9:11 — Marco Rubio raises the specter of robots replacing workers: "If you raise the minimum wage, you're going to make people more expensive than a machine." He adds: "Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers!" [VIDEO.] Alex Knepper responds:That's rather true. My mind went elsewhere. I heard "We need more welders and less philosophers!" and said: "fewer philosophers." And, after a good night's sleep, my morning thought was: Why is it either/or? Welding is a great job for a philosopher.
The sentiment he's expressing here is precisely what's wrong with our nation's attitude toward education. Our politicians think the meaning and purpose of education is to make money. If something doesn't have an immediate economic purpose, it's treated as useless, even offensive. The irony that Rubio will never grasp is that this exceptional country — the country that made his life possible, and made it possible for the son of a maid and a bartender to run for president — was made possible by philosophy.
ADDED: Jaltcoh corrected the Rubio quote and I've corrected my quote of Jaltcoh.
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113 comments:
He said "Welders make more money than philosophers".....not what you wrote above, that "Philosophers make more money than welders".
Big change in context.
Hmmm. Ok, Welders are semi-alchemists, and alchemists are the first Philosopher Kings who could find secrets to transform people and culture with new thoughts...like Leo Szliard did.
Maybe he just meant that philosophers should be smaller.
I think the key profession is Plumbing. That means the pipes that move clean water, waste water natural gas, human waste and steam. Without yje pipe workers we could not exist as a modern society.
Actually philosophy professors make much more than welders do, just another sign of the disintegration of America. Philosophers take things apart, welders put things together.
We need way more welders and far fewer philosphers. There are a ton of welding jobs available. That is, if you care about income equality
We, as a county, owe so much to Adam Smith.
Let's start quizzing Marco on Smith.
traditionalguy said...
Hmmm. Ok, Welders are semi-alchemists, and alchemists are the first Philosopher Kings who could find secrets to transform people and culture with new thoughts...like Leo Szliard did.
Um. Not really. You're pretty much restricted to joining like to like. There are other methods but the are the secret of the welder brother and sisterhood guild.
traditionalguy said...
I think the key profession is Plumbing. That means the pipes that move clean water, waste water natural gas, human waste and steam. Without yje pipe workers we could not exist as a modern society.
Pipe welding is a whole different genre of the welding profession.
My nephew with a philosophy degree is not a welder, but a brew master. Not a lot of work in philosophizing.
There's a supply and demand curve for everybody. It averages out to the right number, absent central planning.
Money is just a token for what somebody else finds useful.
Student loans give you philosophers. Subsidized student loans give you too many philosophers.
We have a shortage of qualified workers to fill the jobs in industry and tech, he was making a big picture point. Some of us can't see the forest for the trees.
I have to agree that that line stood out to me as being tinged with Democrat style national socialism. Like Bernie Sanders "How many brands of deodorant does this country need?"
If I want to study philosophy and live a life of ascetic poverty, what business is it of the President's?
I appreciate that, like Paglia, he wishes to "valorize the trades" but I don't like the route he takes.
Knepper is attributing things to Rubio that he never said or inferred or could reasonably be inferred by what Rubio said. Knepper is proving Rubio's point.
He would have done better to say "Grievance Studies majors"
Derp, very well, could we stop funding it though?
Rubio is correct. We oversell a liberal arts education in this country. Too many people spend way too much money and incur way too much debt studying for degrees that have too little return. Your perspective is that of a well off and educated white person who need not worry about such things.
Higher Ed is a subsidized racket. A scam. I don't expect you to agree with me since you draw a salary from the racket.
Maybe if we imported wetback philosophers to starve at half price, they would get it.
Welders who can weld and scuba dive at the same time and are willing to accept some danger make top one percent money.
Eric Hoffer, the 20th century philosopher, started out in life as a longshoreman.
Wittgenstein, another 20th century philosopher, started out in life as an aeronautical engineer.
Eric Hoffer was a philosopher and a longshoreman. He wrote many books, his most well known being THE TRUE BELIEVER, about the formation of mass movements and ideological zealotry.
Well...sinz52 slipped in ahead of me! I was dithering!
