Quote Originally Posted by JKDS View Post
Here's a question. In spite of college, the internet, and much more free time...is our generation less skilled than prior ones?
No, but you're asking the wrong question. Our generation is certainly exposed to more edifying stimuli per unit time. The average 30 year old today knows FAR more than the average 30 year old of yester-generation. The problem is that the market is not in need of people with an abundance of trivia knowledge. It is in need of whatever it demands. So, locally within populations, there are deficiencies in marketable skills in the current generation that perhaps didn't exist in the last generation. Thirty years ago, there was more demand for unskilled labor. There was more demand for trainable labor. Think of all the (actually quite lucrative) door to door vacuum cleaner salesman type jobs that existed in the 1980s that were supplanted by infomercials and eventually Amazon.

On the other hand, today there is much more demand for higher-on-Maslow's-pyramid type jobs. Think webmaster, 3d-modeler, video game designer, blogger, columnist, youtube ranter (ahem, content-creator). A lot of this stuff just emerged in the last 20 years and caught the unprepared among us off guard. Chiefly, people who dropped out of school or got degrees in unmarketable shit. Also, I think in this generation the job climate has been a lot less consistent than former generations were accustomed to. History bulls forward at an accelerating pace, and today's workers are a lot more rewarded for adapting with the changing dynamics. If you were adept at weaving baskets in the 1800s, you could be pretty sure that was going to be a profitable venture for decades or centuries to come. People in those days were named for their trades and did them for many generations. Today, there's a shaky transience to every job, and being a jack-of-all-trades is much more rewarded than being a specialist has been in centuries past.