New/Old Occupations

There is a nice thread here on obsolete jobs and occupations. Rather than hijack that thread I thought I'd start a new one. My kids are getting up into their late teens and early twenties and I've been trying to stimulate their thinking about what kinds of careers they might want to think about in this changing world of ours.

I think we will see some of the old trades and crafts return. With oil getting more ridiculous every day and eventually probably running out, there will be blacksmiths for the horses, seamstresses, cobblers to fix the shoes since people will be walking more, cartwrights and coachmakers, family grocers, doctors that make house calls (think about it, what a competitive advantage, especially if he takes a horse and buggy) and so on. Steam engines may be revisited along with water-powered grain mills. Buy Aeromotor stock.

People will be healthier because of less stress (no more road rage and hours stuck in traffic), walking more, eating less and eating healthier food from the garden and spending less time flopped in front of the TV (we'll limit TV time because electricity will be so expensive).

Gardening, chopping wood, caring for animals and gabbing over the fence with your neighbor that's doing the same things, will also lead to better mental health.

We'll always need electricians and techs for solar and wind generators, computer geeks, nuclear power engineers and biotech people. Walmart will not be able to compete with goods shipped from China (because of shipping costs) so local economies and mom and pop businesses will revive around traditional small towns again. People will have to get most everything they need within a few miles of home. Door to door salesmen will make a comeback. Sailboats will supersede power boats.

Families will almost always have vegetable gardens and maybe a few chickens. People will stay home more and spend time with their families (yikes!) and multiple generations will live together in the same house, just like the old days. Crime may go down since people will again know their neighbors and the village will once more raise the child.

America will become a high-tech/low-tech organic agrarian economy. People will study old farming methods. The Amish and Mennonites won't notice the difference.

We'll quit fighting over oil once its gone or the cost to fight exceeds the value of the spoils. Maybe peace will break out when we leave places where we're not welcome anyway. Yankee will finally go home. We'll need our boys on the farms.

The end of cheap oil and climate change may not be all bad. Indeed, after a couple generations there may be many positive effects of it. Its a bitter pill for our kids to swallow but I believe the world they leave their children will, in some unexpected ways, be a better one than we handed them.

What do you think?

sounds good to me. i could get used to that

I have been thinking the same thing lately but I could not have put it in writing as perfect as you have. I challenge the others to find fault in Kents opinion.

Assuming there will be cars & trucks running on SOMETHING, I'd think there will be good demand for Civil Engineers, road contractors & workers to maintain highways & bridges. Has anybody seen a road that needs re-surfacing?
The town where I live could really use a bike/walking trail, too, just as a footnote. Mark SW Wis.

Nice words, but I think you're being a bit of a Polyanna. Populations will get denser in the cities and the slums will move to the suburbs. the housing/mortgage problems and foreclosures here in CA are already starting to change some neighborhoods. We'll be more of a tecnological society, not less. There'll always be competition and a tendancy to fight over whatever resource(s) is/are in short supply.

I'm thinking.. you gotta be kidding! The vast majority live in tiny places that will not allow the kind of living you talked about. Not to mention no place to keep and feed a horse. I think there'd be a civil war before we go back like that.

I agree. Its gonna be a war out there, and the have-nots far outnumber the haves. The old days he reminisces about took place when there were about 250 million less people in this country, and everybody had ways to be self sufficient. Very few do anymore, and they're gonna be after your little slice of heaven and mine, long before the utopian society you envision has a chance to take hold. I'm trying to think of the name of that Mel Gibson movie some years back, about the roving bands of people trying to survive after a breakdown of society.

He is not describing some utopion society rather he is describing the very society we lived 100 to 200 yrs. ago. Are you saying we as a people have gone backwords over the last few generations?

Lanse, you and I and most of the people who frequent this forum could probably adapt to that kinda living and get along fine.

However, I suspect the vast majority, the urbanites who have to hire someone to come tighten a hinge on their screen doors, would never be able to adapt and cope. It would take several generations if ever, for the population in general to get "hardened" and self-sufficient back to the way things were 100 years ago. And heck, people 100yrs ago had things MUCH easier than the people 100 years before them! The progress of man is all about man finding ways to do things easier, from caveman days right up to now.

My own opinion, for what its worth, is that IF we run outta gas and oil in our lifetimes, there will be some other "new" energy source that appears. People won't go backwards to "old" energy sources...unfortunately!

they aint got screen doors-Air conditioning. That would be alot to get used to for them

I bet 100 years from now there will be huge 50 ton tractors that run on hydgren and genreate 1,000s of horsepower and people will wonder what it was like to farm with the current articulated tractors. All our old iron will be in musams and TVs, video games, and cell phones will be of more importance then they are today. And we think we're all screwed now.....

