…a developed nation that organises itself to suit the sort of population it thinks it would like to have, rather than the one it does, is inevitably going to run into problems.

via .

An interesting article here from Deborah Orr (@DeborahJaneOrr) from yesterday looking at what our most recent governments have been trying to achieve with their policies.

The quote above from part way down really succinctly sums up the problem. When we started transforming our country we had large numbers of workers trained for manufacturing jobs, for mining jobs, not for jobs working in financial services, retail, advertising. We were told they would be offered retraining, higher education and so on but the reality is that there are people who aren’t remotely academic and who always will be. We’ve shipped the kind of jobs they can do off to cheaper places overseas, missing the bigger picture that anything companies save by doing that we pay out elsewhere in welfare for the people left here who don’t fit into our vision of a highly educated workforce.