Marco Rubio raises the specter of robots replacing workers: "If you raise the minimum wage, you're going to make people more expensive than a machine." He adds: "Philosophers make more money than welders. We need more welders and less philosophers!"
I was born in 47 and as long as I can remember I have been hearing how automation kills jobs. Essentially the same thing Rubio said about robots.
It is true of course, in one sense. Look at secretarial and typist pools. A lot of companies had big rooms with platoons of women (always women) sitting there for 8 hours typing away. Computers and word processing killed all those jobs. There are very few secretaries these days either in pools or as individuals. "Automation" killed those jobs.
But, automation also replaced those jobs. All those secretaries are not unemployed, they are doing other, more valuable and thus often higher paid, work.
The cure for automation is freedom. Freedom for someone with an idea to start a new business or a new industry. Some of the candidates noticed that last night and at least paid lip service. That is the engine that has driven American greatness for 200 years.
We need a candidate that will focus on that.
John Henry
I half-agree with Huckabee to this extent:
When taxpayers are asked to foot the bill for other kids' college education, they should insist on some quantifiable return on their investment.
So the part of education that the taxpayers are asked to pay for, should lead to moneymaking (i.e., taxpaying) careers.
If a student can get a private scholarship to pursue philosophy or history or some other academic subject, that's fine. But not on the taxpayer's nickel. The taxpayer should foot the bill for STEM education only.
...this exceptional country...was made possible by philosophy.
True. So were all the communist countries, and the fascist countries, and plenty of other pathologies throughout history.
Lots of talk last night about the so-called trade deficit. Trump, I think it was, railed on and on about how we were importing stuff from China and not exporting to them.
Then, a sentence or two later, he talked about how the Chinese were buying a big hotel chain as evidence that a deficit exists.
He should have been buzzed off the stage on that.
The whole idea of a trade deficit is caused by accounting shenanigans. We buy Toyotas and send dollars to Japan. If Toyota then buys American steel and ships it to Japan, we say no trade deficit exists.
If they buy that same steel and build a truck plant in San Antonio, we say that a trade deficit does exist. Why? They bought the same steel in both transactions.
Even better, for the US, we now have the Toyotas that we imported from Japan AND the truck plant (with the US jobs and US wealth it generates)
Somebody needs to tell me why that is a problem.
Somebody needs to explain it to the politicians.
John Henry
Welds and philosophies are very different types of products. One philosopher who proposes better ideas can supply enough new philosophy for an entire nation. One welder, no matter how productive, could not supply the needs of even a small town.
We need many more welders than philosophers, even if one good philosopher is far more valuable than one good welder.
I personally think that education is incredibly valuable, well beyond leaning the skills of your trade.
It is so valuable that I don't see why anyone would want to limit it, in time, location, or ideology, to the modern American college campus.
( Okay, I actually do see why some what to limit it to that ideology. But it is not for the benefit of the students. )
Is elitism and sanctimony "nature or nurture." I think she taught her son those "qualities."
He said "Welders make more money than philosophers".....not what you wrote above, that "Philosophers make more money than welders".
You're right. I've fixed my post. Thanks for the correction.
One other thing, a trade deficit will never exist. The Chinese are rational. Dollars do them no good at all except as a means to purchase other stuff. The dollars can ONLY be spent in the US. Ultimately, anyway. They might buy Saudi oil but then the Saudis need to spend the dollars in the US.
But as a thought exercise, let us suppose that a trade deficit did exist. We buy $1bn worth of Chinese stuff and the Chinese never spend the dollars. They stuff it in a bank vault and sit on it.
Would that not be a good thing for the US? We have the goods and have essentially traded nothing for them.
Sort of like my buying a car from Ann and giving her a check that she doesn't cash. I have the car and I still have the money. Though she may show up eventually and take the money, it is still mine in the meantime.
John Henry
My dad was a welder and while I wouldn't say he was a philosopher, he was a man of strong opinions.
I think the key is that we need fewer philosophy majors. A credential does not a philosopher make.
And just as a patent clerk was our greatest physicist, a welder can be a fine philosopher, and probably a better one than the philo major I knew in college who needed my help in symbolic logic, the only legit right-and-wrong-answer class she had to take.
