We made a decision to open up markets to global competition, and this stopped growth in the manufacturing industries, and eventually led to declines in employment, I think by the 1970s. It made no sense to pursue these kinds of jobs, at the individual level.
I think IT work is in a similar situation, where we’re opening up to global competition via guest workers and offshoring, and salaries and job growth are flat, at least in fields that involve only software. If there’s software combined with robotics, or something else like healthcare, there’s still growth.
At the individual level, it makes no sense to go into debt to pursue an education to get into a stagnant field. The local economy, or national economy, may be dependent on these skills — but the fact is, when you reduce it down to an individual decision to take on debt, it makes no sense to go down that path and risk periods of unemployment.
One way to deal with this is to have government intervention in the market to reduce unemployment by having a way to “soak up” some amount of unemployed people. Maybe they get shunted into working for the government, until the market needs them again, or there’s some kind of retraining or education system so people can learn the in-demand skills. Right now, it’s all market-based and mostly individualized, so it requires workers to take on risks, rather than spreading the risks across the industry or society. (In the past, it was soaked up through “defense spending” on war technologies, but there’s no Cold War anymore.)
The other way to deal with this, is to do what the AMA and Bar Associations do: to limit the supply of credentialed workers. This keeps salaries high, and then reduces the risks of taking on debt to finance education. The trade off to society is a shortage of affordable healthcare, and lack of access to legal justice for the poor and middle class — thus creating a kind of economic “injustice system.”
I would not want the Internet to go in this direction, though it may be in some respects. An open and free and inexpensive internet has done so much for society, that it’s fair to say it’s been revolutionary.
