I think what the weakest link economic advocates are trying to argue is more that by strengthening/supporting weaker industries, it allows everything to work in a more efficient fashon- sort of analogous to reducing bottlenecks in a supply chain, except as a pan-economy sort of solution.
Ths is opposed to concentrating on a handful of “star” industries’ success.
I think weak link advocates would be for a strong social safety net, free public education, universal health care, etc. and the superstar advocates would want less regulations, tax breaks, etc.
If I was forced to take a position on this, I’d favor the basketball analogy of making sure you have your top players emphasized.
Assembly lines are the perfect example. One guy implementing an assembly line makes 100 guys with lesser skills more productive. You get very little benefit out of improving the skills of those 100 guys because the assembly line has already improved overall efficiency and limited the scope of knowledge/talent needed to perform any single task. A good person/company invests resources into making the lesser talent more productive rather than trying to make lesser talent inherently better.
That said, I think the markets already do a good job of finding and rewarding superstars. I would say that the ideal solution is for the government to avoid stifling the growing businesses and devote its resources toward minimizing the externalities of the market. You may get little direct economic benefit from it, but government should do what government does best and markets should do what markets do best.
I’m of this belief too. I would like to see society reach the stars, but not at the expense of anybody. If the weakest of us require resources made by the strongest, then that’s how society should prioritize its spending. There needs to be a solid floor of poverty where no one can fall below, and if it means spending less on the best and brightest to do so, then we should do it. Yes, some of them might resent it, and move elsewhere. But this is a moral choice. If people want to be assholes and whine about not getting their sponsored help, then we should let them go.
Here’s some guys that don’t believe this.
Malcolm Gladwell has made a career out of making deep/meaningless arguments combined with a “cute” persona. Canada is good at producing celebrities like that - see also: David Suzuki, Naomi Klein, Jian Ghomeshi (pre-scandal), etc, etc. Despite all their intellectual pretensions, they are about as deep as Spinal Tap (or your average college freshman) and wouldn’t last five minutes in the big leagues outside of Canada.
Outside of Canada? He lives in NY. He writes for the New Yorker, works for Slate, and has sold most of his books in the US. He is certainly in the big leagues by whatever measure you are using. We get it, you seem to hate Canadians for some odd reason, but it doesn’t validate your ad hominem attacks. If you think Gladwell is wrong, support your argument. Or, given that the question actually has nothing to do with Gladwell in actuality, answer the question.
If I were to relate the metaphor to an assembly line, I’d think the question would be whether or not you concentrate on improving the most high dollar part of the line, or whether you concentrate on unsexy, but still vital parts. So in the context of a car, does it benefit the manufacturer to spend more effort improving the say… body assembly and alignment part, or does it benefit them more to come up with a faster way to put the lug nuts on at the end?
Ultimately, your last paragraph agrees with what I was saying upthread, and what the weakest-link concept says.
You could look at it another way- what’s going to be better for the Mexican economy overall? Spending money on tourism-related stuff and NAFTA-related manufacturing (superstars), or spending money on law enforcement and infrastructure (the weakest links)? I think that one thing that is implied with this weakest link / superstar idea is that there’s a time component involved. In the short term, it would definitely seem like you’d get more return out of concentrating on star players or improving star industries, but concentrating on the weakest link is something whose positive effects will take longer to be seen.
The assembly line example is interesting but from a different angle. I’ve worked in manufacturing 20 years and we always look at what’s the bottleneck for productivity and quality. One might invest in an state of the art injection molding machine but then find out that any number of things are keeping that machine from being fully productive. Maybe the molder needs training to run it efficiently, the resin handling system can’t keep up, or the warehouse can’t hold the increased production. So we are always looking at eliminating the current bottleneck and then finding the next bottleneck and fixing it. So it is a constant process of improving the weakest “player”.
Skilled laborers and engineers are the not the bottom by any means. More like the middle and upper middle. What would be ideal is for everyone to improve so more geniuses, more upper middle engineers to implement the innovations and better educated workers to build the innovations. However, that is fighting the hypothetical. If you have to choose between the top and the bottom for economic reasons the top is much more important than the bottom. I was not aware that we were precluding large segments of the population from innovation paths, I tend to think the problem is the opposite, that we are trying to shoehorn everyone into the college path and ignoring those who talents lie elsewhere.
The question isn’t whether the top is more productive than the bottom. That’s almost by definition true. The question is would the marginal increase in productivity be greater by investing in the top or investing in the bottom.
That’s kind of what I was trying to get at- it’s not necessarily the sexy stage, or the critical stage in the process that gets the most bang for the buck overall when improved.
So if you have an existing line, it’s often more productive overall to concentrate on the resin handling system or the warehouse, or the inventory management rather than on the injection molder or some other high dollar, critical step in the line.
I guess I don’t understand the core question, then.
The workers are made more productive, yes, but not by having better workers. All of the money, training, etc. goes to the designer and the company. If a worker leaves the company, he has no valuable skills. A competitor could poach your entire workforce, but only the engineer and the assembly line determine your success. Is that not the basketball analogy?
Likewise, investment in infrastructure and law enforcement in Mexico does not seem exclusive from an investment in manufacturing and tourism. To me, it seems like it depends on where you make the investment. A road that attracts tourists or supplies a factory is certainly more valuable than paving the dirt streets of Tijuana’s slums.
I’ve started listening to the podcast mentioned in the OP: In the first episode, Gladwell talks about the fact that sometimes breaking the ceiling glass only serves to shut the door even more. As in, the male establishment will allow some token female into power to give themselves a moral alibi to keep going as usual.
While tokenism is a real thing, I’m not sure it should be painted in such a negative, simplistic light. I find his logic a bit shaky, and his examples strained at best- at the end he says:
"By the way, here’s a list of countries that have broken the gender barrier and elected a woman, and then never elected a female leader again. They open the door, pat themselves on the back, and never open it again. Ready?
Brasil.
United Kingdom.
Germany.
Costa Rica.
Croatia.
Nicaragua.
Latvia.
Panama.
Bolivia.
Ecuador.
Pakistan.
Poland.
Turkey.
France.
Canada.
And, of course, Australia."
I think it’s fair to note that of all these examples, three (Roussef, Merkel, Grabar-Kitarovic) are still the incumbent presidents of their respective countries. One (Thatcher) has been invalidated since the podcast aired when Theresa May became the second female UKPM and four (Chinchilla, Vike-Freiberga, Moscoso, Gillard) had their mandates during the XXI century.
We aren’t talking about something that happened in the 1950’s and never happened again, are we? Some of these examples are for people still incumbent.
I like Gladwell. Read a book of his once. Not a fan of the way he’s playing it fast and loose with the data in this podcast. Just saying.
Accepting the shaky premise, is it possible some industries are “soccer” and some are “basketball”. Or some companies are “soccer” and some “basketball”. Or some departments of companies “soccer” and some “basketball”?
Or do we have to upend voluntary arrangements across all of society so that they can conform to one or the other?
There is a truth that Gladwell walks right past sometimes: an analogy works…until it doesn’t.
It’s really that simple. The idea that you can consider weak-link vs strong-link models in sports is nifty. Applying it to the economy in any but the most superficial way is stupid.
Gladwell sets up interesting questions and repackages old ideas. Remember: the original name for Outliers is “nurture.”
