I think the issue is intertwined. When you hear this sort of conversation come up, I see two different view points: The ground-level individualist point of view, which is as I described above. And the “30,000 Foot” view, where since the number of jobs equals out before and after, it’s an okay shift.
I think that the individualist view point is what people are afraid of and the “answers” as provided by others at the overview level aren’t useful. “Oh, but you, Mrs Travel Agent can just go get a job as a gate agent!” isn’t valuable to a person who must compete with already-experienced players in that field and likely reduce themselves to a lower standard of living.
Realize that paradigm shifts follow this (rough) pattern when people are displaced:
New technology/process/etc is put into place that increases efficiency
Extant workers are displaced due to others coming in with experience in the new T/P/E
3a. If you are at the leading edge of the shift, you can get another job in the same field. Go back to 1.
3b. If you are in the middle of the shift, you may get another job in the same field. Go back to 1.
3c. You must retrain. Spend 2 - 4 years out of the workforce to retrain on the new T/P/E or get another field under your belt.
The advice tends to come in stale cliches, because they are or their cousin is Bill Gates and they turned from a college dropout into the worlds largest philanthropist through nothing but hard work!
I think it’s the same issue. If we don’t start caring about the individuals and not the count of jerbs in our economy, we will likely get to a place where our capitalist system that’s based around higher and better returns will become so unstable that the rich prop it up for themselves, and the have-nots will get really angry. It won’t lead to some Marxist utopia, but it will lead to bad times for all.
Every time you shift jobs from one place in the economy to another place in the economy, it isn’t a happy event. Look at it this way: Currently unemployed folk get the new jobs and the recently-employed folk get nothing and have to like it. There is an overlap in the venn diagram, but the overlaps shrinks the more disparate the technology bases are between “lost jobs” and “new jobs”.
I never said that it wasn’t an age-old problem, but that’s the literal sentiment I hear from a lot of older people about why they don’t hire the younger generation straight off the street with no experience. I also hear a lot of blame for “HR Interfering with what I ACTUALLY need!” And I could keep going through the reasons…but none of us wants that.
The argument is not about quantity, but quality. Jobs that pay enough so everyone can achieve a decent standard of living relative to what was common just a few decades ago - buying (and paying off) a house, tuition, a decent vacation, etc.
Job tenure is also far below other industrial countries, which has several factors, but I am sure low job security and a turbulent economy have a large role.
Employee benefits were cut to the bone in the 90’s. They still exist for the top 20%, but not for those beneath.
We had three decades of growth in high quality jobs as the nation industrialized until the 70’s. We went from an economy where the largest employer went from GM to Walmart. That was not an increase in quality of work. We have gone from a labor market where a high school diploma did not hurt you, to where even a Master’s might not be sufficient to guarantee a career.
And cost of living was far less also. Quality of life was a mixed bag, depending on what race you were, and how polluted the area was. Life expectancy was lower also, so retirement savings were as well. But the jobs of the 1930s were far better than the Victorian era, and the 1960’s improved on them. (Mostly thanks to unions and fears of revolution back then, definitely not because the invisible hand of the market.) The quality of jobs has been been stagnant or declining since the mid-90s. (In the US, at least. Slightly better in Europe, just as horrible as ever in Bangladesh.)
Again, the argument is not automation replacing all workers, but replacing enough of the high paying, high quality jobs that the ones which remain are not sufficient to maintain stability, let alone growth. I think we entered that spiral in 2008. And like the edge of a whirlpool, by the time it picks up enough speed that everyone notices, it may be too late to pull out of it. I don’t think we have reached that point yet, but we will if we continue to ignore the likelihood that it will happen.
We can choose to correct our course now, by sharing equity, preferably IMHO, or suffer a more violent catastrophe down the road, when they might be a lot less equity to share. Seeing what used to livable buildings crumble, and old factories rust, and knowing this is not a rare condition in too many cities in the US, I don’t care to imagine what that catastrophe will look like. But I think Syria and Libya are providing examples.
