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next_migrationPerhaps you’re middle-aged and have a job, profession, or independent business by which you’re making a decent living. Unless you’ve come to hate that career, you’ll likely want to stick with it for the rest of your working life, if possible. But do take some time to think about how it fits into the framework of complexification—and possible decomplexification. How essential is your work, really?
You don’t need to ask that question in so radical a way as to assume that every job other than “peasant farmer” is non-essential. Barring a major nuclear war, for the rest of your life there will be large, complex economies. Any job or business that was common in 1950 and is still common today will likely exist in 2050. Some new job categories will remain popular because there is now widespread need for them. For example, with everyone using computers, we need a lot of computer repair techs and nerds who can help us get our software installed; computer manufacture may be having problems, but we aren’t going to stop using the ones that exist anytime soon.
However, if your job isn’t directly producing a good or providing a service, but doing paperwork that’s supposed to help others to do so, be honest with yourself about how essential that help is. Plenty of those less-essential positions within a company do real good for the company or its employees—saying your job isn’t utterly necessary isn’t saying it’s useless—but still could be among early cuts if the budget tightens. Anyone who’s worked in a larger business or nonprofit where the number of administrative assistants has ratcheted downwards over the years, requiring other staff to take over their tasks using automated systems, knows what I mean. Government services will be reduced based on political considerations rather than value (the police will be fully funded; teachers and public health officers, not so much). If your job involves the provision of “luxury” goods or services, not necessarily meaning furs and diamonds but just things that most Americans can’t afford, bet that fewer will be able to afford them in future. (The exception will be businesses catering entirely to the super-rich, so long as they retain their current political dominance that will enable them to consume ever-greater slices of a shrinking pie, but you don’t want to be standing next to them when they lose it.)
You also don’t need to immediately abandon a good livelihood because you can predict that fewer people will be employed in it decades from now. Some large-scale changes will occur through attrition, as people now doing those jobs retire and are not replaced, so young people take other types of work. However, if you acknowledge that your work is, at best, “nice but not necessary,” you might want to think about what your Plan B might look like. The younger you are, the more important that is. More on that below.
If you have a specialized skill that can’t be used just anyplace, you’ll need to live in the kind of place where it can be practiced. That may not mean a big city, though. Perhaps your current job would be hard to duplicate in a small town, but some have businesses or cultural institutions that employ people to do something similar. The small-town equivalent would be lower-paid, but your costs of living could be so much lower and your quality of life so much higher that it would be well worth the decline in status as traditionally defined. Some people could make ends meet as independent businesspeople. Keep an open mind.
If your current employment doesn’t provide a living wage or treat you with respect, especially if it’s dubiously sustainable—service work catering for mass air travel, let’s say—it’s never too early to start looking for ways to move into a new field or learn a new skill. If you’re 20 and not yet sure what to do with your life, consider, as you are deciding, that you will probably live long enough to see a lot of ecological and economic decline. If there’s a specific thing you desperately want to do and have the talent for, then by all means pursue it, understanding that if you’re unlucky you could wind up doing low-wage labor to survive for the rest of your life. Otherwise, be strategic. The purpose of work is to keep you fed and housed. Any work that does that without ruining your physical, mental or moral health can be tolerable. It’s nice if you love your job, but if you don’t, you can spend your leisure time on things that have more personal meaning.
Under present circumstances, most Americans are employed or semi-employed by corporations, and those corporations are always seeking to save money by replacing employees with robots or foreign sweatshop labor. Even radiologists are finding their jobs outsourced, as hospitals find it cheaper to send X-ray images digitally to be read by radiologists in India. On the assumption that this trend will go on for a while longer, it’s wise to think about positioning yourself to compete for good jobs that are hard to outsource to other continents or turn over to robots. Contrarily, if America were to descend into outright civil war, foreign sweatshops would be increasingly unwilling to accept possibly worthless U.S. dollars, forcing rapid “insourcing”; however, since at that point 99% of us would be broke, many sectors of the peacetime economy would be virtually abandoned. Jobs that are hardest to outsource or automate are frequently those that require a physical presence and the use of hands and a brain.
Not everyone should go to college!