MAD MAX , Road Warrior , and Thunder Dome

I agree with the rest of guys Kent is being overly optimistic.
There is no room in a 2008 city for what existed in a 1900 city. Too many people as well. And they are supported by technology that these people wouldn"t survive without.
Most people are 3+ generations and no direct contact or memories of any farm or being self sufficient.
Just look at natural disasters. Urban people stand around completely lost and baffled on what to do when the infrastructure no longer works. Not that they are stupid.They just don"t know what or how. Some never had to either.
Just take a look at the general publics response between New Orliens and the Iowa floods.You you think these floods occurred in two completely different countries.Human response was totally different.

I couldn't put it any better then Ron.

As for Lanse's mega tractors, that may well be true.

Personally, I think it'll be micro-tractors. Or rather, robots. Send out small, rechargeable bots that do things like cultivate and pick harmful bugs off crops. Certainly for organic farmers, but even conventional I suspect you'll see a decent return on investment from reducing chemical and labor costs even more.

Either micro or mega, we'll see a lot more automation then even today -- the guys sitting in the GPS controlled tractors today won't be in them much longer. They'll be watching monitors for four or more tractors from an office...just making sure if an alarm goes off the right actions are taken.

Hi Kent. As a kid I lived the life you describe. Sounds like heaven don't it. Makes you wonder why people let it get away from them, but they did thanks to big business and things like greed. I agree that bringing back the family farms would be the best thing that could happen to the american people, but it will never happen cause too many would never be able to provide for themselves. I'd go back to that life in a heart beat, but it'll never happen. Very sad. rw

That is a wise and true statment. Things will move forward and not backwards.

I don't think we can/will go back to lifestyles of 100 years ago like you think.

Personally, I would not want to live like that even though I live in the country on 20 acres.

Just think of how dull life would be if you had to spend 90% of your time struggling just to survive. That would be a very tedious life, and that would get old pretty quick.

thanks. and you said foward, not nessicarally better, another wise point

They had screen doors in 1908.....

If we have ~300M people, and about 434M Acres tillable, we have 1 each with space for a house. ! JimN

I think your long winded -----------

I'm amazed at how many responces say it would be nice to goback but it will never happen. That tells me you believe society has regressed. I agree 100% with Kent but this will not happen overnite it will evolve over several generations. Just as your ancesters of many years ago would not survive in todays world. But through 200 yrs. of evelution you are able to function quite well in todays society. If you take what little survival skills you have and pass them on to next generation and they do the same you would see that 200 yrs. in future they will survive. We also have the benifit of documented successes in history which our ancestors did not have.

did you mean you're long winded?

You left out the thieves and burglars stealing you blind to get gas and drug money, the fact that all this would take a few decades assuming society didn't just collapse, the elderly will die off much faster, life expectancy will drop since so many chemicals/drugs are oil dependent and energy intensive to produce.....

I think you might better pray we start building nuke and clean coal plants ASAP and drilling like crazy for oil.

I do believe we will see more localized supplies, growers, and producers. Trucking dairy products from California to Michigan for example, will become too costly an endeavor to continue. That being said I dont think we will ever return to 80 acre farms becoming commonplace. Dave

Well if everything goes to organic ag, there'll be lots of jobs for gravediggers burying all the people that starve to death.

Thats for darn sure. Progress is progress but it isn't always an improvement. We have all the newest most up-to-date hayin' equipment money can buy but still spend more time hayin' than we ever used to when I was young. Most of the "progress" there is just that it doesn't take as many people. Then again, we run twice as many cattle and put up three times as much hay(custom hay for a couple neighbors now) as we did when I was a kid. It's a mean circle- gotta have those extra cattle to pay for the extra land it takes to run 'em and hay it takes to feed 'em, and gotta have that equipment and land to be able to run the amount of cattle it takes to pay for it all...

Bigger? Yes.
More advanced? Yes.
Better quality of life? Well......hmmmm.....

When I was growing up, from the time I was about 6 or 7, most non-school days were spend on the back of a horse doing cattle work, and on top of a farmall tractor putting up hay and life was good. Dad had time to take us kids fishing or doing other "fun" things quite often. My own kids, at the same age, only knew jumping on a 4-wheeler to work the cattle and air-conditioned cabs to do the haying, and being so busy, haying dawn till dark 7 days a week all summer long that it's a rare occasion we stop to go "have fun". It'd be pretty tough to convince me we have things "better" now.

That new energy source is already here. Check out The Energy Machine Of Joseph Newman.

Those are some interesting thoughts, but we are simply not going to return to an agrarian lifestyle. The fact of the matter is that it is very efficient to have the majority of the population in cities supported by large-scale farming. That is the general trend that our country has been going for over 200 years; no matter how romantic the agrarian lifestyle is, wishing for it to return is not going to bring it back. If you want to know what the US will look like in the future, go to any european country. Europe has had $4/gallon gasoline for decades.

Now it's difficult to say what careers will be good in the coming years, but it is always a good idea to have a solid general education, particularly in math and science. A well-rounded person can always find a good job, while specialists often find themselves out of work.

The other thing to remember is that our population is aging rapidly; health care will continue to be a rapidly growing segment of the economy.