That is median household income, not average pay per job.
And in fact, your original statement was:
So even if the average pay per job were a bit lower, that would not validate your claim. I’m not even sure your claim can be validated. Define “far worse”.
The problems in Syria and Libya have absolutely nothing to do with worker efficiency/job losses and everything to do with corrupt and brutal governments. Syria and Libya are a cautionary tale of giving the government too much power.
They are examples of the devastation caused by revolution. They had different causes (though Libya certainly had a huge population of underemployed workers). They are the fate I hope we avoid.
[QUOTE=John Mace]
So even if the average pay per job were a bit lower, that would not validate your claim. I’m not even sure your claim can be validated. Define “far worse”.
[/QUOTE]
Job security is far worse. Average length of employment is lower. Pensions went from defined benefit plans (not that they provided the security they were claimed to have) to 401Ks and IRAs and hoping there is not a great recession right before you retire. Oops. Most healthcare plans are still tied to employment, and premiums keep rising. I am certain they are plenty of great workplaces out there. But nowhere close to the majority. Plus the fact we sent the worst of the worst abroad so we don’t have to abide by any pesky safety or labor regulations. Retail may be a ‘softer’ environment, but I had better working conditions in the factory in my twenties, than the retail and hospitality jobs I held.
And pick your stat - household income, median wage, average hourly earnings, disposable income. The overall trend is the same. None of them are keeping pace with the productivity gains and corporate profits over the last three decades. Every recession since 1982 has taken longer to recover from. We still have not recovered the losses from 2007-2008 (though Wall Street certainly has.) A record number of people lost homes to foreclosure during this period also. I can’t find any data on how many of those individuals have recovered since no one seems to keep track, just a count of the houses.
58% of workers are in occupations were the average pay is $18 or lower. 34% of the population lives with less than 200% of the poverty level, and 15% below 100%. The highest level since the early 90’s.
If better jobs are coming, they better hurry.
If anyone wants to keep fighting the hypothetical, that is your choice. I believe the crisis is coming, if it has not begun already. I am more interested in how can we mitigate the damage, restructure the economy (which will require political solutions along with market solutions), and prevent a ‘worker revolution’ from happening. I think some form of basic income is necessary. The current safety net is not nearly tight enough to catch everyone falling on it (especially after Clinton’s reforms), so it is time to build a better one.
Well, now you’re just throwing stuff up against the wall and seeing what will stick. You made this claim:
Note some key words:
Majority of jobs
far worse
previous generations.
You have yet to prove that statement. If you want to retract it, and set another marker in the ground, that’s fine. But if you want to make outrageous, unsupportable claims, then they are going to be rejected out of hand.
BTW, over the past 10 years, median job tenure has been increasing, not decreasing. Between 2002 and 2012, job tenure at every age group was either unchanged or longer. Link.
I’m not really sure what you were trying to prove with your chart, with Greece and Portugal at the top. If they’re the goal, then no thanks. And not sure what job tenure has to do with automation, but if you know, you should enlighten us.
And this is especially misleading because household size has been declining.
When comparing incomes, it’s also important to include government benefit, health care benefits, vacations, working conditions, and other non-financial changes to the value of work.
I’m not even sure if job tenure is a good metric. Shorter tenure could mean that there is more mobility in the job market. One of the strongest job markets is software engineering and I would guess it has one of the shorter job tenures.
Exactly. But if want to scare people, you can say OMG, people are only in jobs for 4 years!!!
The economy is changing, and partly because a lot of people don’t want to work for the same company indefinitely. In fact, if you actually read the link that AP gave, it says:
Days of old, dude, as in no one wants to live in the past.
Majority of jobs: 55%
Far worse: 200% or less of minimum wage. From the BLSdata. You can pull up the data and do the math. I don’t think it has changed in the last twenty minutes.