Let’s take a moment to ponder the social and emotional meaning of college education in America. One of the most unrealistic left-wing ideas for the future economy is “Everyone should go to college.” Everyone should get a four-year degree, then everyone will get a nice well-paying job, and we all live happily ever after. This is certainly better-intentioned nonsense than the opposing idea, “Nobody should go to college because they might learn that Jim Crow was bad,” but it’s still nonsense. First, not everyone could get a college degree; in addition to lack of money, lack of access, or lack of adequate preparation or interest, there’s such a thing as lack of talent. Unless you’re prepared to say that people who can’t make it through college don’t deserve basic security or health care, making college universally available would not be sufficient to create a decent or humane society.
Second, there are not enough good jobs that require college degrees to employ the whole population, and there are plenty of jobs that don’t or shouldn’t require degrees that are essential to a functioning society, so somebody will need to do them. Imagine for a moment that every kid in America had the talent, drive, and opportunity to earn a PhD in physics. We would soon know everything that it was possible to know about physics-related subjects; that would be nice. But though there would be a great many jobs for physics teachers and professors in that world, there would not be enough for all those new PhD graduates to be so employed. Most would be forced to take other kinds of available work, and some would, inevitably, wind up stocking shelves and mopping floors at the local Safeway. They might look back on grad school with nostalgia, or more likely with regret and resentment that they wasted years of their lives and incurred financial losses to get an education they then couldn’t use. Therefore, the “send everyone to college” goal is not an adequate substitute for the need to create a system in which lower-wage workers have secure access to food, shelter, and health care. No matter how educated we all might become, somebody, always, will have to work the “lower-skilled” jobs.
America doesn’t like to talk about social class, but we have profound class divides. Except for a brief period of high union membership (largely for white males), the working classes have generally gotten barely a large enough slice of the pie to live on. Real wages have stagnated for decades, while the socially expected expenses have increased. The middle and upper-middle classes have been doing much better, although everyone’s income is suppressed by the increasing proportion of national GDP diverted to make the super-rich even super-richer. Middle-class parents are terrified by the thought that their kids might slip out of the middle class, not because they are snobs (though some are), but because they don’t want those kids to wind up too poor to visit a dentist or dream of buying a home. Working-class kids see college as their leg up. Almost all view the diploma as a talisman that will guarantee continued membership in, or entry into, the middle class.
Unfortunately, this is no longer always true. It used to be that a college degree, in any subject, really was a ticket to a white-collar job or managerial rank. It no longer is, because there are now more young people recently graduated from college than there are available white-collar jobs, so not all can get hired for the jobs they envisioned. Employers are free to be more selective: now only a business degree will do, say, or a degree from a selective school, or a master’s instead of just a bachelor’s degree. We won’t even talk about the fact that many corporate HR departments use biased algorithms to screen job applications. Those who don’t make the cut may end up pouring coffees or driving for Uber.
Back even longer ago, when few people except rich young white men went to college, corporate employers actually had to train the workers they wanted, instead of having them pay for their own training. Employers will say that high school graduates these days do not have the same level of basic skills as they did several decades ago, and there’s some truth to that. It is also true, though, that employers are requiring applicants for most decently paying jobs to demonstrate that they have already acquired some technical skills and experience at their own expense, usually with no real means of knowing in advance that they will be rewarded with a salary that lets them pay off the loans incurred. Finishing a college degree is often one of the hoops to jump through, not because it is the only possible way to learn essential skills, but because it demonstrates things about the candidate: persistence, diligence, ability to follow orders . . . and probably some level of financial security in their family background.
Some degrees are still in great demand, especially those in difficult or boring quantitative subjects, but subjects perceived as easier or more interesting or emotionally meaningful appeal to more students. (Would you rather read accounting textbooks or American literature?) That creates a surplus of graduates in those fields, especially as hiring fashions change. One of my loved ones once worked as a habilitation aide in a home for severely disabled children, comparable to a nurse’s aide with a very low hourly wage, with a coworker who had a master’s degree in Russian history. That was right after the Soviet Union collapsed.
For that matter, even PhDs in hard sciences are now so plentiful that many go through multiple short-term postdoc positions before getting jobs as adjunct instructors at universities, paid a few thousand dollars a course with no job security or, for the part-time, benefits. If there were fewer PhDs than available teaching positions, colleges would be forced to compete for them by offering full-time tenure-track positions. When poverty-wage gig work becomes common in a field, even if the qualifications demanded of workers are very high, it is a sign that there is an oversupply of people with those qualifications.
