The Skill Collapse

"If Only You Knew How Bad Things Really Are"

The progressive myth of the march of history contends that each generation will be smarter, more free, have more resources, and build ever-upward on the skills of the subsequent generation. As if standing on the shoulders of giants. It is demonstrably true that the current crop of 18–21-year-olds will join the workforce poorer, dumber, and far less skilled than their parents or grandparents. I’m not here to argue the case about this; even in liberal circles there is much hand-wringing about this undeniable reality and how it requires further state intervention and management. I’m here to show you the negative feedback loop skill loss and how—if it continues—it will lead to a collapse.

Tech literacy, both in my experience and in measurable data, is dropping with younger audiences as most have only interacted with technology whilst not having low level access to their devices. What was standard navigation in 1999 is regarded as the wizardry of a power user now, and actively has to be ‘cracked’ into many devices. Command lines, registries, network ports—hell even just file paths—are completely alien to most people under the age of 25 in a world of locked off “apps.” Most modern 'tech' devices are deliberately opaque boxes. Apple and their “it just works” design philosophy of aggressively non-user-serviceable tech are partly to blame.

I’m not just here to ‘dab on the zoomers;’ a collapse of skills rather than a gaining of them is endemic to both a technological mass society and their demonstrable fall in computer literacy, despite being touted as the first generation of “digital natives:”

Only 2 percent of students scored at the highest levels implied by digital native status, and only another 19 percent of the 42,000 students assessed in 14 countries and educational systems could work independently with computers as information-gathering and management tools. -The Washington Post

In short those born of the zoomer generation are not so much born in a nation, as they are born online.

Computer literacy is only one striking area, highlighted here because it is a skill younger generations are supposed to excel in. The picture is part of a wider trend of graduates coming out of university without basic workplace skills. This is another reason employers are preferring vocational qualifications like apprenticeships. And why many companies are reticent to train fresh graduates from the incredibly low starting point many have when it comes to basic skills taken for granted in the past, like telephone manner. Hyperbolic headlines like “This woman charges $480 an hour to help Gen Z and millennial workers overcome their fear of talking on the phone” mask a wider, more mundane problem: the education system is fixated on instilling compliance and the myths of the current elite—not skills.

There is no substitute for actually being in a workplace. My long-standing advice has always been this: don't go to university.

The skills and subsequent engineer crisis is bad on the macro scale, but this does offer up opportunities; if you are young, unemployed, and wondering what to do next look at an apprenticeship. You'll generally come out with a degree or equivalent as part of your program if you show willingness. You don't have to go to university. You don't have to go through the struggle session mill. If you’re lucky, you can just work for an employer and gain skills related to an actual job. These opportunities still exist; they are rarer than in previous eras, but they still—begrudgingly—need you.

My area of expertise is engineering, and the most important things an engineering company will want to see before they invest in training you are:

• A driver's license: You're likely to be on site or at a client's office for meetings

• Microsoft Office & general computer skills

• Good telephone manner & ability to communicate with clients

• Ability to understand and communicate complex technical information

I use engineering as an example as I have firsthand experience of it, but no matter what any urbanite tells you, yes, you do need to be able to drive to work a non-fake job. You don't need a car all the time, but UK Gen Z being priced out of ever driving is another looming skills issue. In my experience, this is all adding up to a rapidly aging workforce in private sector engineering jobs, even over and above the general aging population.

It is not uncommon to have workplaces where the majority of engineers are over 50. In fact, the average age of an engineer in the UK is 54. Many have ended up highly paid due to their increasingly rare skillset and are taking early retirement; your average engineer has one eye on the door. As much as 60% of over-50s could have left the workforce because of the lockdowns, according to the Evening Standard.

Worse still, many of these have not trained a replacement, as companies have struggled for the resources to take on apprentices, after the Blair government deliberately shifted the focus onto full-time university. This collapses the on-ramp to technical professions and leaves private companies at the mercy of the increasingly surreal clown show in universities. The baby boomer generation, now largely retired, had a cultural aversion to passing on their skills to the next generation, unlike generations before them. I believe this mindset plays a role in micro-level skill loss as family businesses and passed down professions die out, but also on the mindset of macro government by those born post-1950.

The faceless men we assume will always be there to keep the lights on are seen as an inexhaustible resource by the post-war elite class. To quote an earlier piece of mine:

“There must be some unseen knowledgeable class of people who keep it all running and prevent the abject chaos promised should these institutions collapse.” - The Technocrats

It is a well-explored fact those employed in more practically-minded professions are more conservatively minded; this is part of why the regime can’t do away with conservatives entirely, but the pattern of deliberate exclusion of competent people from positions of authority does have a corrosive effect and is part of this negative spiral. It is not merely a neutral process; this collapse is being engineered in very obvious ways.