‘Far worse’ is also a relative measure. Far worse than the conditions of the 1930s? Not in most parts of the US, but I wonder about the firms that rely on illegal immigrant labor (those 11 million are not hanging out on the corner). Plenty of sweatshops are still around. But workers in the 1930s did not have the highest expectations either. The jobs they had were marginally better than their previous generation.
The West acquired a certain standard during the fifties and sixties, not just in terms of safety and sanitation, but also in terms of dignity, self-worth and opportunity to advance. Most workplaces fall far short of that standard from all the evidence I have seen over the last twenty years. Except for a brief period in the late 90’s, all I have heard is people bitching about work in a way that I never heard from my parents and grandparents - the previous generations that matter the most. Even the homeless have a higher standard of living than most people who lived a hundred years ago. But compared to fifty years ago? Not from stories I’ve heard, both personally, and in countless media interviews and reports.
Particularly my grandfather, a WWII vet who encouraged me to get a factory job for a summer, he found a level of dignity in his work, Weber’s Protestant ethic, no matter how menial, that seems to have disappeared among the younger generations. In large part due to the cultural revolution of the sixties, more people have been defining themselves by measures that have nothing to do with their career or profession, and I think partly because it became an empty definition. One too many recessions and layoffs, and work does diminish in importance compared to family, friends, etc. Because the average laborer cannot depend on a stable job the way my grandfathers could. They only worried about losing their job due to malfeasance or incompetence, but not because investors wanted another 5% return, so let’s move the factory to China, or more often, build the new one there, and let the old one fall into ruin.
So yes, I think that the majority of jobs are far worse than the immediately previous generations, most of whom are still living.
And rather than continue to nitpick what you perceive to be the weakest part of the argument while ignoring any other substantial claims, why don’t you provide some evidence that the majority of jobs are so superior.
Again I did not decide to participate in this thread to continue to fight the hypothetical. I accept it. I’ve seen it. And furthermore, I want it to happen. I want as many jobs automated as possible. I want to work only 1000 hours a year for twenty years and be able to have a decent standard of living, though I will probably work more than that because I have a found a career that enriches me beyond what is in my wallet. But that is my choice, and it should be a choice, not a necessity.
What is the point of designing and building and automating all these processes other than we can kick back on the beach and let the machines do all the work? But that is only fair if we all share the gains and we all can go to the beach. Otherwise I just I am just a 21st century slave owner living off the sweat of others.
I don’t expect a Star Trek Utopia, but the majority of work is bullshit. It is mind numbing and spirit crushing, though perhaps not quite so back-breaking as the bs jobs of the past. The sooner we can figure out a way that we don’t need those jobs the better. I do think we have reached a technological point that we can provide more than enough for everyone using far less effort that in the past. I don’t think that was true one hundred years ago, and maybe not even fifty, but now, yes, I do think it is possible, and I intend to help realize that possibility.
You could be right when it comes to the Ivy League, but we’re talking about the middle class and whether they can no longer afford to be educated or retrained as their jobs supposedly disappear. The problem with the price of education today is not constrained to the Ivy League - prices are skyrocketing throughout higher education.
Well, not really. Wastefulness comes primarily because the signal is filtered through intermediaries. Signalling wouldn’t even be necessary if employers had more direct evidence of an employee’s ability. And yet, bizarrely our history has been to make it even harder for employers to directly evaluate people. Not only that, but by making it harder to fire employees we raise the stakes for employers, which makes them less willing to take risks in hiring people with non-traditional educations.
For an alternative model, have a look at the software industry. For historical and practical reasons, it has avoided many of the pitfalls of other industries. We have no occupational licensure, the job market is more fluid, there is less reliance on formal credentials, there is more emphasis on and investment in mentoring, apprenticeship, and on-the-job training. My company (one of the largest in the world) has software developers that don’t even have degrees. And its a total meritocracy - a person with a 2 year college diploma can find himself leading a team of Harvard grads if he can show that’s the best person for the job.
I’m looking at the way we handle job training in my company as a model for how it could work for everyone - we basically have a large matrix that you can fill in by taking various courses either through corporate training, or at a college, or through online learning. As you fill in the matrix, your name starts popping up in queries as a candidate for promotion or lateral moves when your skills line up with what’s necessary.