Before you go to college for the sake of a future career, therefore, check out recent resources regarding the average earnings and unemployment rates for people in your envisioned degree program. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that in 2018, unemployment rates for 25- to 29-year-old bachelor’s degree holders were low, but were above average in fields including computer and information science and English, and probably for general liberal arts and interdisciplinary majors. By contrast, unemployment was lowest for education, nursing, and electrical engineering majors. Lots of people are needed who have certifications in the former two fields, and the last is challenging and “boring” enough not to attract more students than can be employed.
While nursing and especially electrical engineering graduates received above-average salaries, though (as did computer science graduates), education majors were, unsurprisingly to any teacher, among the lowest-paid. But in an expected difficult future, students might value the hope of a high salary less than the relative certainty of getting work that will provide basic support. (If the political pendulum swings, wealthy finance graduates might find that prospering in hard times, while contributing little or nothing of value to the real economy, makes them quite unpopular.) Note that NCES did not analyze underemployment in this report; it’s possible that salaries of some of the lowest-paid majors, such as liberal arts and humanities, social work, fine arts, and English, reflect the fact that many graduates in those fields couldn’t find jobs that used their education and were working at Starbuck’s.
Many Americans may think universal college education is essential to educated citizenship. Much information they consider to be important for an informed citizen to know is not taught in many high schools, because parents, or the loudest and most aggressive parents, do not want their kids learning that information. Indeed, it is a shame that so many high schools don’t teach uncensored history or biology. However, if a young person reaches adulthood not wanting to hear about those things, then is forced to take a history or biology class in college, they’re more likely to be a pest to others than to learn much.
If you do want to learn more about those subjects than your high school gave you, there are plenty of good books available from bookstores that can convey the basic information much more cheaply. Same for philosophy, literature, art, etc.; anyone who just wants to learn a little about these subjects can get books out of the library and find helpful discussions free on the internet. If you don’t really want to learn about philosophy and literature, paying for the privilege of being forced to do so won’t necessarily improve your mind much.
So, there are only a few rational reasons to go to college: (1) To gain knowledge and skills that you’ll need for a specific career you intend to pursue (e.g., to become a conservation biologist, you must study biology). (2) To gain credentials that you’ll need for a specific career you intend to pursue (e.g., you might be able to teach kindergarten well enough without a degree in education, but you won’t be given the chance). (3) Because you truly want to pursue the life of the mind, devoting yourself to the study of the liberal arts and humanities no matter what sacrifices it may require. Anything else is either an economic gamble with increasingly poor odds; a costly and inefficient means of gaining general knowledge; or a possibly futile random attempt to gain, preserve, or display class status.
Preserving or gaining class status, in the sense of sufficient income to live securely, is not an unreasonable motivation at all. You should place great weight on being able to support yourself, and your family if you have one, for the rest of your life. However, it’s not true that any four-year degree will get you either surer or better-paid employment than any non-bachelor’s alternative. First off, be very aware that “degrees” from for-profit online “universities” are nearly worthless in the job market, and usually leave the recipient with nothing but wasted years and crushing debt. But more generally, there are non-college skilled careers that can provide as much income as many real four-year degrees, or more.
I received an advanced degree many years ago, and subsequently could almost always say with great confidence that I’d have made more money that year had I gone to plumbing school at age 18. For example, Career Explorer (2018) reported that the average salary for a plumber in Michigan was $67,050, with a range of $32,700 to $83,400. It seems very fair to me that a senior plumber makes more than I do; my job is more interesting and I get a much better class of dirt under my fingernails. But many middle-class people who wouldn’t mind their kids’ growing up to do a dull, stressful, soul-crushing corporate cubicle job would be upset at the idea they might become plumbers for a 50% greater salary.
Why? If you feel this way, you ought to contemplate that carefully. Do you fear that if your son, or you, were a plumber, people would presume him or you to be ignorant, or stupid, or right-wing? Is that what you assume about blue-collar workers? If so, I can lend you my +3 Cricket Bat of Attitude Adjustment to give yourself a whack on the head with. Nothing stops a plumber from marching for Black Lives Matter or reading good books on the weekends, and surely some do. If others make wrong assumptions about them based solely on the fact that they do essential work without which our society would soon fall apart [!], the fault is in the person doing the assuming. Since we don’t have enough good white-collar jobs nowadays for all our college graduates, some talented young people would have been better off if they had been encouraged to pursue skilled “working-class” jobs. You will only be smart enough to consider such possibilities, though, if you reject the kind of classism that tells you your primary goal in life should be to have to wear a suit to work.
