Cornfed wrote:I've come across a lot of threads on various forums where young men ask what careers they should go into. For some reason the advice they are given is invariably stupid.
Specific stupid advice is usually given to the effect that they should go into some esoteric area of science or engineering currently in demand requiring a graduate degree. The advice is postdictive - telling them what would have been a good idea to get into ten years ago. In a fast moving (and fast collapsing) globalized economy such small niches don't stay understaffed for long, so following the advice would virtually guarantee the young men unemployment at the end of their education. And that is even if the economy doesn't completely collapse before then, which it will.
General stupid advice usually given is that they should find a productive, useful skill that helps people. Of course it would be a good idea to have skills likely to enable you to survive the coming meltdown, but surely in terms of a career there is ample evidence that trying to do anything useful is for chumps. For one thing only a very small percentage of jobs in Western economies produce anything of value. Most jobs are make-work projects and simply facilitate transfers of wealth, so trying to be productive will mean you are chasing a small and shrinking number of jobs. If you are only hired for being productive your employer will constantly be looking to replace you with more productive and/or less costly machines or foreign workers, whereas if you are hired for other reasons, say to meet a government quota, they won't be. Wages in the productive sector tend to be set by the economic value of the employee, which tends towards minimum wage over time, since even a slight surplus of available employees will create a work or starve situation. Wages in the non-productive sector are arbitrary, which in practice means they are higher these days. And so on.
I don't know why people insist of giving the coming generation stupid advice. Perhaps it is like being the victim of any other practical joke, where at first you are annoyed and then you start looking around for someone else to fool.
Good topic Cornfed. And not to derail the topic, but I just want to add in regards to bad advice given to young men is how nobody steps up to warn young men that they shouldn't start a family too soon in life. Starting a family in your 20's should be out of the question! Period.
The bottom line is that getting married and having kids has a direct impact on your career/finances and if you really want to give yourself the best opportunity to make money you need to focus on making money FIRST, then later on start dating and have children.
I will never forget what my late grandfather told me (who was very successful and died with plenty of money); he told me to pursue making money first, and getting my finances in order, THEN play with the girls later on in life when I'm successful because he said if I do it the other way around that women would be too much of a distraction and they could cause me to loose sight of my life goals.
Another guy I knew who became a millionaire from real estate investing said he would have never been able to accomplish what he did if he got married and had kids. It had to do with the fact that he had to sacrifice for many years living frugally which no woman would have put up with and would have pushed him to find job instead of continuing along the path of true financial freedom. This guy is now in his early 50s and no longer has to work, drives a new Mercedes, and has a custom built home in the suburbs of Los Angles.