Most of the philosophers who made this country had day jobs. That's what made their philosophy useful, practical.
We could go always go back to having 95% of us working on farms.
"Welders make more money than philosophers".....not what you wrote above, that "Philosophers make more money than welders".
Some philosophers make more money than most welders.
Most welders make more money than most philosophers.
Some welders are philosophers. In the academic meaning of the word.
In the 60's there was a philosopher who was a longshoreman or was it vice versa?. Published a number of unreadable but best selling books. Can't remember his name at the moment. Hoffer maybe?
John Henry
So he just lost the philosopher vote.
We have more than enough philosophers on this blog alone!
I will pay for a welder's services if I need one.
A philosopher not so much, so better learn a useful trade so that you can earn something to eat while philosophizing.
"But, automation also replaced those jobs. All those secretaries are not unemployed, they are doing other, more valuable and thus often higher paid, work."
Really? What other jobs? Where?
Who needs any more Philosophy than what was already provided by Bill Murray in 'Caddyshack'?
Toss in a little 'Animal House' and you're good to go for whatever Life throws at you.
I am Laslo.
"When taxpayers are asked to foot the bill for other kids' college education, they should insist on some quantifiable return on their investment.
"So the part of education that the taxpayers are asked to pay for, should lead to moneymaking (i.e., taxpaying) careers."
How can anyone know in any given time what return on investment may come in the future from any particular intellectual or career pursuit? How do we quantify "return on investment?" In the tax dollars a particular individual can contribute to the national pool each year of his or her working life, or in the unexpected or unimagined returns on investment--monetary and/or otherwise--that may benefit society or the world at some future point when the seeds of apparently "valueless" intellectual or philosophical pursuits bear unexpected fruit?
In the broader sense I took the comment to mean "we need more welders and less Melissa Clicks"
I don't think he was limiting his use of the term "philosopher" to just the philosophy department.
Robert Cook said...
"But, automation also replaced those jobs. All those secretaries are not unemployed, they are doing other, more valuable and thus often higher paid, work."
Really? What other jobs? Where?
Really? You are asking that as a serious question?
Where do you think they all went? In case you can't figure it out, they went all over the place. Many to jobs in fields that hadn't even been imagined 20 years before.
Or Telephone operators?
Are all these (mostly) women now unemployed?
I might also point out that at the same time that secretaries and telephone operators were disappearing, participation in the labor force by women was steadily on the rise.
John Henry
Laslo Spatula said...
Who needs any more Philosophy than what was already provided by Bill Murray in 'Caddyshack'?
I do.
I also need the Philosophy provided by Chevy Chase in 'Caddyshack'.
How can anyone know in any given time what return on investment may come in the future from any particular intellectual or career pursuit?
Exactly Robert. That's why free markets are the way forward, even in college education.
Ignorance is Bliss said...
"I also need the Philosophy provided by Chevy Chase in 'Caddyshack'."
I stand happily corrected.
I am Laslo.
Ah, to think a degree in any major was the ticket to the good life. Now, a lib arts degree is more a prep for future hobbies, with a lifetime reading list. At least that's how History worked out for me.
Philosophy is a great subject, and I am glad I took the survey I took. Especially since the prof turned out to be a closet conservative. But I noticed the actual Phil majors were a dreary lot.
traditionalguy said...
I think the key profession is Plumbing. That means the pipes that move clean water, waste water natural gas, human waste and steam. Without yje pipe workers we could not exist as a modern society.
While true, we also need a host of other skilled workers to supply the things carried in those pipes (water, natural gas, steam) and to process the waste. We need the countless people who contribute to making electricity available or the pumps won't run. The next time you turn on a light switch, try thinking for a moment about how many people had to work to produce the electricity and distribute it to you. Hint: the chain starts well before the power plant.
The assumption that you need to go to a university to learn about philosophy is outdated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Philosophy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_philosophy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_philosophers_(A–C)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Abelard
http://www.amazon.com/Ethical-Writings-Dialogue-Philosopher-Christian/dp/0872203220/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1447253212&sr=8-1&keywords=peter+abelard
http://onlinephilosophyclub.com
However, as the son of a welder, I can assure you that you need actual training from a skilled professional located in the same space as you to master the trade.
