Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire could teach anybody to be a farmer" but information technology required "a lot more gray m

I’d just like to whoop his ass...

I think someone should get a spoof going of the old El Paso Pace salsa ads going.
"New York City!?"

I’d like to see him with a Tankers helmet ala Dukakis.

We just — more and more, if you think about it, the agrarian society lasted 3,000 years, and we could teach processes. I could teach anybody — even people in this room, no offense intended — to be a farmer. It’s a [process]. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn. You could learn that. Then you have 300 years of the industrial society. You put the piece of metal on the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow and you can have a job. And we created a lot of jobs. [At] one point, 98% of the world worked in agriculture, today it’s 2%, in the United States.

Now comes the information economy. And the information economy is fundamentally different because it’s built around replacing people with technology, and the skill sets that you have to learn are how to think and analyze. And that is a whole degree level different. You have to have a different skill set, you have to have a lot more gray matter. It’s not clear that teachers can teach or the students can learn. So the challenge for society is to find jobs for these people — who we can take care of giving them a roof over their head and a meal in their stomach, and a cellphone and a car and that sort of thing. But the thing that’s the most important, that will stop them from setting up the guillotines some day, is the dignity of a job. And nobody’s yet come up with a simple solution, in this day and age, to how we create jobs, particularly for people already out of school.

I can tell you how to fix the school system so that the kids come out with better skills, more ability to appreciate life and to work collaboratively and collectively and read the instruction manual and follow orders. But it’s very hard to figure out where the jobs they’re going to get will come from, and for those that are already out in the work force, to get them back into the system and teach them new skill sets, is almost impossible. It’s very very hard to do and nobody’s really shown they could it. There’s individual cases where you can retrain them, I don’t want to overstate it. But the coal miner I talked about in West Virginia is not going to move, and his family, out to California where the solar jobs are, and even if he got there he’s not going to get those jobs. Nobody’s going to hire an older person. It’s fascinating to me — older people are always willing to hire younger people; younger people are not willing to hire older people. I think it’s just they’re afraid of older people that may have skill sets they don’t have, and you know, they make fun of them, they say they’re not able to change and think — none of those things are true, there are plenty of older people who are really smart and really can do new things if you gave them the opportunity. But there’s a discrimination from young managers to hire older people. It’s reasonably well documented I think, and certainly observable.

So your basic premise is, it’s not that bad, it’s better than it was before, but it’s a big problem and the problem is not the redistribution of wealth, it is the job where you’re going every day. And you say ‘What’s business’s responsibility?’ It’s not business’s job. Business’s job is to take the investors’ money and to maximize the money by creating products that the public wants and are willing to pay for. And you can’t say to them they should go and create jobs deliberately. You can have a tax policy that encourages that, and that’s one of the things you should do, and then use the collective wisdom of all of the heads of companies, to create small pockets, and it adds up to a lot of jobs.

That’s what I would do right away. Your taxes are lower the more people you hire, and higher the fewer people you hire. And let capitalism work, because government’s not going to be able to solve the problem directly. But short of that, who’s going to create the jobs? Well if it’s not industry, there’s only one group left to do it. And so the next time you want more efficient government, think twice. I’m not so sure you do want more efficient government. Back in the ’30s, we created an inefficient government. We put people to work building infrastructure we needed. They weren’t maybe the — you could have had other people do it more efficiently but we wanted to create jobs and we did, and it took us — World War II was really what took us out of the Depression, but it got us through the Depression. And maybe that is the answer, that we’re going to say ‘government’s got to create no-show jobs,’ or jobs that you have to show but that aren’t needed. We can pass a law that says you’ve got to move all the paper from the left to the right side of the building every day, and back again. Okay. And then the government are going to hire people to do it. But it’s better than people being out on the streets, desperate for a job, not being able to find it, [destabilizing] society.”



Analysis
Despite the significant volume of words, Bloomberg’s basic argument can reasonably be summarized as follows: Income inequality is not as chronic as it was in the past, but is still a significant problem. The primary cause for concern is educational inequality, and in particular the extent to which older people who previously worked in agriculture and in relatively low-skilled manual work can transition to participating in the information economy.

As an illustration of his broader point, Bloomberg presented farming as a relatively straightforward endeavor which “anybody” could easily learn, and argued that, by contrast with farming and low-skilled manual labor (“you put the piece of metal on the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow”), taking part in the information economy required greater intelligence (“a lot more gray matter”) and different skill sets (“how to think and analyze”).

Knowing the broader context in which Bloomberg uttered those remarks certainly enhances one’s understanding and appreciation of them, but it does not alter their meaning or significance — Bloomberg was not speaking ironically, for example, or taking on the persona of someone else, when he made the comments in question. As such, those who quoted him did so both accurately and fairly, and did not misrepresent the meaning of his words.

Snopes invited Bloomberg’s presidential campaign to provide any background, context or additional information which might alter a viewer’s understanding of his remarks, and we also asked whether Bloomberg still stood by his comments and the manner in which he expressed his arguments during the Oxford speech.

In a statement, a spokesperson said: “Mike wasn’t talking about today’s farmers at all,” and highlighted the fact that Bloomberg mentioned “3,000 years” of the “agrarian society.” However, this claim does not comport with the fact that Bloomberg was clearly speaking in the present tense about farming and low-skilled industrial labor, and the present-day dilemma of how to provide a new skill set to “those that are already out in the work force.”

Don't worry, if Bernie doesn't whip him Don will.

The Obama Crew welcoming Team Trump to the White House:

as always, it's more complicated than the bumper sticker version



I would say that farmers and machinists are probably in the information age now too, and they probably produce a lot more per person than the same jobs did 10, 20, 50 or 100 years ago.

which gets to his point, what the hell is everyone else going to do for a job?

I think it’s just they’re afraid of older people that may have skill sets they don’t have, and you know, they make fun of them, they say they’re not able to change and think — none of those things are true, there are plenty of older people who are really smart and really can do new things if you gave them the opportunity. But there’s a discrimination from young managers to hire older people. It’s reasonably well documented I think, and certainly observable.

Bloomberg suffers from one of the worst cases of “New York, NY” provincialism I’ve ever seen. You know the type, they think because they know what country makes the best pastrami they think they know everything about everything. And because they are convinced they already are worldly, suave, debonair, and good looking, they stopped learning anything a long, long time ago.

All you have to understand why Mini Mike is running, and going down worse than Evil Knievel, is to put together a little montage of all the flubbed cop shoots in NYC, followed by the Texas Church hero. It’s the perfect illustration of how people create the worlds they live in. We like ours better.

The Obama Crew welcoming Team Trump to the White House: