> I don't buy the idea that Europe might have abandoned the concept of childhood education all of a sudden.

My school education didn't include pouring concrete, plastering, laying tiles, architecture. Just about covered some basic woodworking, but not the structural kind.

> These skills are clearly easy enough to learn.

UK minimum wage times fifteen years is enough to buy a house. After tax. As a 100% mortgage. And then the house would have a guarantee. And you'd have contributed to your own state pension, which you wouldn't have done if you'd simply learned the skills on your own, so hopefully this hypothetical education was a paid internship. And if you'd specialised in literally any one of those skills instead of generalising, you'd be able to earn more.

> So how do you explain poverty? Why don't these people spend 12 months learning how to plaster and start making bank?

Holy non-sequiter Batman!

https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salaries/builders-salary-SRCH_KO...

Watch a house getting built some time. There's a lot of people there. Even with UK's poorly thought-out greenbelts and planning permission driving up land prices, a house built in 6 months only takes 10 full time builders to have them be responsible for 50% of the average UK property price.

> Could there be some important limitation based on physics that you're failing to account for?

Physics? No. It's Baumol's cost disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

If it was physics, rich nations would just be outbidding poor nations for the resources to build houses. Poor nations do, in fact, have houses; they can afford them because their human labour is correspondingly cheap.