Consider being more specific, since produce-picking is arguably mindless labor but “farming” isn’t necessarily. Farmers do things like deciding what to plant, knowing timings / how weather affects them, diagnosing and fixing problems, doing marketing and sales, and hiring and managing other people if the farm is big enough. In your hierarchy, I would put most farmers (as-in owner-operators of farms) somewhere between skilled labor and petit bourgeoisie.
Attempting to break into the middle class can be risky due to the sticker price of college plus the lost wages.
My experience has been that the myth of expensive college is a bigger problem than the actual cost of college. The difference between my yearly pre-college income and post-college income was enough to pay off my entire student loan the first year. Of course that depends on treating college like an investment (get the training and credentials you need at the lowest price) instead of following the bad “self-fulfillment” advice, but I think that’s a different problem.
The problem with intellectual labor is it’s hard to tell whether someone is doing it right. If there were clear criteria for success then the job would have been automated away by now.
This isn’t necessarily true. You mention sales later, and I think that’s a great example. I can trivially write a program that looks at your sales data and determines if the trend is positive, but I can’t write a program that calls customers and convinces them to buy my product. The actual process and verification are frequently completely different processes.
Even with something much harder to verify like management, this still holds. It’s true that it’s hard for me to tell if someone is a good manager, but it’s still much easier to check results (what does their team’s turnover look like?) than to know exactly what steps they should follow to make that metric better.
Moreover, if you knew what the right thing to do was then you wouldn’t need to hire someone else to do it.
I don’t think this is true. It’s common to know exactly what you want done but not have time to do it. For example, Sergei Brin knows how to program, but he still needed to hire thousands of additional software engineers.
When white collar workers collaborate in teams it is impossible to how how much each individual employee is worth.
It depends on how big the gap is, but I’d say this is difficult but not impossible.
Credentialing. It’s hard to measure if someone is a good electrical engineer but it’s easy to measure if someone has a degree in electrical engineering or used to work for Facebook.
For what it’s worth, this is sort-of changing in the software field. It turns out credentials aren’t good enough and it’s more effective to directly measure how good someone is at writing software (either with tests or by looking at code samples). Unfortunately, most places seem to do this as a two-step gate (you need credentials and to pass the “can you do the job” test), but I think that’s more of a path-dependence thing than direct usefulness (path dependent because historically the most competant people got software engineering degrees, so if you don’t get one now it implies that you can’t, even if in a world without that history, not having a software engineering degree wouldn’t mean anything).
Consider being more specific, since produce-picking is arguably mindless labor but “farming” isn’t necessarily. Farmers do things like deciding what to plant, knowing timings / how weather affects them, diagnosing and fixing problems, doing marketing and sales, and hiring and managing other people if the farm is big enough. In your hierarchy, I would put most farmers (as-in owner-operators of farms) somewhere between skilled labor and petit bourgeoisie.
My experience has been that the myth of expensive college is a bigger problem than the actual cost of college. The difference between my yearly pre-college income and post-college income was enough to pay off my entire student loan the first year. Of course that depends on treating college like an investment (get the training and credentials you need at the lowest price) instead of following the bad “self-fulfillment” advice, but I think that’s a different problem.
This isn’t necessarily true. You mention sales later, and I think that’s a great example. I can trivially write a program that looks at your sales data and determines if the trend is positive, but I can’t write a program that calls customers and convinces them to buy my product. The actual process and verification are frequently completely different processes.
Even with something much harder to verify like management, this still holds. It’s true that it’s hard for me to tell if someone is a good manager, but it’s still much easier to check results (what does their team’s turnover look like?) than to know exactly what steps they should follow to make that metric better.
I don’t think this is true. It’s common to know exactly what you want done but not have time to do it. For example, Sergei Brin knows how to program, but he still needed to hire thousands of additional software engineers.
It depends on how big the gap is, but I’d say this is difficult but not impossible.
For what it’s worth, this is sort-of changing in the software field. It turns out credentials aren’t good enough and it’s more effective to directly measure how good someone is at writing software (either with tests or by looking at code samples). Unfortunately, most places seem to do this as a two-step gate (you need credentials and to pass the “can you do the job” test), but I think that’s more of a path-dependence thing than direct usefulness (path dependent because historically the most competant people got software engineering degrees, so if you don’t get one now it implies that you can’t, even if in a world without that history, not having a software engineering degree wouldn’t mean anything).
Thanks for pointing out this error. I have replaced “farming” with “agricultural labor”.