The market determines labor’s value, and right now, a lot of misbegotten advice to younger people completely ignores what the market is saying. From el gato malo at boriquagato.substack.com:
a gatonomics™ lesson
i remain, as ever, in awe of the one-sided zero-move-look-ahead economic illiteracy that has been inculcated into the self-styled american intellectual and social media maven.
it has spilled over into all manner of odd ideas and unrealistic expectation amidst a profound incomprehension about a variety of “trap” industries where there are huge demands for costly education and investment that result in hyper-specialization and options constraint due to both attitudes and opportunities.
architecture is notorious for this. it takes a mountain of school to become an architect, and outside of a few “stars,” the field is mostly a low-wage desperation slog of journeyman work with far too many people chasing too little opportunity.
architect wages stink because the worker has no power. their skills are not scarce, demand for them is limited, their skills do not readily port to other fields, and all want to “do what they studied” often as a sort of passion project (which, of course, is fine to value but often fails to align with monetary incentives.)
your “dream job” in a field you enjoy often comes with a serious price because it’s the dream of others as well. that’s a recipe for oversupply of “prestige” positions and in this absurdist educational cargo cult era for a massive overproduction of workers chasing work that is not in demand while undersupplying industries that are both needful of workers and profitable to work in.
it gets pretty stark.
