I'm ok with hearing "it's not this it's that" if there's an overcooked "it's not that it's this" narrative nearby, and there is: education was (and is!) aggressively pushed as a cure-all for job displacement and other ills by people doing labor arbitrage in the united states, it eventually turned out that wet sidewalks did not cause rain, and now there are a bunch of underemployed kids stuck with fake dreams and real loans and a bunch of rich boomers+billionaires whose brokerage accounts depend on continuing the hustle. Given that we have seen the exact education-cures-all narrative inversion exploited to disastrous consequence in the United States, we should absolutely be asking the question "is education the active ingredient" to avoid exporting the same stupid mistake to others.

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