Unfortunately, our institutes of higher learning are such that, once one earns a Philosophy degree (or any of the soft sciences) that person firmly believes that they are smarter than everyone else; that manual labor is beneath them and that their superior intelligence entitles them to make a living by just reading, writing, and demonstrating their brilliance.
Really? What other jobs? Where?
All the more reason to bring in millions more low skilled workers who barely speak the language, if at all, and whose education is that of a rural peasant!
Unfortunately, our institutes of higher learning are such that, once one earns a Philosophy degree (or any of the soft sciences) that person firmly believes that they are smarter than everyone else; that manual labor is beneath them and that their superior intelligence entitles them to make a living by just reading, writing, and demonstrating their brilliance.
You forgot the Oxford semicolon.
Blogger Ron Winkleheimer said...
However, as the son of a welder, I can assure you that you need actual training from a skilled professional located in the same space as you to master the trade.
I am in general agreement with that statement but that training can be much more productive with tools.
Last March at Automate 2015 I got a demo of a training system from Lincoln electric. I put on a regular looking helmet and inside it had virtual reality screens that made me feel like I was in a shop. They gave me a standard stinger and told me to weld 2 pieces that I saw in front of me. (In VR) Haptic feedback made it feel so real that I swore I could feel sparks on my arms. I could also "see" the weld I was making and adjust for the proper bead.
The quality of the weld was visible in real time and captured for playback. The quality of the weld was graded automatically on a 1-100 scale. Problem areas were highlighted. I got about a 75 but felt that was pretty good since I have never done much welding and none at all in 10-15 years.
We will still need instructors to do hands on training. They will be much more productive in terms of the number of students they can train and the quality of the instruction.
Some other cool automation from Automate can be found here: http://www.packagingdigest.com/automation/13-automation-game-changers-that-ease-engineering-tasks150407/page/0/3
My take on the coolest stuff at the show.
John Henry
"... was made possible by philosophy."
I have nothing against philosophy, but what absolute drivel!
"entitles them to make a living by just reading, writing, and demonstrating their brilliance."
This pretty much describes every white collar job.
Read this. Write a report. Show your brilliance. Here's your paycheck.
Philosophy majors get made fun of, but philosophy profs and majors usually are smart. There are soft majors to be sure, but philosophy requires a huge amount of reading difficult texts and integrating information. That's why it's one of the more common majors for CEOs, if I'm not mistaken. For instance. It teaches complex and integrating thinking that can be applied in many different contexts. Which means, it's really a great undergraduate degree that can lead to graduate professional training.
It also helps hone one's own thoughts. Everyone is a philosopher, after all, but not everyone has a good philosophy. We're human, we try to make sense of our world in a way that's usefully coherent. But, most of us can't integrate all the various pieces together well, so have a fair amount of incoherent ideas about the world. Not that they don't make sense in isolation, but they don't make sense in light of our assumptions about other topics or issues. The current political partisanship is a major example of how much poor constructive philosophy dominates these days.
I can't believe that nobody has linked this yet.
Jay Leno is a philosopher extraordinaire. He is also a pretty hands-on guy with cars.
In this video he talks about welding as a potential career.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpsRIO1mmhs
I think it was an ad for the AWS.
John Henry
"The next time you turn on a light switch, try thinking for a moment about how many people had to work to produce the electricity and distribute it to you."
Don't, whatever you do, ask Cookie about this
"How do we quantify "return on investment?"
Marxist theory of labor and all that.
"The assumption that you need to go to a university to learn about philosophy is outdated."
Just so. Education has become cheap; it's just educational credentials that have become absurdly expensive.
No one needs government subsidies to obtain an education, especially in the humanities. Considering the extent to which so many academic humanities departments have been corrupted by politics, few universities really have all that much of value to offer in these fields anyway.
Yet educational credentials remain valuable in job markets; thus, many students will evaluate "educational opportunities" (that is, formal, for-credit education) primarily on how well they can be expected to perform as a financial investment. It's hardly unreasonable for them to do so.
