x.com · https://x.com/briansolis/status/1664747491399553027
The U.S. faces its largest projected worker shortage ever. Three thousand years ago, the richest king in Scripture faced it too, and had to write a letter.
Send me a man skillful to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass, and in iron … to be with the skillful men who are with me in Judah and in Jerusalem.
2 Chronicles 2:7
Graduates boo commencement speakers who hype AI. Meta cited it while cutting 8,000 jobs. And on July 12, 2026, The Hechinger Report showed the same country walking into its largest projected worker shortage ever: more than 18 million college-educated workers gone by 2032, fewer than 14 million arriving. The gaps sit in the work that keeps society upright: nurses, teachers, drivers, electricians, welders. On an unfinished building, a poster reads, "Finish this, ChatGPT."
Seth Russell, 22, welds in Torrance, California. His counselor pushed college; he skipped it and carries no debt in a market where some trades start at $50 an hour. Both parties built the squeeze: a meritocracy that made the diploma the only respectable door, and an immigration politics one economist likened to rolling up the welcome mat.
Scripture kept a record of this exact predicament: a king's letter. Solomon is about to build the temple. He has David's stockpiles, cedar on contract from Lebanon, gold past counting. What Jerusalem cannot supply is a master craftsman, so he writes to the king of Tyre and asks for one, offering wages in wheat, barley, wine, and oil (v. 10).
The gold was already in the city. The hands were not.
Tyre sends Huram-abi, born to an Israelite mother and a Tyrian father, fluent in bronze, stone, timber, and crimson (vv. 13-14). The house where God's glory would come to rest was raised by a borrowed foreign craftsman the richest king alive had to request politely.
The letter concedes what economies keep forgetting: skill is a currency kings cannot mint. God scatters it into particular hands, across borders and bloodlines, and no treasury conjures it back once a generation is taught to look down on it.
None of this indicts college; nurses and engineers sit on the same shortage lists as welders. But fifty dollars an hour is a country relearning, slowly, to write Solomon's letter.