That’s not to say nobody should go to college. Many should. Many millions of people are employed in, or otherwise meaningfully use, the fields of study they pursued in college. The smaller cities and towns I’m recommending that more people should live in have many fewer jobs for educated people, but not none. However, in remarking upon employment options, I’m not going to say anything about the usual four-year university degree programs (except to comment that if your finances are tight, starting off at a community college isn’t a terrible thing). If you’re a young person who did well in high school, you know more about the current state of academia than I do. You will have had a guidance counselor talk to you about what subjects you were good at, what college majors you might consider, and what jobs they could lead to. College is so often perceived as the only path to success, though, that your guidance counselor may have unwittingly failed to cover other options. Those are what I want to talk about here.
Good working-class jobs
These days most people without credentials or specific skills are restricted to low-paid service jobs—flipping burgers, stocking shelves, cleaning houses or making up hotel rooms—or even more exploitative digital-age equivalents like Amazon warehouse work or Uber driving. Corporate employers structure these jobs to pay you just barely enough to keep you coming back, not enough to support a family or prepare for a better job, and when the company is pinched, they’ll toss you out without a second thought. Do whatever you possibly can to avoid lifetime dependency on these jobs. If you are stuck with them for now, working for humans rather than a corporation is likely a better option.
Manufacturing, where it still exists, is preferable because it usually provides a living wage and sometimes a transferrable skill set, though with union membership low, more employers require abusive hours and lowered wages. These jobs almost always leave you at the mercy of corporate employers that might pick up and move to Mexico. Americans’ preference for cheap foreign-made goods could well change in future, as intercontinental supply chains become more costly and less reliable. The remnants of America’s manufacturing industry deserve support so they can make it through the transition period. However, if you support it with your labor you should keep in the back of your mind that you might be betrayed by your employer, as many small manufacturing towns have been, and try to prepare to do something else if necesssary.
A good way to identify some kinds of training that lead to jobs is to peruse the catalogs of community colleges. These colleges mostly cater to working-class people, often returning students, whose reason for taking classes is specific: they want to compete for jobs better than minimum wage burger-flipping. Community colleges therefore strive to provide training that will help to prepare their students for local job opportunities. Some of those opportunities do not provide a living wage, but for some people can provide a stepping stone to a better career; others provide very good wages. Additionally, they have two-year associate programs for those who plan to transfer to four-year state college programs in common subjects. For average students who are not striving to be Masters of the Universe or progress to an elite graduate school, but just to get a useful degree from a state college, one of these programs can be quite money-saving.
Check out the programs offered by your local community college, or those in towns you’re considering moving to. If the college is reasonably good-sized, there must be something in those lists of potential fields that you would be good at. Consider them with an eye to things that people need and that are hard to outsource.
Agriculture, horticulture, and forestry, where it exists, are truly essential fields if anything is. Under corporate-capitalist practices these industries contribute greatly to environmental damage, but they can be done sustainably, and it is absolutely necessary that they be done to some extent (every society must have food, clothing, fuel, building materials). Unfortunately, the relative income of most agricultural workers is not at all in accordance with their importance to society. Not only are agricultural laborers poorly paid and forced to endure health-wrecking working conditions, but most land-owning farmers would barely break even without having large acreages and getting per-acre federal subsidies for commodity crops. There is a great need for more small farmers and foresters who find ways of making a sustainable and ethical living outside that system. Examples are successful Community-Supported Agriculture projects and Joel Salatin’s soil-building, mostly humane, and profitable methods of meat production (e.g., Salatin 1996, 1998, and others).
As a corollary, once food, fiber, etc. are grown, they must be processed. Big business has worked hard to make that a centralized and then globalized endeavor. However, taking food as the most important example, local butchers, bakers, brewers, independent small businesses making processed foods, etc., still exist. We are not about to revert to a culture where every family does all that stuff at home. We’ve been willing to tolerate the negative health effects of industrial food because it was cheap, but if its price climbs too far or its delivery becomes too unreliable, those local businesses could become much more popular. If you like the idea of developing such skills, you might be able to get training or pick it up by working at a small business.
