]

> But it would also be good to ensure people can make a good living and self actualize without a formal education.

How? Wanting magic to be true doesn't make it possible. If your economy is already strong enough to provide a good living to anyone who wants to be a noncontributing poorly educated self-actualizer, then OK, let them enjoy that. But what if it's not? Who supports them? Even developed countries with good social welfare usually make it hard to be voluntarily unemployed and receiving welfare just because you'd rather play on your hobbies than work for others' benefit. It's meant for people who want to work but can't, not those who don't want to but can.

[DubiousPusher]

We don't organize into socities solely to eek every drop of value out of people economically that we can. The goal is to create a more stable and less miserable life for people. Some people are never going to be happy spending years in formal education. And creating an incentive so strong that even people without the slightest interest or compunction towards it creates its own inefficiencies.

You twisted my comment into a false dichotomy. Societies obviously cannot fully subsidize people to enjoy a life of the most self indulgent or pretentious interests. But a society can acknowledge that not everyone is going to grow skills, discover talents or develop interests in the same way. Perhaps the most efficient thing is to shrink agriculture work to the bare machine assisted minimum with a dichotomy of skilled labor at the top and a balloon of grunt workers at the bottom. On the other hand, growing a wide professional class of ag workers with more stake in the system may lead to happier workers and perhaps a more sustainable and durable ag sector. If a society needs to subsidize that or create a pipeline that carries workers out of primary education into that kind of work it may be preferable for less tangible reasons. It's absurd that we should drive forward with efficiency no matter how much it emiserates people. And to insist upon it with so much of the reward for it accruing at the top is downright feudal.

Even still, it's not necessarily true that funneling everyone into the knowledge economy is in fact better. If someone would be happy and productive farming five acres but they go to the city, get half a degree, crash out and end up in a very low value labor market, society has probably lost out. It is my opinion that economists view labor markets aa far too fluid. They don't account for the fact that people are more like bits of rock, sand and clay than they are like water. They clump together, break apart and get stuck.

[exporectomy]

There's a whole spectrum of agriculture lifestyles available around the world for people to choose from. People who get more satisfaction being an owner-operator farmer or more professional employee farmer can do that by migrating to a country where it's readily achievable. Same for many different types of work.

But people mostly seem to want to be richer and are happy to forgo that kind of lifestyle in exchange for a higher paying job. Who are we to tell them that what they want is not what they should really want?