The Next Millionaire Class? Why America’s Future Depends on Tradespeople
28th August 2025
Time to Pick a Nit: Such people are not ‘tradesmen’ unless they own a firm.
‘Tradesmen’ are people engaged in ‘trade’, i.e. trading goods for money.
People who trade services for money are ‘mechanics’ (or, I suppose nowadays, ‘technicians’). You can look it up (if you can find a dictionary that doesn’t just follow what people do as opposed to what they ought to do).
I believe that this is the fundamental premise of the book The Millionaire Next Door, which came out in 1996. So it’s been a long time coming, but it’s still good to see that the trend is continuing.
One hopes that eventually young people will realize this, get back into vocational training, and we can all watch colleges shrink back to where they ought to be.