And the communication goes the other way - you can look at internal job opportunities and match them to your own skill matrix to see what you have to learn to qualify for those kinds of jobs. To lower risk, people can be temporarily promoted to test them in the new position, and then move back to their old position if it didn’t work out, no harm no foul. A corporate culture of acceptance of this sort of test means there’s no stigma attached to it. When you can actually try someone in a position at relatively low cost, there is less need for signalling.
Our educational system is seriously deficient for supplying the needs of the modern economy. We’re still stuck in a model that assumes people will spend their early years training for a life-long career, when in fact most people change careers several times in their life. Our system makes it extremely difficult for older people to go back to school and change directions when necessary. So we wind up with an inflexible labor force that can’t easily adapt to the changes we’re facing.
We need a model of life-long, incremental education coupled with a mechanism for employers to match their job requirements to the skills acquired by the populace. We need to get past the need for an intermediary to certify us, and instead need the tools to communicate our ability more directly with employers.
It sounds like you’re saying that education consists of either the Ivy League or the ‘bottom of the barrel’. You’re excluding a huge middle of fine institutions which produce the bulk of the educated workers. That’s what we need to target. The Ivy League can play in its own sandbox.
You don’t need the Ivy League to make it into the upper class. If you want to be in the top 1%, all you need to do is become a professional, marry another professional, stay married, and live responsibly. In my province, two married schoolteachers will have a household income of perhaps $170,000. A nurse married to an engineer (my situation) can result in a household income anywhere from $130,000 to $250,000.
I know plenty of people in this kind of household income situation, and not one of them went to an Ivy League school. Some of them don’t even have degrees. A friend of mine has a 2 year diploma in electrical engineering technology, and his wife is an office manager, and their income puts them close to the top 1%.
Then of course there’s the traditional way to become rich - start a business and grow it. That doesn’t require a degree at all. But if we had a system less reliant on intermediaries and signalling and more ability to directly connect skilled workers with the people who need them, it would also lessen the value of an Ivy League degree. It would be more of a meritocracy.
This golden age of the working class didn’t exist for everyone. Women had few areas they could branch out and become professionals. Minorities had a hard time getting anything but the most menial job. And I believe it totally ignores the advances made in other areas. I’m a software engineer; I get to sit on my **** all day and use my creativity to solve problems. I’ve worked on web sites that millions of people use every day. I can work from home and I have very flexible hours. I get paid pretty well to do this. My job didn’t exist in your grandfather’s day and according to the BoLS there are 1 million such jobs today. There are millions of other computer-related jobs.
Jobs are disappearing because of technology, and in the end the beneficiary is the owner of the production facility. Look at what happened to all the farm jobs in the States.
The thing is as prices come down because of the same technology, people can afford more and the standard of living goes up, creating in the process new jobs that didn’t exist before.
This does not go on forever. Sooner or later no labor input whatsoever is needed. This may be a way off for some fields, and come sooner in others, and employment begins to be squeezed. At that point state interference comes about because of either political processes (where beneficiaries tend to be the powerful) or because of reasoned decisions (where beneficiaries tend to be more rationally determined). In either case a Utopian situation can happen, but is not guaranteed if human greed is not kept in bounds.
Sorry, I got here late and don’t want to read 3 pages of posts but, here comes my standard response on automation:
The idea of automation putting vast number of people out of work, and that being disastrous, is wrong on at least two levels.
Firstly, there is not some finite number of jobs that go down by one every time a job is automated. We’ve been automating jobs since we noticed animals could pull heavier ploughs than humans.
It just frees up human labour to do something else, and the amount of work that humanity can do in total goes up.
Graphs of unemployment rates since 2008 paint a picture of rising unemployment, but if you zoom out to the long-term picture, there are booms and busts, but the base level in the US has hardly changed in 150 years despite vast numbers of jobs being made redundant.
