That's because moral justification isn't at the center of our society. The market is. Many attempts have been made to switch from the market to something else, not many were brilliant.
The "lucky historical accident" you cite isn't one... It's just the way our society was built.
Also you could argue on many different levels. To me, long studies meant delayed enjoyment of life, less freedom until 23, etc... You get less immediately, more later.
In the end, the question is really: "Do we want to use social engineering (as it's called) and try to build a brand new society, when all other attempts lead to poverty and war?"
Of interesting note in this domain, BI is often advocated as an alternative to minimum wage (such that in a mature BI system, there would be no minimum wage, though in some models there'd be a transitional period as the BI ramped up and the minimum wage wound down, at least in real if not nominal terms.)
So, while BI removes economic duress that forces people to take low-wage jobs, that also allows it to remove regulatory barriers which, while they exist to prevent abusive profiteering from economic duress, also have a side-effect of preventing generally mutually-beneficial arrangements that happen to have low wages (but where the low-wage earner might benefit from experience that increases future potential, etc.)
> If those crappy jobs are necessary, they will have to improve, either by making the jobs more fun or interesting, or increasing the pay.
You make this sound as if an employer simply can raise the pay of his employees without taking into account the realities of the market.
Some services or products are worth less precisely because there is no customer available willing to pay more for it.
> Some services or products are worth less precisely because there is no customer available willing to pay more for it.
And for some services or products there simply isn't a viable market. If it's necessary to keep people in poverty to keep it viable, then I say we're better off without it.
The moral argument is that the market is more fair at setting prices because it is a more fundamentally democratic mechanism than price controls. That is, all of us together, compared to a handful of easily-lobbied people, are better at finding sensible prices.
So how much do you pay your friends to hang out with you? I've been going with $20 a visit, but I've heard that might be a little on the low side these days.
edit: at least that's what i assume they're talking about.
What do you think life is like if you choose to skip postsecondary education? In most cases, it's straight into a factory/manual labor job that is much more physically (and in many cases mentally and emotionally) draining than your standard white-collar coding job.
To characterize those who choose education as having less in the near term seems to ignore what modern universities have become: in America at least, it's basically a secular rumspringa, wherein students dabble in drugs, sex, and other "counter culture" in addition to their studies. This may not be the experience of every CS student (perhaps due to the field's gender inequality and the number of introverted personalities), but it's just a gross misrepresentation to state that choosing further education means less freedom and enjoyment of your life and you should be rewarded thusly.
"You'll do whatever you want but get a degree first": tell me you've never heard these words. Maybe this education-then-life approach is counter-productive: education should be a life long journey, and life shouldn't start after your studies. "Finish your homework first, then you'll get to play" may be related...
Also, I suffered a stroke at 32 because of my job, so I'm not sure IT is as safe as you think. YMMV.
And I didn't study in the USA. Free education in Europe is not always as sexy as some may think. I often think that maybe this difference is what makes Europeans boring, and americans so creative and innovative. It's like we're trained through higher education to be obedient (white collar) workers, and you're trained more to achieve whatever you really want.
Lastly, it's been studied/proven/observed/shown that children who can delay immediate gratification for a better future outcome will perform better at school and in their lives (cf The Stanford marshmallow experiment).
You seem to suggest letting these American-style gangsters go unchecked. Why though?
You also seem to be suggesting that studying until 23 is less enjoyable than working 9-17 from 17/18 onwards.
This all leads me to think you have a very upper-class, down-upon, shielded from trouble perspective.
The point is that you couldn't have been a software engineer if you'd been born 100 years ago. And demand for software engineers might tank in the future. People who currently enjoy their jobs as software engineers are lucky to be living in a time when it's possible to make a good living doing that. If you'd been born in another time, there might not have been such a good match between what you're good at, what you enjoy, and what's profitable.
