Readers of this blog (yes, you are legion … waves to crowd) will know that I think investment in skills can be risky, and that because of this the social insurance framework – how generous are short-term unemployment benefits, and who pays for retraining – has a big effect on what sort of skills people choose to acquire. See old posts for various examples.
Now, you might wonder if this can really be so, in our dynamic information economy, in the case of those bread-and-butter tech skills like programming. If you’re good at that, you should be set for life, no? If you do so wonder, then take a look at this piece by Noam Scheiber on The Brutal Ageism of Tech: highly-skilled Silicon Valley nerds in their thirties sneaking off for botox so it won’t be noticed they’re almost ready for the scrapheap.