Crimson847 wrote:I don't see an explanation for why the service sector's pay and working conditions won't increase. That seems like a questionable assumption over the short to medium term, given the increased demand for services and reduced supply of service workers due to aging of the population.
It almost certainly will in services such as elder care. In other services, I expect automation to be a thing. I didn't realize much of the country lacked automated car washes until I moved to Texas. McDonald's is experimenting with automated fast-food delivery. I imagine there are companies hard at word at automating the stocking of shelves.
Crimson wrote:Are you talking about people with mental disabilities? Because disability benefits are already a thing.
Crimson wrote:If this is what you were referring to in the above paragraph when you said some people lack the capacity to solve even simple problems, I struggle to find polite words to express my opinion of that.
In the paragraph you quoted, I was not talking about people with disabilities. Quite the contrary. My mother is incredibly smart. She's also efficient, hard-working, and gets along well with people. Those soft skills were in high demand when she started out and she makes great money as a corporate lawyer (first from seniority, then from being poached by someone she used to work for).
With her law degree, she would seem to be well-trained in logical reasoning. She was married to a computer scientist for twenty years and has one son who is a computer scientist and another who does computer science-y stuff. However there's a lot of concepts she just cannot seem to get, and they always seem to relate to connecting two things with the same underlying logic in superficially distinct domains.
I see the same thing with the best and the brightest Texas has to offer trying to teach them linguistics. Many of these students have social and organizational skills I cannot dream of. I foresee many of them making six or seven figure salaries in the near future as business executives and the like. And yet... translating rules to trees is an elementary matter; I picked it up in high school the first time I saw it. However I see bright students get incredibly frustrated, when they cannot understand how the tree they drew doesn't follow the rules that were on the paper.
The ability to apply similar logic across superficially different domains is just one such example; I'm using it because it's the example where I'm most convinced there are some people who just can't do it. At the moment, the fact that I can do this and many other smart people cannot doesn't hurt them much. However in my case it saved me from the fate of a typical autistic person, because it allows me to do the sort of academic work graduate school requires (assuming I don't fail out on account of my other issues).
However as things become increasingly automated, the ability to make connections across domains and see the application of research in microbiology to polymer science--for example--may become increasingly critical, and normal or even exceptional people without this ability will be put at a disadvantage. And I believe that this is not the only example where many bright, normal people are lacking in an ability whose deficit does not present immediate problems.
All the conditions you mention are treatable, particularly the mood disorders, and the quality of said treatments is advancing at a rate that's actually rather exciting. If you think these conditions doom a person to poor functioning or disqualify them from pursuing a career in "brain work", you're mistaken.
Speaking as someone with depression and anxiety who follows psychological and neuroscience research, the pace of research seems discouraging rather than exciting. I am convinced that we will eradicate the common cold before we are able to cure depression and anxiety.