Not saying it's the solution to everything. But, currently there's a shortage of qualified people in the field.
It's not that hard to get qualified. (come on, I'm qualified and I'm not that smart)
So yeah, I can blame some individuals choices.
But a do agree there are some basic structural problems in many fields.
But I say the same thing about many trade jobs. Demand is very high for well paying positions yet people are ignoring them by claiming that that type of work is beneath them.
I think you're overstating it, what we find trivial may actually be very challenging for many people. It takes a certain aptitude to do our job. The difference is maybe I'd never be a fantastic plumber but I can at least see how plumbing is done and have a concept of it in my mind, like connecting pipes and stuff like that. While in computer programming, what I do, you can't just look at it and say oh I see how that works. Half the time I don't even know how it works. It just kind of does! You build stuff on top of a lot of preexisting tools and such. It's abstract and esoteric in a way.
There's a name for this phenomenon but I can't remember what it's called. It's like opposite of dunning kruger, where everyone thinks they are smarter than they are, this effect is when people who have an aptitude for something and find it easy, figure that everyone else must be able to do it as well because they find it easy to do. I wish I could recall the name. It's like when you're helping a kid with math homework and they just don't get it and you want to scream look kid this really isn't that hard! or you're making this a bigger deal than it is!
But anyway, on an individual level I think what Rah is saying is correct, personal choice for a majority of people has a lot to do with outcomes, but of course on a economy of scale level that's not true. It's like voting, on an individual level your vote really doesn't mean jack, but as a collection of millions of votes it does matter.
I do take issue with some stuff like when fast food workers want the same pay as teachers, but yes the recent gain in wealth by our country hasn't been well distributed and this is by design, since the vast majority of wealth is made by investment and capital/intellectual ownership. Investments have the lowest taxes and the greatest gains. But poor people don't have any extra wealth to invest or buy capital or buy/patent ideas.
Another reason wealth gains aren't distributed that well as opposed to in the past is actually due to tech. It only takes one person to invent a computer program that can then be duplicated infinitely for use and that one person can reap immense profits off a one time investment. While in the past if you made a product or something it costs to produce more of it and make more product. It doesn't cost anything to make more software, just some more gigabytes of space on a server. So when Henry Ford was inventing the Model T he had to buy steel and he had to pay workers to assemble it and so on and so forth, all things that distribute the gains through out society. When Bill Gates published windows they really don't have to distribute gains at all, or buy anything, or pay anyone to produce windows aside from their programmers. It's part of why off the shelf software is so affordable but also part of why all the gains by software companies don't really drive our economy beyond the tech people they hire. They don't invest that much in capital.
