Peter Schiff Visits New Orleans

[punter]

"That's alot of peddling!"

[SleepyHead]

Hmnnn...

Neuroscience

Mathematics

Engineering

Evolutionary Biology

Robotics

Communications

Science

Radiology

Graphic Design

Business admin

Economics

Mechanical Engineering

Linguistics

Biological Sciences

Accounting

NOT "WORTHLESS", VERY USEFUL in any normal productive economy.

Not useful in a ponzi economy that only values ponzi economy jobs.

Its the economy that's wrong, not the young students.

Edited November 19, 2012 by sleeping dog

[Executive Sadman]

Hmnnn...

Neuroscience

Mathematics

Engineering

Evolutionary Biology

Robotics

Communications

Science

Radiology

Graphic Design

Business admin

Economics

Mechanical Engineering

Linguistics

Biological Sciences

Accounting

NOT "WORTHLESS", VERY USEFUL in any normal productive economy.

Not useful in a ponzi economy that only values ponzi economy jobs.

Its the economy that's wrong, not the young students.

The trouble is, we send 50-60% to university, when, historically, 20-30% has been plenty. Truth be told, monkeys could do the vast majority of jobs out there. The decision to send so many to university has been purely political...mainly to provide meat to put in the highly unionized meat grinder of further education, rather than to benefit student themselves.

Its all very well saying 'we need brain surgeons' (or whatever) but if only 10,000 people need brain surgery a year, requiring lets say a couple of hundred brain surgeons, training several times that amount of brain surgeons, at great cost to the taxpayer, is a vast misallocation of that human capital. The market has been sending us these signals for the last decade...cratering graduate salaries and soaring graduate unemployment...along with vastly increased wages in the trades, things like plumbing, decorating. And yet no politician dare mention it because the traitorous and malevolent self interested unions will demand their scalps.

Yes, degree's benefit society. But as with everything, moderation is key. Taken to its logical extreme 100% of the people at university 100% of the time is no better than 0% of people at university 0% of the time...

[Diver Dan]

"That's alot of peddling!"

Working in a glamourous/fun location like a night-club in New Orleans where clunge is on-tap pretty much 24/7 is a pretty tempting option for a person with a degree if the other option is working the graveyard shift in a call-centre, office bitch or burger-flipper. It might be more instructive if Peter Schiff were to interview a few people with degrees working in crappy jobs instead.

[SleepyHead]

The trouble is, we send 50-60% to university, when, historically, 20-30% has been plenty. Truth be told, monkeys could do the vast majority of jobs out there. The decision to send so many to university has been purely political...mainly to provide meat to put in the highly unionized meat grinder of further education, rather than to benefit student themselves.

Its all very well saying 'we need brain surgeons' (or whatever) but if only 10,000 people need brain surgery a year, requiring lets say a couple of hundred brain surgeons, training several times that amount of brain surgeons, at great cost to the taxpayer, is a vast misallocation of that human capital. The market has been sending us these signals for the last decade...cratering graduate salaries and soaring graduate unemployment...along with vastly increased wages in the trades, things like plumbing, decorating. And yet no politician dare mention it because the traitorous and malevolent self interested unions will demand their scalps.

Yes, degree's benefit society. But as with everything, moderation is key. Taken to its logical extreme 100% of the people at university 100% of the time is no better than 0% of people at university 0% of the time...

Sorry, but I don't agree.

We can have as many of those type of graduates as we want, because they all produce value for society. Imagine how quickly our economy would improve if they were using their skills to their fullest? Rather than their skills being wasted outside a strip club.

The economy is being strangled by ponzi/fiat madness that redirects the capital to non-productive jobs, and thus destroys productive jobs.

We may not need that many brain surgeons, but many of them could be doing research and development, creating new medicines, drugs, procedures, technology etc etc etc. Creating the patents and skills to lead the 21st and 22nd century.

Instead, what's the west doing? Calling these skilled people worthless!..... They're our only hope!

[Dorkins]

The trouble is, we send 50-60% to university, when, historically, 20-30% has been plenty.

I think that over time as the body of human knowledge increases and jobs become more specialised, it will make sense for more people to spend longer in formal education. This is an ongoing process though and we are a long way from it making sense for 50% of people to study for a bachelors. The fact that we don't yet have enough specialised knowledge to pass on means that some universities created new specialisations such as tourism and events management which obviously don't require an academic setting to learn. At the moment I'd say sending the 15-20% most academic to university is probably about right. Might have to bump it up a bit to account for the Tim/Tamara Nice But Dims who get the necessary grades through intensive tutoring.

[R K]

Patronising c0ck.