Secondly, it would be a good thing if every job was made redundant.
There are jobs when there are human needs. The point where there’s nothing for a human to do is where your every (physically-possible) wish is fulfilled, including creatively.
The idea of only a small elite that can afford what machines make, while everyone else is in poverty, doesn’t make sense. The fewer people that can afford a technology, the less effect it would have on our existing economy.
In summary, yes automating jobs causes problems in the short-term. I’ve been made redundant myself, I know how it feels. But long-term it’s simply a net good, and can’t make people worse off.
I explicitly said that the next tier down tries to emulate what’s above them. I said that because it’s true. The next echelon of schools competes to try to make themselves as elite as they can, using the top as a model. Then the next does the same, and so on. That’s why my old department at StateU hired a graduating PhD out of Harvard instead of hiring one of the other candidates. As I indicated, the entire rest of the totem pole tries to emulate the headpiece.
That’s completely mistaken.
There’s a huge literature on game theory and signaling, in both economics but naturally also evolutionary biology. Not my thing but for the most obvious example, peacocks don’t signal through intermediaries. And yes, the wastefulness is very often part of the point, because it indicates a deep reservoir of resources if so much can be frittered away to make an empty statement. The cost of the signal is prohibitive to those who are too resource-poor to make it, and that is what allows discrimination using this as a proxy for quality. This happens all over the place.
We never have perfect knowledge of ability. We can’t peer into the dark recesses of the soul to find the creamy nougat filling. Ultimately, we’re using proxies, and some of the proxies are extremely good, like a manager checking on objective progress with lines of code, or a recommendation from someone you trust implicitly. But others aren’t so good. A great interview, for example, can still leave an entirely misleading impression. Just the way it is. What this means is that there is an emergent order in games where every winner has a loser. This emergent order very often has wastefulness built in as one additional filter. An engineer could try and think of a better system, but often will do so by ignoring the deeper hidden reasons for why people make these sorts of decisions.
It could be said that you’re taking the role of the central planner here, trying to force the world to be better contrary to the decentralized way these games naturally evolve.
By stereotype and joke, computer programming is an autism-spectrum profession. Behind the joke is the nature of the work, about the closest thing we have to a purely technical profession, which is both highly objective in evaluation and also divorced from any necessity of having skill with interpersonal relations.
And you’re seriously using that as an example to apply to the rest of the world? A lot of you guys make a big deal about not wearing suits, as a sort of reverse status symbol. It would be clueless for a candidate to wear pinstripes, and you get away with your Bizarro-signal precisely because you’re not a profession whose primary purpose is interaction with high-level clients. The case is emphatically different with high-status jobs that have face-to-face client service as their focus. People such as big city lawyers or investment bankers continue as they are because asserting their status as professionals is inherently part of their job. Their business is not merely to serve. Their business is to quiet fears and insecurities among their clients by having a larger lion’s mane than anybody else. That $2500 suit is a signal, and it’s wasteful on its face, and simultaneously it is absolutely necessarily for them to be successful.
And to say it again: This sets the standard for everybody else. The #30 law school isn’t looking toward the ground to figure out how to adapt to maintain their position. They’re looking up. They’re investing gobs of money just to maintain their relative position. They’re running as hard as they can to stay exactly where they are, like they’re on a treadmill.
You reach for a counterexample, and instead you make my point for me.
We use proxies instead of reality all the time, by necessity because reality is out of reach, and those proxies will quite often be inaccurate, and just as often be wasteful in their attempt to discriminate. The uniqueness of your one exception just outlines that much more clearly how miserably difficult it is to ascertain quality everywhere else. StateU is more expensive because it’s working hard not to fall behind. People rely on these signals because reality is too hard to see in every other job but yours.
