A professor once told this story about living in the People's Republic of China…

In every village in China, there were two occupations: farmer and shopkeeper. No one wanted to be a farmer and everyone wanted to be a shopkeeper. The result was a village full of failed shopkeepers turned farmers.

The People's Republic assigned your education to you. It needed engineers and so it forced people to become engineers.

Unfortunately, I often find myself being pro-PRC and it's because of things like this. They had to something, otherwise nothing would have been accomplished.

Right now one of our biggest problems in the West is that we don't make anything anymore. What we do make is done so with extreme automation. Western nations are generally net exporters of food and it's all accomplished with mechanization. This is a good thing because we're one of the first societies to never fear starvation. However, it has put us all out of work. It used to be hard to put food on the table. It took serious toiling… but we ate what we produced. In theory, freeing us of the farm should have yielded a labor force capable of doing other things: building roads and shit. However, we automated all that too. So that should have freed us to put to make consumer goods but we automated that too. What we couldn't automate, we let the Bangladeshis do…

So now we're all supposed to go to college and I don't really understand why. When I was going to college, everyone wanted to be a “web designer” but seriously, how many web designers does the world need? These days, the job of web designer is replaced by a free script. To my shock, I learned my friend (having failed to find a job in web design) is now teaching it to a new and soon to be unemployed generation…

Somehow we've become convinced that design is the thing of the future, but it's not a job that anyone can just be trained to do. Unfortunately, it takes natural talent. I'm not saying that training doesn't help and I'm sure as shit not suggesting that I'm talented (I mean, look at this place). In fact, I think by pointing out my own failures I raise another point entirely: utility often trumps design¹⁾.

Design is pretty much the end-game. When you're incapable of manufacturing anything, the only job left seems to be telling the Chinese how to do it. The problem with that is that the Chinese can do the job themselves and sooner or later they're going to compete head-on with Apple and probably win. Sure you can play the patent game and other nonsense, but good luck enforcing your patent in China, Vietnam, the Middle East, and any number of other lucrative markets…

So what the fuck are we doing? What have we become? We're a nation of fast food workers and designers. No one wants to be a fast food worker… but everyone is going to end up as one.

I find myself increasingly skeptical of the notion that everyone has to go to college. I don't think a lot of people really benefit from it. The world needs skilled workers doing skilled things like fixing my fucking car and not taking three days to do it…

Increasingly the people doing our skilled labor are imported from overseas because no one can be troubled (or is even able to, given the state of our education system) to study necessary lines of work. We're becoming a casino economy. Why bother studying for a profession when it's just going to leave you so heavily in debt that you'll be earning half of what a truck driver earns for the first fifteen yours of your career? There's no fucking point. I mean, why bother? Especially in a world where Mark Zuckerberg can laugh all the way the Caymans in his Gulfstream full of $100 bills for getting lucky just once…

Maybe it's the media's fault. I don't know. I'm just going to point out that in the Soviet Union, the worker was glorified. He was a giant, a huge monochromatic man holding a hammer… In America we chew out sixteen year-olds for putting pickles on our hamburger. Never mind this kid is at least trying to be useful. His peers are breaking into your car and doing far better for themselves…

Basically, education here has become an enormous industry from the people who finance it on up to the school administrators doing their best to keep their jobs. There's no real accountability for the system, either (well, except for the financial one, and that's doing quite well, so don't expect it to disappear). Where do all these students end up? Most don't end up in their line of study at all. A great deal are underemployed…

Why is it happening? It's because we're being sold this idea that we have to go to school to succeed. Do people take it seriously? Shit, people buy new cell phones every year because ads on TV tell them to… so of course it's happening.

Will your education lead to a job? Well, not without an unpaid internship of course. I mean, there are so many people with your exact education and qualifications that companies have their pick of the litter. You have to show your dedication first. In the end, will your unpaid effort guarantee you a job? Of course not. They don't hire unpaid interns as prospective employees, they hire them for slave labor. There's a pretty much endless supply appearing magically every summer. This is seriously how we treat people…

Meanwhile the kid who thought driving a truck would be an OK job has been paid for the six years you haven't been. And he doesn't student loans. And he gets to see the country. Granted it's the same part over and over again, but hey, whatever… it's still a better view than memos pinned to a cubicle.

So I guess the point of this section was: DRIVE A TRUCK. I think so, anyway…