I gave up on philosophy a year or so into my undergrad career. I took a class on Plato, and the prof graded me down for not understanding the proper interpretation and understanding of the pieces we covered for the class. I asked him how he knew that. His response was that philosophers agreed with him, and not me. Which, being from STEM, was entirely unconvincing and unsatisfying. He was essentially saying that there is no right or wrong in philosophy, just a popularity contest. 1+1 could equal 3 if enough philosophers believed it. Yes, some of the smarter people in my class were philosophy majors, but I remain unconvinced that it wasn't just a big scam job, and they were philosophy majors because they were in on the scam, or could see through it better than the rest of us.
All education in the humanities is just a huge amount of reading. Anybody can do it. Few people do it without the impetus of paying for the education. Same with getting fit.
You don't need a gym to have a healthy body. But gyms and personal trainers abound. And as any reader of instapundit is repeatedly told, there's apparently smart and less smart ways of working out.
So maybe there is room for some professional assistance to help speed up the process and save the bother of injury.
No, this country was made possible by white men who were willing to work, love, kill and die for their white women and children. Accept that and burn like vampires in sunlight.
But as a thought exercise, let us suppose that a trade deficit did exist. We buy $1bn worth of Chinese stuff and the Chinese never spend the dollars. They stuff it in a bank vault and sit on it.
Dude...it's worse than that. They lend the money right back to us so we can buy more of their stuff. Then they lend the money back to us......
John Henry said...
Lots of talk last night about the so-called trade deficit. Trump, I think it was, railed on and on about how we were importing stuff from China and not exporting to them. "
I like Trump and he does have a limited point about currency manipulation on the part of the Chinese (although the Chinese have an equally valid claim against the US manipulating the dollar) however I notice that he doesn't complain about trade deficits with peer economy countries like Germany,the EU and Japan. Without China a lot of inexpensive consumer goods wouldn't be available and if the Democrats have their way and raise the minimum wage to $15 (why not $150?) they would be unaffordable even if available. Trump is wrong, we do export a lot to China and we need to press the Chinese to further open their market to us. Americans see a lot of consumer goods in the shops with the made in China label but they don't see the high value American exports.
How do you revere the US Constitution and the Federalist Papers and despise philosophers? The Constitution was not a holy text passed down to men.
We're borrowing money from the chinese to pay the interest on money we've borrowed from the Chinese.
Ask your local loanshark how this usually turns out in the end.
Since we are being asked to foot the bill for a lot of it...then we should have some say if you pay for it all yourself with no taxpayer help, knock yourself out.
"Yes, some of the smarter people in my class were philosophy majors, but I remain unconvinced that it wasn't just a big scam job, and they were philosophy majors because they were in on the scam, or could see through it better than the rest of us."
I think you get this in a lot of fields. There are people who are doing really creative, constructive work, and there are people who don't know what they are doing so can only be oriented by what other people have to say.
Thomas Kuhn's now overused and exhausted term "paradigm shift" was used by him to describe what happens in science, where most people are just going with the flow and occasionally there's some major change to shake things up, and then all the followers fall in line with this new pattern. Quantum physics in the early 20th century follows this: it can't be true because it can't be true, God playing with dice and whatnot.
Good philosophy isn't about a popularity contest, but to get past the point of popularity judgment a person has to get deeper into the field where the creative and engaged philosophers dwell. There's certainly a lot of sophistry, arguing for its own sake, but there's the occasionally earnest pursuit of truth.
John Locke sure seemed to be more of the latter and it rocked the world. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and Thomas Paine were those kinds of philosophers too, among so many others.
The proposed solution was not no philosophers, but rather fewer philosophers.
Most of the enlightenment thinkers whose ideas our country was founded on were much more than philosophers also.
@fivewheelsAnd just as a patent clerk was our greatest physicist,
Einstein got his Ph .D. in physics, THEN became a patent clerk to pay the bills while he waited for a professorship to open up. In other words, our greatest patent clerk was really a physicist.
This exceptional country was made possible by philosophy. But the Founders were not full-time philosophers. They were farmers and lawyers and businessmen who had enough wit and interest to read and understand philosophy - and apply it.