One very large group of programs at the large community college in my hometown consists of the traditionally blue-collar-male jobs dealing with mechanical things: building, installing, maintaining, or repairing everything from cars or tractors to houses to their plumbing, wiring, HVAC, or cabinetry. Most of these are important tasks that people value and that are often impossible to outsource. For example, as I write this, there has been a shortage of new cars because of supply chain disruptions, making both new and old cars more expensive. Such problems are likely to recur in future. This will encourage people to keep old cars for longer—which they should have been doing anyway—so the need for competent auto maintenance and repair will increase. Likewise, demand recently shot up for furniture repair and re-upholstering, and for workers in that field, because shipping issues were preventing Americans from just throwing away their tatty old furniture and buying new. Providing energy-conserving or green-energy technologies (home insulation, solar or geothermal, etc.) will be a virtually guaranteed growth industry.
A very attractive feature of many of these jobs is that they can be done by small businesses or by independent businesspeople, who get to keep the products of their labor. You don’t have to work for a big corporation that hires by algorithm to work as a plumber, mechanic, or cabinet-maker, and you can do it in almost any small town. Women are still a small minority in most of these professions, and sometimes face discrimination or harassment, but you shouldn’t let that stop you if that’s where your talents and interests lie. If you have adequate stamina and grip strength to do the physical labor required (and that varies greatly depending upon specialty), such skilled jobs might well provide you a better and more secure livelihood than many four-year college degrees.
Another large group of potential careers is in the area of health care, with students being prepared for jobs including nursing assistancy, entry-level nursing, EMT, massage therapist, dental hygienist, and various specialized “assistant” or “technician” roles, including that of veterinary technician. Some of these jobs are reasonably well-paid; a nurse who continues to advance in education and rank can end up with a very good salary indeed. The job of nursing assistant does not pay a living wage, but the program that permits people to take the CNA test (in my home state) only requires one semester and six credit hours, providing a start for those who can’t afford more training. With current health care staffing shortages, some employers are offering staff perks including financial assistance for continuing education.
As of this writing, health care labor shortages have resulted from workers being burned out by exhaustion from the pandemic or forced out either by abuse from conspiracy theorists, on the one hand, or one-size-fits-all vaccine mandates on the other. Health care sounds like a rotten job at the moment. However, when the craziness of the pandemic is over, I suspect that most of the public will go back to just wanting someone to take care of them when they are sick or injured. Licensing of health care workers is state-by-state, although there are some interstate compacts, so if you got your training before you moved you’d have to jump through some hoops to be recertified, but health care workers can find jobs almost anywhere.
You won’t find this at a community college, but training in a variety of complementary fields (e.g., acupuncture, herbalism) could be marketable if you’ll live in a state where their practice will not be legally suppressed to prop up doctors or hospital corporations. The medical industry never did a very good job of dealing with many chronic diseases or commonplace discomforts, and is now pricing itself out of the market for many people, making less expensive complementary care a viable option. Midwives are likely to be in demand in future (provided the right wing doesn’t ban their services), as are doulas, who provide support rather than medical assistance. Even some OBs are acknowledging that making culturally sensitive midwife care the norm could do a great deal to reduce the health disparities and outright abuses faced particularly by non-white pregnant and birthing Americans.
Law enforcement and firefighting are also essential jobs and hard to outsource, but very challenging, difficult work and sometimes (though less often than warrior-cop training will tell you) life-threatening. Good people in these jobs should be well compensated, and should expect to be. Jobs in extractive industries (mining, shale oil, etc.), are a significant source of employment only in specific regions. Those jobs are also hard, often dangerous, but well paid. However, they are subject to boom-and-bust cycles driven by things like the fracking investment bubble and to constant corporate efforts to replace human workers with heavy machinery. There will also be inevitable decline in employment because, aside from the fact that those industries are destroying the environment, supplies of economically extractable resources are declining. It will simply not be possible to keep fracking at the same rate forever. Work these jobs if you like, but use the good pay to prepare yourself to do something else in your old age.
