| The words he used for his actual endorsement didn't scream "MANDATORY CODING" to me: "I want to make sure that (young people) know how to produce stuff using computers and not just consume stuff." Yes, it could mean coding. But people produce stuff on computers without coding all time. They produce stuff on Photoshop. They produce stuff on Excel. They produce stuff on Wordpress. It's becoming increasingly clear that economic growth and wage growth are becoming uncorrelated in the US. For example, startups add billions and billions of dollars to the GDP of the US, but we'll never hire the millions of people that got laid off at steel factories over the past twenty years. The economic model for the US this century is essentially one that consists of high-skilled knowledge workers, high-end manufacturing, and local service workers. Everything else will be subject to economic factors outside of US control. Lower-skilled manufacturing has had a revitalization in the US over the last couple years, but that's mostly due to things like China's currency appreciating, the price of oil remaining high, and a natural gas boom in the US. If any of that changes, those jobs will go back to China. Or Singapore, or Africa, or anywhere else where the supply of raw human capital is cheap. If you view the future of the US economy in this lens, then everything Obama talks about makes sense. For example, if this is the future, then the safety net programs we had in 1980 are inadequate in 2013. Nobody really debated health insurance in the US in 1980, because over 80% of Americans already received health insurance from their employer. Now it's barely two-thirds [0]. If you have a "top-heavy" skills distribution in the US, and your income is more strongly related to skills than ever, then you need a "top-heavy" tax code. Or you could just let people bleed to death in their bathroom because they tried to pop their own thrombosed hemorrhoid (trust me, don't google it) because they couldn't afford a trip to the ER. And to tie it back to the OP, it also means education for those high-skilled jobs will be the best way to ensure economic advancement. It's no longer a sure thing to advance economically by putting in your time in at the plant and have your labor union negotiate a 5% raise for you every two years. That doesn't need to mean everyone becomes a programmer. We'll still have manufacturing jobs, but they'll require more than just punching the clock every day[1][2]. We've all probably worked with a self-taught programmer who was toiling away at some crappy job until they either got a degree or made enough web sites to convince a company to hire them. And they probably tripled their income in the process. So I see Obama's statement as saying we should streamline that process as much as we can, and orient our education system to produce as many high-skilled workers as possible. [0] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/study-fewe... [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/business/economy/02manufac... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/magazine/skills-dont-pay-t... |
This is nonsensical, since a lot less than 80% of Americans even had an employer in the 80's (or even today).
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/EMRATIO
The uninsured rate has actually remained roughly flat at 15%.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AU.S._Uninsured_and_...
And to tie it back to the OP, it also means education for those high-skilled jobs will be the best way to ensure economic advancement.
This is really unclear. For example, if education is primarily about signalling rather than skills (lots of evidence suggests it is [1]), all you do is waste resources on a signalling arms race.
[1] There is a fairly extensive literature about forgetting stuff. Bryan Caplan has written a fair bit about it, for example, and even has a book on the way: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/10/does_high_schoo.... http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/11/the_present_val_... http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/02/the_career_cons....