Further evidence that higher education is a bad bet
I used to play poker with this 26-year-old college dropout at a local neighborhood bar. His $1 million+ lifetime earnings as a professional poker player shames any pride I might have had in my own amateurish $18k- payday. But playing poker contributes nothing to society, you remonstrate? Fair enough. But consider:
Persistent unemployment is not a problem because employees and employers are “mismatched,” one of those callous Management euphemisms that will one day take its rightful place alongside such Third-Reichisms as “transport.” It’s a problem because our economy is a castle made of bullshit built on a bullshit foundation foundering in a swamp of bullshit. It is not an absence of skills and abilities that curtails and limits the prospects of gainful labor; it is an absence of any industry requiring any labor. Yes, it was lovely that we had a decade or two in which fake jobs full of people pimping their fake skills abounded, but that wave crested and rolled back.
Follow
Are we pimping fake shit? BTW, I hate how your catpcha code is underneath this. I always forget to input it!
1Naah. Not us. We perform a necessary function in society. Criminal defense is honest work, even if our sweat is not caused by physical exertion. But I do think higher education, including law school, is largely a scam. The excerpt I quoted paints our entire economy with a pretty broad brush. But I think the writer has a point, and the observation that one can makes lots of money by playing poker without producing anything seemed related to it.
2