WP: ‘Have the robots come for the middle class?’
13th July 2013
Read it.
Computers and cyborgs aren’t about to render the American worker obsolete. But they’re tilting the nation’s economy more and more in favor of the rich and away from the poor and the middle class, new economic research contends.
The rich — like Barack Obama and his cronies, including those who own and operate the Washington Post. Yeah, those rich. Which is what make thumb-suckers like this one so … well, rich.
Despite rising fears of technology displacing huge swaths of the workforce, there remain huge classes of jobs that robots (and low-wage foreign workers) still can’t replace in the United States, and won’t replace any time soon. To land the best of those jobs, workers need sophisticated vocabularies, advanced problem-solving abilities and other high-value skills that the U.S. economy does a good job of bestowing on young people from wealthy families — but can’t seem to deliver to poor and middle-class kids.
Well, to begin with, wealthy families (including government employees like the Clintons and the Obamas) don’t send their kids to government schools, so they actual get an education. You’d think that the parents of ‘poor and middle-class kids’ would connect the dots and quit voting for these bozos, but they never do. So it’s pretty much a matter of Own Damned Fault.
It’s a challenge other countries are solving better than America, Levy and Murnane say.
And they’d say that even if it weren’t true, because it’s part of The Narrative that foreigners do everything better and America would suck less if we just became foreigners.
It’s one that U.S. policymakers will need to solve if they hope to keep their global economic edge and to keep lower-income Americans from falling further behind.
Which ain’t gonna happen while U.S. policymakers are in the pockets of the teachers’ unions whose votes them depend on for their cushy government jobs.