Society has achieved the capacity to keep every single person healthy and safe, but selectively denies it in order to keep them motivated by the fear. Do you really think that's a giood thing?
I'm not advocating communism, I'm just saying that maybe it's time to step back and look at the bigger picture. It's not a sense of entitlement, it's trying to make human life a grander thing than just getting by.
Without a proper social safety net, diversification is hedging against downturns...
Besides, right now where I live, it's geologists and engineers that are unemployed. Supposedly 'safe' jobs.
And finally, if everyone piles into the same industry, it drives wages down, and you'll still have plenty of grads who are unable to get a job.
The problem in the end, is that, because a degree is the new HS diploma, everyone needs one, in any subject, and unemployment is the inability of the economy to absorb workers, it has nothing to do with those people choosing the 'wrong' degree anyway.
If people are buying whatever degrees, economics says that those people are buying a degree that they consider valuable. They are paying 'the market' price for the degrees, they can't be separated from it.
It's easy to observe that other actors place far less value on the degrees than the people buying them, but those people are not setting the market price for the degrees.
The US approach to Government subsidies on the consumer side of privately supplied markets in college and health care mostly seems to accomplish raising the prices of college and healthcare as market providers raise prices to what the relatively hotter markets will bear.
I've already addressed that when I mentioned 'rampant entitlement mentality'. It's people thinking that others owe them something just because they happen to be members of homo sapiens species. Entitlement 101.
It's not a coincidence that most of the people studying philosophy, sociology, gender studies etc. are leftists, many even radicalized (e.g. anarcho-syndicalism in philosophy departments).
That's why the leftists need a powerful state. Since they are useless parasites, they have to make money by working in government or non-profit or government-inspired jobs.
Is what I'm writing true or not?
Where exactly did I write that it is (morally) wrong to push for a higher minimum wage? I am not writing that it is wrong to push for $15/hour. I'm writing on why American workers have a hard time competing with people in Asia or South America, many of whom work for $15/day. That's why, among other things, companies are leaving for Mexico or Vietnam.
Students are taking huge government-backed student loans, so that they can go to college and study sociology/gender studies(or some other worthless field) and then get a job in the government or non-profit. Do you see the circular nature of that?
My point is that most people(except some spoiled & stupid rich kids) who are studying sociology now would NOT do it in a truly free market environment, because:
a) There wouldn't be many government jobs or government-inspired jobs waiting for them. b) 18 yo couldn't get student loans to study these subjects. Why? For the same reason homeless drug addicts aren't getting $10 million loans from banks. It's a bad investment for a bank to give unreliable people money. Likewise, sociology(or some other worthless field) majors couldn't get a loan, since their earning potential is very low. c) No welfare. Since there wouldn't be welfare checks to fall back on, most people would think twice about what to study and their choice would not be sociology.
No, people are willing to have the government pay a lot of money for those courses, in the form of financial aid. People who actually have to pay for the courses themselves are far more likely to study something with actual practical value.
This is true. But why is the minimum qualification a degree? For some jobs that qualification makes sense; but there are many for which it doesn't, yet it is still considered a minimum qualification. The assertion that this state of affairs is largely due to the fact that college degrees are subsidized--many people can get them without having to pay for them themselves--is certainly not original with me; economists have been making it for decades.
College isn't trade school, its purpose isn't to study profitable subjects, its purpose is to produce well rounded well educated people, not to produce workers.
They won't do anything, except enrich themselves with high-paying parasitic office jobs in the government or some non-profit.
China is busy building stuff that no one will use, it's the equivalent of paper-shuffling and is quite literally the product of a giant stimulus plan by the state:
You have very little of that in China + some other countries and that is their appeal.