There will surely be continuing demand for the electronics, computing, networking, and white-collar business fields (accounting, business assistancy, communications, marketing), although some are easier than others to outsource. Computer and device repair will remain a popular business as it becomes harder for people to buy new gadgets frequently. Every business must pay bills and keep books, but computerization and contracting services to specialized corporations allow local businesses to reduce the number of humans they employ locally to do accounting tasks. It would be wise to check out job ads from your town of interest to see how many jobs in these fields really exist. If what you are really good at is writing or speaking, certainly pursue communications-related work, but be aware that many of these jobs can be done remotely. If the potential hiring pool for a writing job is not just the writers in your town but every writer with an email address, the competition is huge and some will be desperate enough to work for peanuts, driving wages down.
Uncle Sam wants you!
There’s another potential source of job training if you cannot pay for it yourself and you are still young and in good health: Join the military. I could never have done this (I’d have literally died from all the running in boot camp, to say nothing of my severe allergy to authority), but if you think you can hack it, it could be a very good option.
Not everyone in the military is in a job involving violence: you could get paid to be trained as a medic, helicopter repairperson, firefighter, truck driver, or data analyst, skills that would be useful later in civilian work. Many employers like hiring veterans, whether for emotional reasons or because they know those people have acquired the discipline to get up in the morning, get to work, and function as part of a team. Also, as a veteran you would be eligible for (at present) 36 months of GI Bill financial assistance to help you pay for college, vocational, or technical training or apprenticeship.
Or, you could get shipped somewhere to fight America’s next imperial war for oil, then get stop-lossed and kept there until you get blown up. It’s not a risk-free option by any means, especially if the current presidential administration is highly militaristic or less than two years from losing power.
Note that for most interesting jobs, the Army has special qualifications, e.g., refusing people who have any convictions other than for minor traffic offenses, have ever had drug or alcohol problems, ever used any drug at all, ever used marijuana “experimentally” after age 18, or ever served in the Peace Corps. There are also minimum requirements for strength, standardized test scores, etc. I’d never suggest lying to the government even if their expectations of perfect bodily purity from childhood are ridiculous ... but if you would, be aware that for a job with a security clearance, you would be investigated. If you want a good job in the military, ideally you should start aiming for that goal from early adolescence, getting in shape and making sure that you keep a clean record and never let anyone post a photo on social media of you smoking a joint that’s perfectly legal in your state. If it’s several years too late for that, you can still investigate your options, but they will be narrower (and once you’ve enlisted, the military does not have to give you, or even consider you for, the cool job that the recruiting sergeant said you’d be perfect for).
Just as many white-collar workers’ ignorance about blue-collar work and vice-versa is a problem for our society, the fact that in many communities very few Americans serve in the military, so that some people may not personally know anyone who has served, is a problem. This is not to give any sympathy to the attitude of some right-wing veterans in politics who suggest that anyone who hasn’t killed a foreigner or two isn’t fit for leadership, which, among other things, conveniently excludes almost all women. However, some people (“chickenhawks”) find it easier to support wars of choice when they don’t really understand what they entail, or have any loved ones who might be killed in them. As we face the decline of America’s empire, which some will propose to postpone with ever-increasing military violence, things might go better if every community has some skin in the game.
Also, if this country continues to approach the precipice of a civil war, it might save millions of lives for a more diverse group of people to have served. At the moment soldiers, especially white soldiers, disproportionately come from a few specific geographic areas, and a few who are racist extremists go back home to pass on the skills they learned to militias whose fantasy is someday to kill, subjugate, or ethnically cleanse all the rest of us. That is not great news for the rest of us. Every person in the potential “enemy” regions, cities, or ethnic groups who gets military training, then keeps effective weapons in civilian life, makes civil war or “insurrections” seeking to massacre civilians more costly to the aggressors, therefore less likely.
I am, in fact, sympathetic to the idea that there should be some form of universal service, with civilian alternatives to military service for pacifists and people too small, weak, or unhealthy to get through boot camp. Every youth who wasn’t excluded for sound reasons would spend two years in uniform, be taught some useful skills, develop some aspects of discipline, and be forced to work as a team with other Americans from different backgrounds. There is zero chance that this will happen under present political circumstances, of course, but perhaps one or more of our successor nations will consider it. In the meantime, if you are young and fit and have an adequately clean record, especially if you can’t otherwise afford college or job training, you might consider voluntarily taking this up as a two-year self-improvement opportunity.