Anything's more useful than forcing slaves to dig lumps of rock out of the ground so he can store it in vaults in Zurich.

[punter]

Patronising c0ck.

Anything's more useful than forcing slaves to dig lumps of rock out of the ground so he can store it in vaults in Zurich.

Peter's a stockbroker, he buys equities mainly on behalf of his thousands of clients

[libspero]

Sorry, but I don't agree.

We can have as many of those type of graduates as we want, because they all produce value for society. Imagine how quickly our economy would improve if they were using their skills to their fullest? Rather than their skills being wasted outside a strip club.

The economy is being strangled by ponzi/fiat madness that redirects the capital to non-productive jobs, and thus destroys productive jobs.

We may not need that many brain surgeons, but many of them could be doing research and development, creating new medicines, drugs, procedures, technology etc etc etc. Creating the patents and skills to lead the 21st and 22nd century.

Instead, what's the west doing? Calling these skilled people worthless!..... They're our only hope!

If you produce 2000 aeronautic engineers a year, and between Rolls, Airbus, NBDA, BAE and a handful of smaller others they recruit, say, 100 graduates a year you are going to have 1900 people left in the job market.

If 400 more then get jobs in these companies in junior roles you could argue their skills may become useful at a later date.

That would still leave 1500 people who, unless they manage to find other areas where their skills are transferable, will simply lose those skills. Paying money for something you later go on to lose is wasted money. End of story.

Ask any number of graduates whether they remember anything from university. I bet you 90% who don't use those skills on a daily basis have forgotten them.

[cica]

Quite naughty of him to do it in that party town but we get the point.

A lot of those subjects are definitely very valuable to individuals/mankind but were obscenely overpriced.

A lot of those people could have studied say Mathematics at a very high and valuable standard without doing it so expensively and inefficiently in those traditional institutions.

People were going to university at ANY price, that was the problem.

If you wanted to do software engineering you could learn a silly amount spending 6 months in a college, 6 months at home with the parents studying remotely, followed by 1 year "in industry" even actually paying the company for the hassle of having to seat you and have you asking questions and be light years ahead of someone that did an old school expensive 3 year degree.

Edited November 19, 2012 by cica

[billybong]

Technical sector = hard and underpaid and if it goes wrong company bankruptcy.

Banking/financial sector = easy and overpaid and if it goes wrong company gets endless taxpayer support.

Of course in the UK there are always endless calls for people to go into science and engineering etc because there's "a skill shortage"

It's been the same for decades and don't expect it to change anytime soon if ever - even if the likes of Cameron urge a spurious war effort (yet again and for the umpteenth time)

Edited November 19, 2012 by billybong

[SleepyHead]

If you produce 2000 aeronautic engineers a year, and between Rolls, Airbus, NBDA, BAE and a handful of smaller others they recruit, say, 100 graduates a year you are going to have 1900 people left in the job market.

If 400 more then get jobs in these companies in junior roles you could argue their skills may become useful at a later date.

That would still leave 1500 people who, unless they manage to find other areas where their skills are transferable, will simply lose those skills. Paying money for something you later go on to lose is wasted money. End of story.

Ask any number of graduates whether they remember anything from university. I bet you 90% who don't use those skills on a daily basis have forgotten them.

But your viewing it from the perspective of today's economy. It didn't need to look like this.

Those "spare" aeronautic engineers would be so cheap to employ, a young upstart with some ambition could start up a new company, hire them, use their talent, which could blow away the old companies.

Moreover, Rolls, Airbus would be able to pay less for their Aero Engineers, which means more cash rolled back into R&D to develop new tech. Further growing the economy.

There's nothing set in stone about this economy. Besides, we had 10% to 20% only going to University 30 years ago, and we've been in decline all that time. So less grads didn't exactly help either.

[libspero]

But your viewing it from the perspective of today's economy. It didn't need to look like this.

Those "spare" aeronautic engineers would be so cheap to employ, a young upstart with some ambition could start up a new company, hire them, use their talent, which could blow away the old companies.

Moreover, Rolls, Airbus would be able to pay less for their Aero Engineers, which means more cash rolled back into R&D to develop new tech. Further growing the economy.

There's nothing set in stone about this economy. Besides, we had 10% to 20% only going to University 30 years ago, and we've been in decline all that time. So less grads didn't exactly help either.

I'm not sure I really agree with your logic.

How many people does the world need designing aircraft? 10,000? 100,000? The cost of entry is so high you are never likely to have more than a handful of companies producing them.. and how many design engineers does a "handful" of companies ever need?

On the other hand, people to run the airline service? you need staff in every airport, on every flight, in the canteen, running air traffic control, ground crew, security etc etc.