The purpose of education is to enable people to have the basic skills necessary to support themselves (instead of having to be supported by the state) and to develop their ability to read with comprehension, express themselves, reason with logic, and to understand the history and foundational concepts of our country and culture so that they can distinguish reason from nonsense and use proper judgement in selecting our leaders - and BE a leader.
It's true that there seems to be an emphasis in education on ensuring that people attain the skills that enable them to get and hold a job. But that is necessary for the rest. People who are not independent cannot make a country based on liberty and freedom. If you are dependent on government to support you, you will vote for a government that has contempt for the philosophies of freedom and liberty that this country is based on.
A government that is powerful enough to give you everything you want is a government that is powerful enough to take everything you have.
I took a class on Plato, and the prof graded me down for not understanding the proper interpretation and understanding of the pieces we covered for the class.
Maybe he wanted to give you the proper foundation so that you could discuss whatever new insights you might have with others in language they understand? I know it's not exactly like learning the four postulates of Quantum Mechanics that are almost certainly universally true. Nothing in philosophy is universally true. We have to create touchstones or we are complete lost. It's turtles all the way down, after all. So teaching you the history of philosophy is the way to go. If it wasn't for you, fine, but it certainly is not an absurd approach to pedagogy.
The irony that Rubio will never grasp is that this exceptional country — the country that made his life possible, and made it possible for the son of a maid and a bartender to run for president — was made possible by philosophy.
Yes, but think of the other philosophy-inspired nation-states of recent years -- Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and Communist China, to name a few. Philosophy's track record in the past 150 years has been about as terrible as it is possible to be. Modern philosophers can hardly take credit for the success and happiness of government according to the principles of long-dead 18th century philosophers.
Gahrie said...
But as a thought exercise, let us suppose that a trade deficit did exist. We buy $1bn worth of Chinese stuff and the Chinese never spend the dollars. They stuff it in a bank vault and sit on it.
Dude...it's worse than that. They lend the money right back to us so we can buy more of their stuff. Then they lend the money back to us......
11/11/15, 9:41 AM"
Actually they are doing us a favor. You want to pay higher taxes to cover the welfare state because that is what those bonds are financing. Indeed the more we owe them the less leverage they have over us. Remember the old joke: owe the bank $100 and the bank owns you. Owe the bank $1,000,000 and you own the bank. And if the left has its way with having an ever expanding welfare state we will need someone to buy bonds to float the spending.
My mind went elsewhere. I heard "We need more welders and less philosophers!" and said: "fewer philosophers."
And thank you, Stannis Baratheon.
We need lesser English teachers.
"The irony that Rubio will never grasp is that this exceptional country . . . was made possible by philosophy."
Maybe a welder would think that, but no competent philosopher would infer this from what Rubio said.
On second thought, the welder, empirically minded as she is, might just ask Rubio before spouting off, rather than make a baseless prediction without any attempt at falsification.
@Gabriel: "our greatest patent clerk". Do you have a cite for that :)?
"we will need someone to buy bonds to float the spending."
The Chinese have been bailing out of US bonds for years. You know who is buying US debt now ? The Treasury with imaginary money created to do so.
In the past several months, the Fed taper of QE and subsequently U.S. bond buying has coincided with steep declines in purchases by China, a dump of one-fifth of holdings by Russia, and an overall decline in new purchases of U.S. dollars for FOREX reserves.
The "backing off "of QE was cancelled after a few tremors scared the Fed away from sanity.
"How do you revere the US Constitution and the Federalist Papers and despise philosophers? The Constitution was not a holy text passed down to men."
No, it was written by men like Franklin who was probably the world's greatest physicist at that time. At one time Chemistry and Physics were considered "Philosophy." Was that what you meant ?
he irony that Rubio will never grasp is that this exceptional country — the country that made his life possible, and made it possible for the son of a maid and a bartender to run for president — was made possible by philosophy
No, that's not it. The irony is that what's exceptional about this country is that it's founded on a philosophy--that its existence is framed by and predicated upon that philosophy. Rubio's point misses that, sure, but that's not a criticism the Left can make since they insis that this country is NOT exceptional (our current President thinks every nations is exceptional so that's nothing special about ours).
