Back in the day, there was an unwritten contract that helped push us forward. To keep it brief, essentially governments took over basic education so that people were easier to employ, and then the companies would hire them, adding their own specific training on top. The deal was that the companies would pay reduced tax for hiring, and the employees would pay increased tax to cover all of the government spending. Obviously I am simplifying a bit here, but you get the point.
The problem is though, that while this helped us advance in many ways, the entire way business works has changed. Previously, for a company to be relatively successful, it had to provide something useful. However over the years this has heavily shifted and now the most successful companies are the ones that do us the most harm to our wellbeing. Not only that, in order to produce their product, they can generate a lot more profit with far fewer people. On top of this, the work will continually be replaced by automation going forward, so they will need even less.
So why educate people?
You see the problem, don't you? While there might be jobs for a while for people who have experience and skills, the lower level roles will be automated, so how will people build their capabilities? The schooling system is only designed to get people to a basic level before they need to get specific industry experience, but they can't get that experience because companies are profit-driven and will replace as many roles as possible with automated processes.
Education is a cost, and while there was incentive for governments to do it earlier as it led to employment, if that employment declines, the incentive declines. And then for the corporations, they are not going to need people with basic educations anyway, so the system becomes increasingly broken, with more graduates across the board, less likely to find professional work - not only in their field of study, but anywhere.
The economic model we have been using is now breaking at an increasing speed, because it is requiring less and less people to turn a profit. But at some point, that means there aren't enough people to consume the goods and services also. Not only that, there is also not going to be enough income privately or publicly to maintain the complex system that keeps us going. The companies will make profits for a while, but they have no incentive to spread the wealth to maintain wellbeing, other than ensuring their future customer base - but they don't look that long-term anyway - quarter by quarter is all they see.
The system we have used the last hundred years or so to take us forward, is already unsuitable to provide what we need of it, yet we keep on doing the same thing, telling our kids to get a good education, despite those graduating today already finding it hard to get decent work. The wealth gaps are widening, as are the social gaps, the health gaps, the emotional gaps and wellbeing in total. For now, some people are improving, but even they will get to a point where they will struggle to live in a society that is collapsing.
People always say that the billionaires will be fine, because they have their gated communities and when it really hits the fan, their underground bunkers. But if you think it through for a little bit, does living in a bunker sound like paradise to you?
Is survival the same as successful?
I don't think so, but we seem to keep heading in the direction where our wellbeing is decreasing and we are more and more seeing survival as the goal, rather than thriving as a species. The systems we relied on to hold society together through a complicated mess of social contracts, has degraded to the point that the contracts are no longer valid, because society itself has failed. The only way to reverse course, is to make people relevant again, to make humans the focus of activity for governance, industry, and the community. This doesn't mean automation doesn't have its place, it is just that the goal of automation has to shift from increasing profits, to improving wellbeing.
But where are the incentives?
We keep fooling ourselves with the busywork of the past processes, even though they do not lead us into a better future. We keep relying on systems that are broken and unable to produce what we need, because we'd apparently prefer a death in the familiar surroundings that are failing us, than trying to do something different that has a chance of working.
The factories for society are dead, as we no longer produce better people.
Taraz
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