Hell, even in other technical professions, it isn’t necessarily about pure skill within the subject. I can take finance as an easy example. The ability to do impressive math does not necessarily correlate with any real knowledge about the markets. It’s just that being a dazzler on the blackboard is much easier to notice and reward than actually knowing what you’re talking about. That was a multi-trillion dollar mistake right there that we still haven’t entirely recovered from, and all because the proxy is so much easier than digging deeper. Even when people deeply believe they’re being objective, it isn’t necessarily the case. They can use status as a signal and fuck themselves over without even realizing it.
It doesn’t sound like I’m saying that all, since I explicitly said exactly the opposite.
I was not talking about techniques that people could use to get into higher income brackets.
That was NOT NOT NOT what I was saying.
Class is about much more than your income. Being in the 1% is nice and all, but it doesn’t mean you’ll be accepted by the average person of similar income as their peer. 1600-Billy is still going to be condescended to by people like Ted Cruz if he goes to StateU on a free ride instead of going to Princeton (or even one of the “minor Ivies”). Someone with a flat overlooking Central Park is going to be higher on the totem-pole than two married professionals who live responsibly within their means in Plano, Texas. Those worlds are so far apart that the people in Texas will be able to say, with total honesty, that they don’t care about how rich folks in New York live. But 99.9% of the time, they’re still going to be playing little status games with the Joneses next door. We compare ourselves with our peer group, our neighbors, and they compare themselves with their (slightly different) peer group, and so on and so forth, with each individual more likely to look upward than downward. The Plano folks genuinely don’t care about the big city, but their world is still bent by that chain of influence. StateU still looks to Harvard for guidance on how to be high status. And that means dedicating resources to colorful plumage.
I say again: I would like to be wrong about this.
There is no compelling reason I’ve ever seen for me to believe I’m wrong about this.
I think Hellestal and Sam Stone are arguing at cross purposes. I don’t think you two disagree as much as you may thing you do. Sam is saying the current system for education and qualification is wasteful and outdated; Hellestal, you seem to agree it may be but that it’s hard to dispose of. Those aren’t contradictory positions.
Your only disagreement seems to be in how fast this can change. It certainly CAN change; how quickly it will change is, to be honest, impossible for us to know for sure. Class distinctions can be very sticky but can also be upturned with remarkable speed. It is not really that long ago that a peerage was a necessity for being important in the UK; it’s already becoming something of a quaint anachronism, something you give to people AFTER they’ve become popular and important. Kate Winslet is much more powerful and influential than the Countess of Squishmoor-Snaggletooth.
Will an Ivy League education stop mattering in the next ten years? No. In the next thirty? Probably not in most professions (but maybe in some.) In the next hundred? Very possibly. Things change. The landscape of education has not always been the way it is now, and will not remain this way.
I’m not sure of this. I know what you’re talking about, but I believe that’s a phenomenon driven by the distortions already in the education system. it may also be somewhat unique to the institutions you are familiar with. I don’t think the local community college has any illusions about being compared to Harvard. And to the extent that the ‘food chain’ as you describe it exists, it’s because the model of status and signalling as a proxy for showing educational achievement is driving it, and it’s that model I’d like to break.
I’m very familiar with this. That’s the whole point to Veblenesque goods - to show status through wastefulness. But I don’t believe that’s why college signalling works (outside of the Ivy League, anyway). The use of signals and status as the end result of an education isn’t a feature - it’s a limitation. It’s a result of the screwed up way we educate and hire people. And in any event, it’s breaking down. When everyone goes to college, the signalling value of a college degree diminishes. It used to be a signal of above-average intelligence, work ethic, etc. That’s why you could get hired into a management job with any degree, even if it was unrelated to your field.
We encouraged people to take anything they want in college, because the degree itself would guarantee a good job. But once everyone started doing it, that no longer holds. So now we need an alternative - we need to more directly communicate skills to employers, and we need to lower the risk of hiring so that employers are more willing to take a chance. We need to transition to more of an apprenticeship/mentoring model wherever we can. We need to bring employers more fundamentally into the educational system.