This response is not wrong in the sense that having a philosophy (and, in fact, a very different one) was necessary for the creation of our nation, but other things were just as necessary--a rebuttal would be "well if it weren't for relatively untrained local militias helping to win our war for independence we wouldn't have a country (ie "this country was made possible by the fighting done by citizen soldiers") so we need fewer philosophers (or welders!) and more soldiers.
Writ Small said...
How do you revere the US Constitution and the Federalist Papers and despise philosophers? The Constitution was not a holy text passed down to men.
Two responses: 1.) Rubio's comment doesn't mean or even imply that he despises philosophers (nor that he loves welders). His assertion is that we need more of one and fewer of another, and he's looking at the need in terms of jobs--he is saying that the current & future job markets will demand more welders and fewer philosophers, and therefore we ought to align or educational priorities around that fact. If I have a problem with my toilet I call a plumber, not an electrician, but that doesn't mean I despise electricians.
2.) If you asked him I doubt Rubio would say he'd have a problem with our schools turning out philosophers of the kind who wrote the Federalist papers; his problem is probably not with some hypothetical terrific philosophers (who agree with his basic worldview/philosophy) but with the types of philosophers that our universities actually turn out. I'd be surprised if most of the philosophy majors in a typical university have read any of the Federalist Papers (maybe a bit here and there for an AP History class in high school) and it's likely they view those particular documents as something to dismiss as oppressive patriarchal dictates from dead white slave-owning men.
The First Law of Philosophy: For every philosopher, there exists an equal and opposite philosopher.
The Second Law of Philosophy: They're both wrong.
"Our politicians think the meaning and purpose of education is to make money."
The way to make sense out of this statement is to substitute the word 'taxpayers' for 'politicians'.
The introduction to a great discussion was not deftly made by Rubio, but I am heartened by the attempt.
I suggested the possibility pursuing plumbing or electrical work to my son recently. He has been uninspired so far in his college studies. Trudging along. He looked at me like I'd sprouted a new head. Accused me of reverse pyschology.
Discussion needed.
I'm all for people getting a philosophy degree, just don't come to me later and ask me to pay off your student debt.
"Our politicians think the meaning and purpose of education is to make money."
----
No. We think that the end-goal of a student loan is to pay it back.
Sure.
But if you have more welders, you get better infrastructure.
If you have more philosophers, you get worse, more watered-down philosophy.
Or to put it another way -- 90% of the benefit of philosophy comes from the top 1% of philosophers. 2% of the benefit of welders comes from the top 1% of welders.
A merely competent welder produces the most value for society by working as a welder. A merely competent philosopher produces the most value for society by asking "Want fries with that?"
Important as philosophy is, we don't need more professional philosophers.
We already have lesser philosophers. That's a step in the right direction, eh?
Rubio should have said more welders and less community organizers.
"Why is it either/or? Welding is a great job for a philosopher."
Sure.
http://twentytwowords.com/bob-dylan-is-a-welder-and-he-makes-big-iron-gates-out-of-scrap-metal-5-pictures/
And Kasich said the word "thrice", thus losing the Joe Six-Pack vote, including welders.
Our politicians think the meaning and purpose of education is to make money.
It's Knepper who seems to be the one saying making money is essential for the teaching and learning of philosophy.
Didn't the original philosophers just hold court somewhere in public outside of a university system.
And you can learn philosophy outside a classroom, whereas it's a little hard to learn welding on your own. You need a license to weld, not philosophize. Heck, the Flashdance girl welded by day!
See, the sad thing about a guy like you is, in 50 years you're gonna start doin' some thinkin' on your own and you're going to come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life: one, don't do that, and two, you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library.
I was a philosophy minor. A background in philosophy helps you come to terms with the utter futility and insignificance of your life. I would caution all young men interested in taking a course in Kant and the Categorical Imperative that such a field of study does not attract hot chicks. The psychology courses get the hotter girls. I have no knowledge of welding schools, but my guess is that no supermodel was ever recruited from a welding school......Marxist philosophy is an example of a faulty weld.
If we stop subsidizing philosophers - how many of them will become welders?
I prefer this exchange from the oft-overlooked 1983 classic Max Dugan Returns:
Michael McPhee (Matthew Broderick): "Can you make money from philosophy?"
