stevencurtis

Greetings Robert,

I use your books in most of the 11 different courses I have been known to teach in Sociology. My students often ask the following, and I defend your positions for argument, but need clarification:

A) In the past you've noted the shift in demand for labor in the US from "Routine Production" to "Information" and "Symbolic Analysis."

1)  Where should investment in the US now go?       
2)   How should we be investing in 
      Symbolic Analysis and continue to retrain the 
      workforce for a global information economy?  

B) Is routine production dead? Is "Routine Production Service" job creation undesirable in our current dire economic situation?

C) Would creating manufacturing jobs be useful for the nation? Construction work, road and bridge repair and building etc. would be a limited number of jobs and require public funding, not privately offered in this economy.

My dissertation was on related topic of vouchers there. It's the churches in rural areas that promote the ideology of privatization in a big way, I found in part. "Class warfare" never really died; in the UK, it's alive and well, with 'new labor' and new language. Robert: there should be no subsidy whatsoever to the wealthy, even if inversely calculated to income, as this is a huge ideological Trojan Horse--the wealthy are not in need of the voucher, yet they push for it. My research shows they see this as a good start to being privatizing other public services in general, and victory in getting vouchers for themselves is largely symbolic