And what do you do when the signals start to fail because we’re watering down standards and encouraging everyone to have the same signal? What do you do when the cost of being a good peacock impoverishes you for life? That’s the problem we face now - there’s a fundamental disconnect between the desire to have the entire middle class go to college and the ‘signalling’ model. If every peacock has the same bright feathers, how do you choose a mate?
Quite the opposite. I want to democratize education. I think it’s already in the hands of rent seekers and special interests. I think professional organizations help set standards so high as to create barriers of entry into professions solely to keep wages high. I think educational facilities are rapidly becoming lucrative jobs programs for administrators and bureaucrats, rather than efficient mechanisms for educating the populace. I think they’re becoming overly politicized and biased, and I think too many people are being encouraged to take useless degrees or political indoctrination disguised as education.
I don’t want to design this system. I want it to emerge from market forces. I just want to make sure set up the ground rules that will allow that kind of innovation.
There’s some truth to that, but you haven’t made the case that this makes it fundamentally different when it comes to the need for things like licensure or status signalling by degree.
I will grant that this works better inside a company because it has a lot of knowledge about the employee’s ability in the first place.
I did mention that this is a company-wide system, right? Programmers are a small fraction of our employees.
You keep saying that you’re not framing the issue in terms of the Ivy League vs everyone else, but your examples are investment bankers and big-city lawyers? Let’s stipulate that status will always be important for that crew, and talk about answers for the other 99.5% of the population.
In the particular case of the law, I know this isn’t true. There is no smooth graduation of lawyers from the Ivy League on down. Law is a bifurcated profession - the ‘big city lawyers’ from the Ivy League have lots of money and status, and the other lawyers make substantially less.
As for suits and nice offices and all the rest. Of course those are signals. So was the expensive concrete bank building when people were worried about the safety of their assets. The market uses signals all the time. A strong brand is a signal. A glass and steel highrise with a corporate logo on it signals that the company is important and plans to be around for a long time. All that is true. But that doesn’t mean the proper way to connect employers and employees is through such signals.
Imagine if we did to consumer goods what we do to hiring decisions. Let’s make it illegal to actually evaluate a car through tests. Let’s make it impossible to return goods that don’t work for us or that we find defective. Let’s make people rely on nothing but the signals sent by the car companies. Do you think that would make the market more efficient? So maybe we’ll have an auto certifying agency, so when I buy a car I can choose one that has its ‘car license’ telling me that it meets minimum standards. But I can’t test drive it, and I can’t do any sort of evaluation other than maybe sitting in it for an hour in a dealership. Can you imagine how that might screw things up?
That’s my point - we now have the tools to put reality in reach. The same arguments you’re using were used to justify other intermediaries we’ve managed to dispense with. The value of a big publishing house was in part a signal - they used editors to sift out the lousy books, and because they did that, books published by them were guaranteed to be of a certain quality. This was valuable because no one could determine the quality of a book until they’d read it.
But now, when I hear about a book the first thing I do is go to Amazon and read the customer reviews. We’ve crowd-sourced the editing and review process. So now I don’t care at all who the publisher is, because the signal that used to be a big advantage is now completely irrelevant.
New musical artists couldn’t get heard unless they signed with a large music publisher. They acted as an intermediary as well. They provided the supply chain. They could get the ear of distributors and radio stations because it was assumed that they wouldn’t be passing on complete dreck. But now I can go evaluate the music myself on internet radio or youtube, and I can discover new music through crowd-sourcing, and the need for a music publisher/distributor is greatly diminished.
Just because we used to do it one way doesn’t mean we should assume that’s the best way to go in the future.
Imagine a system where I put my educational achievements in a matrix with a job site. The employer who’s looking for someone fills in a matrix of the skills he needs. The site matches us up. Part of the deal with the employer is then that after a suitable evaluation period he rates me as an employee. If I get a good rating, all the institutions that contributed to my matrix get bumped up a bit. Or perhaps he’s more specific and assigns different values to different categories based on his assessment.