Max Dugan (jason Robards): "Yeah, if you have the right one."
As Iowahawk would say, #Truestory: After graduating from college I worked a variety of odd jobs to pay for my move to California. One was a laborer for a bricklayer who graduated from Swarthmore with a philosophy degree.
Where would Philosophy be without welding? No Weldanschauung. Things began to go downhill when Philosophy wearied of welding, (i.e., Weldschmerz).
This country was not made possible by philosophers.
It was made possible by war.
Without war, the philosophy of Locke et al. would have been entirely moot. Jefferson, the Sage of Monticello, would have been hung along with his less enlightened cronies.
As for the philosopher/welder question, while we need both there is currently a shortfall in the the very large welder market and a glut in the very small philosopher market. Best case scenario is that we produce more welders who can think critically about their lives about what makes life worthwhile. Philosophers can shift for themselves. They always have.
If you are building a house, you don't need 13 architects and 1 framer. You need fewer architects and more framers.
To argue that the statement that we need fewer philosophers and more welders means the speaker thinks philosophers are useless means that while philosophy may not be useless, you certainly weren't using it.
Sage of Monticello, would have been hung along with his less enlightened cronies.
I think you mean "hanged,' viz Blazing Saddles.
I have no knowledge of welding schools, but my guess is that no supermodel was ever recruited from a welding school
Never seen Flashdance then, I take it. I am sure it is a true story....
I suggested the possibility pursuing plumbing or electrical work to my son recently. He has been uninspired so far in his college studies. Trudging along. He looked at me like I'd sprouted a new head. Accused me of reverse pyschology.
I WISH I got into welding or plumbing instead of going to college. Would've made more money and had way less debt to pay off. And the odds of you being dismissed for being insensitive to somebody is quite low.
Shop class as soulcraft.
Does nobody aspire to do better than minimum wage, ever?
I have known a number of welders, and some are amazing philosophers, especially over a few beers. How many philosophers are great welders?
My brother got his degree in philosophy.
He makes a living as a certified A,P, H mechanic.
(Thats airframe, powerplant and helicopter)
"Does nobody aspire to do better than minimum wage, ever?
Sure, but how likely is it anymore that most can achieve such aspirations?
With the loss of labor unions and the globalization of labor, (where human labor has not been eliminated outright by automation), workers are just chattel, as they had been before the brief interregnum of the 20th Century.
Labor is a commodity, Bob.
The value of labor is what it brings to the job.
It is not now, nor has it ever been, a zero sum equation.
A letter in today's New York Times quotes John W. Garner, who was Secretary of Health Education and Welfare under President Johnson from 1965 to 1968, as saying (and I read this quote before somewhere, but didn't remember it)
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted acitivity, will have neotehr good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes or its theories will hold water.
That last thing is a pun.
Meanwhile, I've got a sink without a shutoff valve - and there's a hose that is manufactured so as to connect to a washing machine going into the bathtub, so that way the small leak won't leak on to the floor and downstairs, because the vanity also has a leak. There is larger shutoff valve - two of them one for the hot water and one for the cold water, in a nearby closet, but it is not working, and the water for the whole line will have to be shut off in order to be able to fix it by breaking the wall of the closet, although I'm told the actual repair of the valve won't take long. And there was the time someone didn't know where aleak was really coming from.
Einstein got his Ph .D. in physics, THEN became a patent clerk to pay the bills while he waited for a professorship to open up. In other words, our greatest patent clerk was really a physicist.
According to Wikipedia, a couple of corrections. He was a Swiss patent examiner, not a patent clerk. I don't know what a patent clerk is, but patent examiners are what I deal with professionally. And, his PhD seems to have been a couple years after he had been working in the Swiss Patent Office for awhile. His patent examiner position was initially temporary, but became permanent at the Swiss Patent Office in 1903, but he didn't complete his thesis until April 1905. But, he was publishing before either, starting apparently in 1900.
A bit of related fun.
"Does nobody aspire to do better than minimum wage, ever?"
Sure, that's why a lot of people major in something other than philosophy.
Hahahahahahahaha!
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