Update:
And to answer your new question...
1. Not everyone is being retrained to the IT industry
2. Neither "should" everyone be retrained to the IT industry
Well, obviously, but you wouldn't know that from the way some of these Silicon Valley tech-progressive types and their liberal centrist politician handmaidens talk about labor market issues, which was my motivation for starting the thread.
If you insist on continuing this discussion, which I don't agree was productive (I also don't agree that my initial question was in any way unclear but that an inability to think outside the confines of neoliberalism made it so), I'll just unlock the old thread.
Anyway, sorry for flouncing (and for still being such a pill about this now tbh).
I think you may be confusing somewhat advice given to individuals that is (ostensibly or intended to be) in those individuals' self-interest* as opposed to advice for how society as a whole should progress.
There is also *currently* an imbalance in the supply of programmers compared to the demand for them that, if addressed, would most likely work to the benefit of society as a whole by reducing the cost of websites and other products produced by programmers, though exactly where the optimum balance of utility lies is hard to say and probably is not a huge increase in the number of qualified programmers.
In addition, of course, many programmers are inclined to believe that the world needs more programmers and advocate for that, but I don't doubt that engineers feel the same way about engineers, doctors about doctors, lawyers about lawyers, and so on. Thus, Silicon Valley in particular pushing for the education of more programmers should not surprise anyone. Also, recall that, whether your everyday programmer is helped or hurt by the training of additional programmers, no doubt Google and Facebook are helped by the training of more programmers because the labor market balance then shifts in their direction as employers. They would like an oversupply of programmers as opposed to the current undersupply.
*And studying programming is in most likely in their self-interest for a large number of people as one frankly doesn't have to be particularly smart or good at it to make a good living, certainly less so than in many other careers given the ongoing undersupply of individuals with programming skills. There are other fields where this is true also (such as nursing), but programming requires no real formal education or certification, unlike nursing and some other similar fields with shortages, and nursing is also disfavored by and for men for what are of course purely sexist reasons.
