To have and to have not

Joe Nocera, the business columnist of the NYT says we should be educating our kids to take advantage of the"knowledge economy" and let the rest of the world make our consumer goods.  Who needs factory jobs, he says.  Meanwhile, nearly 2 billion Indians and Chinese are probably hearing the same message and will be rapidly educating 5 times our number of children to take these same jobs.  Do you hear a giant sucking sound as the internet enables well educated people around the world to do our banking, investing, health care diagnoses, etc.  If this sounds like a replay of the loss of American factory jobs, it is.  Only this time around, there is no educational alternative to get us to the next job.   What the pundit class and Americans in general don't seem to realize is there is a class of low education Americans who for whatever reason can't or won't be assimilated into the knowledge economy.  For these people, the middle class factory job is the end of the rainbow.  Besides, the keyboard commandoes who think they will be masters of the universe will soon find themselves working for peanuts as they compete against billions of highly educated people around the world.  Those factory jobs may be the future....