| "...they’re... going to destroy far more more wealth for their contemporaries than they create for themselves..." This is the trend, use less and less resources (approaching zero) to make society more and more efficient. I see both sides of this coin. The first is that industries need disruption and resources need to be used as effectively as possible. This will help solve the many problems caused by resource constraint. The second is that by disrupting the way current industries are run jobs are also destroyed. Craigslist disrupts classifieds and hundreds of news papers go out of business. We all rejoice, but there is a gap that is occurring that is troubling. What happens to the people who loose their jobs? There is a gap between people loosing their job and jumping on the new train that is accelerating. Where does this bring us in 10, 20, 50 years and how do we bridge this gap? The answer is (re)education, but where and how? 50% of students drop out of high school! Education needs to be disrupted if we ever want to close this gap, the consequences if we don't are massive and will corrode any progress that is made. |
I don't think this is anywhere close to true on a national basis in the US. Do you have a source for that?
The Dept. of Ed seems to indicate that it declined from 14% in 1980 down to 8% in 2009:
http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=16