I don't buy the idea that Europe might have abandoned the concept of childhood education all of a sudden. Most people I spend quite a lot more than 5 years learning skills; I know someone who spent 15 years in the education system to end up working at a petrol station. This long list is not relevant. These skills are clearly easy enough to learn.
> Clearly you've also never gotten a line by line price estimate for a house where you could save €50k by doing the plastering yourself, like I have turned down.
So how do you explain poverty? Why don't these people spend 12 months learning how to plaster and start making bank?
Could there be some important limitation based on physics that you're failing to account for?
> I don't buy the idea that Europe might have abandoned the concept of childhood education all of a sudden.
My school education didn't include pouring concrete, plastering, laying tiles, architecture. Just about covered some basic woodworking, but not the structural kind.
> These skills are clearly easy enough to learn.
UK minimum wage times fifteen years is enough to buy a house. After tax. As a 100% mortgage. And then the house would have a guarantee. And you'd have contributed to your own state pension, which you wouldn't have done if you'd simply learned the skills on your own, so hopefully this hypothetical education was a paid internship. And if you'd specialised in literally any one of those skills instead of generalising, you'd be able to earn more.
> So how do you explain poverty? Why don't these people spend 12 months learning how to plaster and start making bank?
Watch a house getting built some time. There's a lot of people there. Even with UK's poorly thought-out greenbelts and planning permission driving up land prices, a house built in 6 months only takes 10 full time builders to have them be responsible for 50% of the average UK property price.
> Could there be some important limitation based on physics that you're failing to account for?
If it was physics, rich nations would just be outbidding poor nations for the resources to build houses. Poor nations do, in fact, have houses; they can afford them because their human labour is correspondingly cheap.
Ok, so let's quickly run through this argument. Stop me at the part you think is a mischaracterisation:
1) Resource constraints are negligible. Other than labour, obviously.
2) The skills to build a house are quick to acquire. It takes a couple of years. Less time than people are already spending anyway under general schooling as I assume the UK has 10 years compulsory education like most of the civilised world does.
3) The payback on a house is huge because the compensation for labour is high.
4) And I suspect you just demonstrated that people need to coordinate in groups of double-digit size to build a new house. Since they can sell the house for a 90% markup on costs they'd probably get wealthy doing it.
So is your argument here that the UK can comfortably house the entire world population? All 8.5 billion? Everyone gets a nice big apartment, maybe 2x the size of the current median? Let alone rental stress and housing unaffordability which are banished problems? Because given that we're ignoring the actual constraints (physical space, capital and materials) I'm not seeing what you think is the limiting factor here that doesn't just scale up as we add in more humans.
> Clearly you've also never gotten a line by line price estimate for a house where you could save €50k by doing the plastering yourself, like I have turned down.
So how do you explain poverty? Why don't these people spend 12 months learning how to plaster and start making bank?
Could there be some important limitation based on physics that you're failing to account for?