This two-way feedback is constant. Perhaps it’s supplemented by ‘rate my school’ data and even ‘rate my employer’ data. Educational institutions that become good at teaching produce better employees, which drives their ratings up, which puts them more in demand. In the meantime, everyone is learning what kinds of education work and what don’t.
And for employers, they can post their matrix of skills for employees they are looking for. When I go looking for a job, I get matched up by matrix hits. But now I can also discover where I’m lacking. I can be told by the system “If you only had skill X, 1142 more jobs would have been available to you.” I can start making objective decisions based on the exact needs of employers.
Employers can do the same thing. If they can’t find employees that match the skill matrix they need, they can start looking at the ones that are closest, and offer to hire them at a lower wage and an offer to train them in that skill.
This doesn’t account for the intangibles like interpersonal skills, but I’m sure we can figure out ways to handle that too. The point is to open up education as a life-long process, to create many pathways to becoming educated, and to open up channels of information so we no longer need to rely on very bad proxies in lieu of actual knowledge.
No, StateU is more expensive because the growth in administration is 3:1 vs teaching jobs. State U is more expensive because it is heavily subsidized by federal student loans. State U is more expensive because it’s spending money on things like climbing walls and terraced gardens and expensive paintings to attract those students with their lucrative federal money. State U is more expensive because the demand for its services is growing while the supply remains relatively fixed.
Really? So what value does college bring in terms of actual knowledge? Having interpersonal skills and an expensive suit is certainly important for a lawyer, but so is, you know, knowledge of the law. That can be evaluated. It’s not hard to tell a good teacher from a bad one. Extend my model to a ratings system for substitute teachers, and you’ll soon find out which ones are worth hiring.
Teachers are actually a good example. The ratio in quality between a good teacher and a bad one is immense. And yet, I don’t believe education degrees carry a whole lot of signalling power. My local school isn’t looking for teachers who graduated from Harvard. Most of the teachers hired here will have gone to college here. They are undifferentiated by degree. So the school has very little to go on when making a hiring decision. And yet, once that teacher is in the system, he or she is almost impossible to fire. This is one of the biggest problems in the education system - the existence of a minority of extremely bad teachers who do disproportionate damage to children. A better model of hiring is desperately needed.
I’m not sure I understand your point. How does the signalling system we currently have prevent this? Doesn’t it make this worse? I can get a degree in just about anything without needed interpersonal skills or any of the intangibles you’re talking about. In fact, I think the example above works against you - it’s a case where status and signalling resulted in a mess.
You keep saying that you’re not discussing the Ivy League vs everyone else, yet all your examples are class and status generated by going to an Ivy League school. Tell me how much status I’ll gain by going to State U as opposed to the guy who got his education online? The answer is none, because outside of your initial job hiring, no one cares. I have no idea what kind of schools my classmates went to. My wife has a masters degree she attained through distance learning, but no one knows that - they just know she has a masters.
Maybe in your field or your location people yap about their Harvard degrees and compare each other based on what school they went to. Where I am, no one cares. Your status is attained through your accomplishments, and nothing else. If you have a big house and work in a high status field, you’ll have status. If you’re a slacker and live in a dump and work at Radio Shack, no one is going to care that you have a Harvard MBA.
Sure, but their status games are going to have nothing to do with where they went to college.
And again, your comparisons always seem to come back to Ivy League people living in New York. I’m talking about the education of the masses. In Plano Texas, your status is more likely to be signaled by the fact that you drive a big Duellie pickup truck, or that you have your own construction company and a big house in the suburbs. You’d probably go down in status if you went around bragging about your Harvard degree.
I flatly don’t believe this. I agree that status is important, and signalling is important. I just don’t agree that status is a mountain with freaking Harvard at the top. That may be true for lawyers and bankers and academics, but for most of the middle class it’s an irrelevancy. Even if it’s true for colleges, that’s only because we’re relying on this signalling mechanism. That’s my whole point - if there’s a better way to go, let’s do it.
I’d like to nominate this thread for the** Longest Average Posts of 2014** award. Yes, I know it’s early in the year but really, there’s no need to wait.