The demand for the latter vastly exceed the demand for the former, yet none of the latter really need a degree qualification.. just vocational experience. Sure you need a margin of error because you want the world to have a decent choice of aircraft designers.. and you want the aircraft designers to have a good enough chance of getting a job that it is worth the initial investment of time and money. Having a vast excess of highly trained people for only a small section of the job market is simply a waste of time and money for those who didn't ever really have a good chance of being the cream of the crop from the outset. You are just raising people's hopes and expectations and costing them a life-long debt into the bargain.

[RufflesTheGuineaPig]

Its all very well saying 'we need brain surgeons' (or whatever) but if only 10,000 people need can afford brain surgery a year

Enough said.

[Executive Sadman]

But your viewing it from the perspective of today's economy. It didn't need to look like this.

Those "spare" aeronautic engineers would be so cheap to employ, a young upstart with some ambition could start up a new company, hire them, use their talent, which could blow away the old companies.

Ha, Its survival of the fattest nowadays.

Lots more dynamic new car makers like Tesla might have emerged to take over GMs market share when they should have gone bust. But because GM is now little more than a conduit for govt money to find its way to the UAW, crap companies never go bust, and new ones rarely emerge. Corporatism has long replaced capitalism.

If Henry Ford had been starting out in 2000 instead of 1900, there would be no ford. His established competitors (the entrenched vested interests) would call upon the govt to create barriers to entry to ensure the marketplace isnt competitive and their hegemony is never challenged.

The most obvious and highly regulated market of this is the large UK housebuilders. Really, every one of them should have gone bust in 2008/9 and their vast landbanks sold off to those small and responsible developers with liquid cash. Instead they got bailed, and even now, when house prices and land values are stable, they are still sucking at the teat of the public purse, demanding govt give various taxpayer funded enticements to FTBs to mortgage away their futures in exchange for cramped, shoddily constructed boxes.

[@contradevian]

I'm waiting for the first BSc in Buy To Let

[200p]

Why not get straight to the point; a Masters of the Universe.

[thod]

We may not need that many brain surgeons, but many of them could be doing research and development, creating new medicines, drugs, procedures, technology etc etc etc. Creating the patents and skills to lead the 21st and 22nd century.

Nah. You could train all you like but you would never win the Olympic 100m. Such men need not only training, but natural talent. These graduates are not geniuses. They are ordinary men with some training. They will not advance their field. There are few in each generation that can. Elitist perhaps, but true.

[Bloo Loo]

way too many people sucked into the myth that is the "knowledge Economy".

Everyone needs a job in a society that requries FIAT to purchase the means to live.

That means every job needs to provide value.

The Big industries used to ensure those that had the knowledge were in short supply so that they could justify high prices for their products, as other people couldnt make them without the specialist knowledge they had bought.

TODAY, only closed shops can manage this....hence the highest salaries for the qualified are in the Public Sector, LAW, Banking and MEDICINE.

Engineering is being decimated by the Chinese who are not stupid yellow slanty eyed morons.

Even those that beleive that their qualies ENTITLE them to high pay, need to understand that it is the wealth of the nation that pays their wages....charge too much for an essential service, and YOU will be pitchforked out on your ear when the SHTF.

I beleive that we are fast approaching a time when the ENTITLED are going to get a shock.

Edited November 20, 2012 by Bloo Loo

[Rare Bear]

Nah. You could train all you like but you would never win the Olympic 100m. Such men need not only training, but natural talent. These graduates are not geniuses. They are ordinary men with some training. They will not advance their field. There are few in each generation that can. Elitist perhaps, but true.

Yes, you meet lots of people with qualifications but very few with a natural feel or talent for a profession. The ones with the qualifications are there for the salary, probably wear a nice suit, have an immaculate CV and have a nice patter but the ones with the feel and interest in the job are the ones you want to employ.

[Injin]

Nah. You could train all you like but you would never win the Olympic 100m. Such men need not only training, but natural talent. These graduates are not geniuses. They are ordinary men with some training. They will not advance their field. There are few in each generation that can. Elitist perhaps, but true.

Winning the 100metres is all about beating other humans. Even then it requires other runners to have value.

Discovering things about how the way the world works is not a similar competition and yes, more or less anyone can do it.

[Dorkins]

Discovering things about how the way the world works is not a similar competition and yes, more or less anyone can do it.

If you'd ever worked in science, you'd know that both of these statements are false. Scientific research is extremely competitive and only really suitable for people who are happy to take risks and deal with disappointment because most genuinely innovative projects do not pan out as hoped. The vast majority of people want a more certain life where they can follow established working patterns.