A long-running story has been the wholesale assault on the skills pathway for Air Traffic Controllers; it was an issue highlighted by Democratic Senator Patty Murray who questioned the bypassing of the FAA’s own university program in favour of ‘off the street’ hiring based on a diversity questionnaire:

Nonetheless, the FAA did actually move to ‘off the street’ hiring with diversity as a criteria, passing over graduates of FAA-approved university air traffic control programs, during the Obama administration.

The FAA launched the Collegiate Training Initiative in 1997, working with colleges and universities to offer air traffic control degrees, and making their graduates the primary source for hiring controllers. This trumped the previous requirement of a high school degree and three years of (unrelated) work experience.

In 2005 the FAA Inspector General recommended adding coursework to these schools to reduce training time at the FAA’s academy. Since the FAA didn’t do this, Congress directed a study of the move in agency’s 2012 reauthorization.

Instead the FAA started an Air Traffic Controller Recruitment Campaign which bypassed graduates. A decision made by the FAA, and not by the Air Traffic Organization, meant that both high school graduates and those with air traffic control degrees had to apply through the same program and pass both the standard aptitude test for controllers and a biographical test. This had the effect of bypassing hundreds of controller graduates. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) expressed concern with the FAA’s change in hiring practices at the time.

-A View From The Wing

This air traffic control story is a microcosm of how skills in high-impact professions are being eroded to meet diversity quotas and hiring targets. Diversity, equity, and inclusion being, by law, priorities of public and private industry take many of the headlines, but the skills collapse is much longer in the making than that. I believe “DEI” as it’s known is partly an excuse for the general lowering of standards as skills in all population segments dry up.

There cannot be a white, technically proficient class that is able to emerge from this shortage on top, as skills become rarer and those with them become more valuable and they wield greater bargaining power. Those in charge are faced with a tricky arbitration balance where they need to have racial, cultural, and gender groups at odds with one another in order to retain control of vital organisations, but also need those organisations to still function at a basic level.

As I talked about in The Military Stimulus Complex, the main product of the U.S. defence sector is well paying jobs—not military equipment. A large percentage of "deployable" equipment within NATO has already been sent to Ukraine and revealed nations are exaggerating how much battle-ready equipment they have. The real story will be if this equipment can be replaced. Modern military equipment is designed for largely "on-paper" hypothetical wars and insurgencies. If everything that was said about NATO equipment performance compared to Russian equipment was true, the Blue & Yellow LARPers would be in Moscow by now; something does not add up. Modern military equipment is also complex, high-precision, and has interlocking systems, and is therefore skill- and resource-intensive. This requires both primary and secondary defence sector manufacturers to retain a large skills base across a number of disciplines, but this is increasingly diluted for the needs of race-based politics as a control vector in the existing skills vacuum favouring white skilled workers.

The DMV-ification of the US military industrial complex is a visible part of a ubiquitous problem: strong institutions represent rival castles but weakening them threatens collapse. I believe the current elite class really did assume the pool of skilled labour was inexhaustible; using globalisation, any gaps could be plugged from outside. Indeed, importing skilled workers from abroad has been a powerful way of diluting the interests of native homogenous groups, but a degree paid for in bribes from Mumbai does not in reality make you able to deliver functional work.

The collapse of skilled, white male workers within the workforce is—of course—celebrated in many corners. This late stage of the collapse and the social causes for it are celebrated in a Bloomberg article entitled “Men Dropping Out of the Workforce Could Be Progress”, in which gynocracy and the increasing hopelessness of those men excluded from skilled work are actively cheered. “An economy that offers more opportunities to everyone may just mean fewer men working than we’ve seen in the past.”

Once again, I would point out that these trends predate the modern conception of “woke” ideology and find their roots in the western educational environment of the 1990s; the collapse is being celebrated with a post-hoc rationalisation—it was already happening and has been happening as western nations de-industrialise. This is why it is felt most sharply in heavy industry: the dream of a service-based economy for western nations, a globalised world where whole countries are simply industrial zones, is rapidly fading—as are the liberal myths of ever greater freedom and prosperity. Climate change and racial equity may be used to justify the collapse and the world of subsistence we are drifting into, but they did not cause it. We have been in this cycle since World War II and are simply reaching the logical conclusion of it.

Managed economies are not sustainable; what we see is akin to the USSR in the 1980s: planned economics overseen by an all-powerful managerial class is ploughing into the iceberg of reality. It is not ideology but pragmatic reality that motivates those in power. Their position as the technocratic elite—the managerialists—makes this a choice between gradual loss of control or inevitable collapse. With the negative feedback loop of skill loss, we are seeing many who seem to be sticking with the mindset of the baby boomer generation: they simply hope to be dead before the real hardship occurs.

Thanks to Plasma Rob for additional copy editing of this piece.