I hate seeing this meme. It is ageist and makes older people less likely to be hired for even their same jobs.

Old people can still learn to do new things. The problem I see is that a lot of older people do not want to learn new things. Also, old people tend to have obligations such as family/child expenses, residence costs, etc. that they want to be compensated for even at an entry level.

Rural conservatism has a lot to do with preserving tradition, that is, making sure things don't change from the old status quo you loved before.

However, there are substantial barriers to that demographic to return to an education program precisely because it is a "return". Those barriers are far more social than anything else, yet they remain.

The real problem is that for many old people it's certain they'll never be able to get back to the status (financial, social and professional) they have now if they have to start all over again. As long as there is any promise of them being able to keep doing what they have experience in, that's what they'll aim for.

> As long as there is any promise of them being able to keep doing what they have experience in, that's what they'll aim for.

That's the real education that needs to happen. That job is gone and they're not going to get there. It's gone because the world has changed, the economy has changed. Holding out hope is holding that person back. I had to learn this early in my life, and now I live in two different countries depending on where I'm finding work.

That is also ageist. I see it here on HN all the time - "companies don't want to hire older people because they want too much money".

At the peak of his career he realized technology would kill the industry with the quality of amateur photography improving and technical skills becoming less important, he would often compete with people with barely any talent and be undercut on price. It was still sustainable at the time but he was sure better cameras, film and postproduction processes would kill his business.

He went back to school and became a homeopathy practitioner. My personal opinions of homeopathy aside, I have to acknowledge he was an expert at what he was doing and he was even regularly invited to give lectures. He kept doing that until the day he died, almost twenty years ago.

It's never to late to switch career paths. The bigger problem in the US seems to be that it is amazingly hard to do so unless you've built up a fortune to cover the cost of doing so.

Even someone approaching retirement age can start over and be productive if they have the chance, financial means, mental health and determination to do it.

That's... really just not true at all. US labor mobility is higher than in pretty much any other developed country by pretty much whatever metric you want to pick. Measures like those in Germany (or whatever else you pick) would help at the margins but they would not do much to change the labor demographics of the midwest working class white community, which by broad historical standards are fairly good already.

Fundamentally this was an election about identity. Nate Cohn said it best in a tweet last night when he pointed out that working class whites (and not their minority compatriots who share the same economic problems) had suddenly started behaving like a minority group and skewed hard for one candidate from their historical positions.

It's about racism, and social change, and fear, and maybe sexism. "Economic Anxiety" is a myth that needs to die.

What about the angle that sexism is actually a stronger driver of all this than sexist? It would certainly make the Obama->Trump conversion more explainable.

If rayiner proves it cannot be racism then possibly it is sexism...

Talk about spreading hate.

I'm no big fan of Trump but I have reason to be thankful for Americans.

And if Americans who live with American politicians year after year decides Trump is their best hope then A) it must be pretty bad IMO B) it is their choice and I respect it.

Honestly I find it very strange how strongly people on hacker news are pushing against this idea, how deeply they are insulted by the idea that Trump has brought open sexism into the mainstream.

I'm not sold on that. I think the main difference is that those economic problems have been felt by minorities their entire lives. Not that it's fair, but that's been the reality for them. So it's not any bigger of an issue this election than any other. But the economic pains felt in the white working class haven't been felt since pre-WWII. They were the middle class of this country but now they are feeling the declines. Even if working class whites are now on somewhat equal footing with other minorities, they've been in decline in comparison to what they had. And that definitely leads to "Economic Anxiety".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

And that's one problem I'm struggling with. Ultimately a lot of the suggestions I see to help the "left behind" in this thread might fail due to this very sort of politics alone. So many of the social help programs in the US have been demonized in the past by focusing on this in coded terms. Think "welfare queens" and the negative reaction to just the "Obamacare" nickname for some of the most direct and obvoius examples.

"Racism, social change, fear, sexism"... that can be overcome. The real problem is how these emotions are used as a political weapon now. No attempted solution will work if an opposition that hates it can transform it into some sort of identity politics battle. Especially now that we've found out that identity politics through a megaphone is actually more effective than "dog whispers".

It is possible for Donald Trump to surprise me, and one way he could surprise me is if he actually is more friendly to a stronger government with the goal of helping these people out. Donald Trump dose not make the laws, however, Congress does. So I expect no change.

As a side note, in a way, it was a shame it wasn't Bernie Sanders vs. Donald Trump for that reason. It would have been fascinating to see if economic policy really could out-trounce the Southern Strategy this time...

Look, I grew up with this nonsense. My grandparents even believed in new age non-sense like "earth rays" and astrology. If you just want to get out some witticisms about how pseudoscience is obviously pseudoscience that's fine by me. But I'm not sure you're adding anything to the conversation by ragging on my dead grandfather.

If you want to be outraged about something, how about being outraged that social public healthcare in Germany actually pays for homeopathic "medicine" (i.e. products with no active ingredients and no valid studies) and that pharmacies are allowed to claim these so-called remedies can actually alleviate specific symptoms.

I think this challenge of the race to the bottom exists in virtually every industry.

That nearly every industry developed like that is precisely on point: that your job is currently a safe bet doesn't mean it's something you'll be able to do all your life, no matter how good you are. There may never be a "Bitrot Belt" but the job market simply isn't static and never has been.

The entire point of the anecdote was that he had a successful career doing one thing well past his thirties, things changed, and he switched to a completely unrelated career and was pretty good at that too. The details are just flavouring because it's a personal story.

If you want something more blue collar: my father-in-law had a long career as truck driver, then changed paths to work in logistics/manufacturing. Plus I think he worked as a mechanic at some point. Sure it's mostly centred around working with vehicles but those are still three different jobs before he reached retiring age.

The bigger problem in the US though might be location. The Rust Belt is dead because the jobs went away and there are not enough new jobs in the region to replace them. People actually have to uproot and relocate to find a new job and a new home -- that can be jarring.

The problem is, people who used to make a livelihood don't want a minimum wage job, no matter how high the minimum wage. They're adults used to providing for themselves and possibly a family, for god's sake! They don't want some elementary retraining program to make them barely capable of doing a modern job. They want to feel productive and useful on their own, like most of us.

In Trump's acceptance speech he explicitly mentions this:

We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals. We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none. And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/11/04/donald_trump_...

Ask the residents of Central Texas about what happened when they privatized the toll system. Personal data leaks, false charges sent to collections, terrible customer service. It was only after widespread outcry for government oversight(!) by Republicans that anything got done about it.