A lot of the hangup I see coming from older generations is that around “unskilled labour” that is the hardest to combat. They don’t get that labour is requiring less people and less skill in general. My Dad’s era something as simple as utilizing maps and finding your way around a stretch of wilderness or even a city was a matter of experience. There was strength in how irreplaceable personal experience was. Now it’s GPS assisted and basically any idiot can get where their going in a city they have never been before utilizing the fastest and most direct route. The same goes for computer assisted and manufacturing jobs. High levels of skill that take years to master is now largely something utilized for hobbies or bespoke craft and the fact that to a capitalistic sense we are individually depreciating in value to common pawns is something that is being banked on. The power of labour is dwindling on both an individual and mass scale. There is less skilled labour needed and less labour needed overall. We are all more speedily than ever becoming more replacable with any random body off the street.

But the idea of a meritocracy where the harder jobs are rewarded more remains and makes sense to people. They cling to that hardest. They just don’t see that making all the jobs unskilled and making unskilled jobs worth absolute peanuts that pushes hardship onto vast swaths of the population is causing the whole system to fail.