Danté's Inferno

I was just reading one of Seth’s blog entries, refered to my by Lighting Essentials via his facebook page. Seth’s blog post can be found at: The forever recession (and the coming revolution) Trackback at “http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83451b31569e2015391e6aa1b970b”.

I basically agree with most of Seth’s points about the death of the Industrial Revolution and the decline of the proximity workers who could demand higher wages. In fact, this is something near and dear to my heart and I really don’t understand why there are no governments in the world, AFAIK, that are actually dealing with this.

I went to a trade show with some brass at Ford Motor Company way back in 1993. This event was to show the brass the new and improved machinery to use in plants to make components of automobiles. The thing that struck me most was when a vendor told us:

The beauty of these new products is that they only require a basic 8th grade education. By basic, I mean, the worst schools in the US, if a person gets through 8th grade he/she is fully capable of operating this machine at peak efficiency!

The VP from Ford looked at me and said,

That’s fine and dandy for the bottom line, but what the hell are we going to do with all the people we put out of work…no one has a plan for that eventuality!

Wow!This was 1993, and you know what, we still don’t have a plan!

It’s fine and dandy for Seth to say that if you have a connection, you have a factory. But that works for maybe 10% of the world’s population. You figure another 10% is basically agrarian, so what the hell do we, the remaining 80%, do for a living? How do we earn money so we can spend it on the 10% factory owners with their single laptop and the 10% of the folks that want to feed us????

It’s painfully obvious to me that the whole ‘Higher Education’ will save us, is a crock. Mind you, I’m a strong believer in education as long as it’s education that teaches you how to think, how to solve problems, how to better communicate, how to have empathy and spirituality, but that ain’t what we got anymore. Higher education became an industry.

I communicate daily with college grads with some real world experience (>5 years) world-wide on almost a daily basis, and they haven’t learned the basics of how to learn! Great, as long as someone produces a manual, but who are we going to get to produce that manual? Some factory on a laptop operated by some unknown person with no references or credibility??? And who’s going to have a job to pay for this manual, so that the factory owner can afford their laptop and government subsidized Internet and electricity and health benefits????

Why is it only a handful of people world-wide are even asking this question???