I watched the video. I think one argument that is not broached is that, in these societies, access to skills is not in any way straightforward, and, equally, neither is access to employment. A human being cannot just walk out of their home and access the relationships via which they might acquire skills. And, furthermore, the recognition of skills, or competencies, tends to follow from the contexts an individual has accessed. Without resources you will not be able to be viable as a human being and, as an effect, you will have few, if any, skills. This is possibly why we see an increase not just in rates of mental illness but the emergence of new forms of psychological disorder over the last few decades. One of the reasons anti-poverty action fails is merely as an effect of the way social valuation or devaluation operates. The poor are moving in different ways through the institutions that subtend economic viability and therefore the meaning of what they attain is different. Anti-poverty tends to end up lining the pockets of educators and the programmes fail because the people on them are stigmatised. The labour market operates in this way. As poor people attain things, unless it's really a rare skill, they are overlooked. Because of the specialization of competence and the increased duration of the investments of time, energy and income required to accede to competencies, people end up stuck. It requires more and more resources to access the contexts that bequeath skills, this is why you need state support for the poor. If you don't they just remain poor. If you look at it, it's those toward the bottom of the social hierarchy whose credentials aren't recognised and that affects how you are treated. Without access to other human beings, people don't develop fully. This is why there is so much isolation in contemporary society and why drug use has decimated the poor.
