> Why are so many people in top positions, whether in the public or private sector, so old?
... because they're the most experienced? When in human history has this not been the case? And what in the world makes you think this isn't the way it should be?
Then they should be comparing where people in previous generations were at the same point in their life. Not where previous generations are at the same point in time.
If we get rid of student loans this could change overnight, we have fashioned a society that punishes risk taking on so many levels but the student debt is the strongest driver I can see its basically a return of the indentured servitude culture of the 18th century when most people came to this country under the auspices of indenture.
A lot of the young engineers I work with are definitely weighed down by their college debt, super high housing cost and health cost. A generation ago buying a house was much more affordable. So was college. So I'd say, yes, a generation ago it was easier to take a risk because today you don't have much less margin of error.
Think about how much has changed in the past 30 years. The average american is 10x the productivity of his equivalent, but at a cost of specialized skills. That "experienced" human being also came from a generation that could scoff at, say, learning to type ("i'm not a secretary!") which on the surface makes them look more inept, but that's only true if they were starting out today. Instead they were able to invest in skills and opportunities invisible to a modern workforce largely in debt largely uncertain and, in contrast to the author's posit:
>Who wants to work on mastering a complex task for 10 or 15 years, with no real guarantee of commercial success?
The thing that's different in now vs then, is that the span of the average human life (and the underlying span of healthy operation) has increased an enormous amount... in a single lifespan.
This means those occupying the "top" jobs have a much, much, much longer tenure than their predecessors.
This is coupled with massive consolidation in industry and politics meaning there is less and less of those jobs in the first place.
Hence much of the dissatisfaction of the younger generation.
> This means those occupying the "top" jobs have a much, much, much longer tenure than their predecessors.
"Much, much longer tenure" is a bit of a stretch. This is more about scarsity of certain jobs. We require a lot of 'on the ground' workers, e.g. software developers, and orders of magnitude fewer CEOs, CIOs, directors, etc.
It's similar to someone wanting to get into a management position. Once the position is filled, and the person is doing at the very least "slightly above awful" job, you won't hire a manager for that team for quite some time.
My wife tutors at a college, and she said the same thing about the professors there. She said that most of them looked well past retirement age, and some could barely stand up on their own or talk loud enough for a class to hear them. Meanwhile, the younger people who want to teach are stuck being adjunct professors with no job stability or benefits, or working as tutors grading papers and picking up the slack for teachers that refuse to retire.
Most pension systems assume x years of payments. Just because people are getting older doesn't change the fact that the money won't last. Therefore the retirement age gets adjusted upward until it is average life expectancy - x years of retirement.
And what would the students gain? I mean, I get that younger people want to become professors, but the students are better off being taught by somebody who’s been teaching and researching the field in question as long as possible.
It's really striking how many of the top people in different fields are essentially the same today as they were twenty or thirty years ago. Look at politics. Look at Hollywood. Look, though to a lesser degree, but still markedly more so than in previous eras, at sports.
Nobody ages out and opens up their spot anymore. It's a problem when that means the pipeline gets stalled, and causes a lot of problems when the old guard does finally retire or die off, and there are not enough suitable candidates waiting in the wings to pick up, because they have gotten tired of waiting around.
I don't really believe in this generalization, but I was struck recently by how a local "classic rock" station is playing the same songs as they did 30 years ago. You'd think that "classic" would have advanced by a few decades.
But come on, is your claim really supported by Tom Brady being 42 and not 38? Or by the falling US life expectancy? Or by social security retirement age changing from 65 to 67?
I'm solidly in the Millennial bracket and the closest thing I had to "planned activities" before I was old enough to pick them myself was Little League during the summers.
Then again, I grew up in rural Iowa, and I've heard cultural trends take a decade or so to make their way from the coast all the way inland.
But I think some of it is also just a matter of what you are focusing on. I'd guess there are plenty of kids growing up similarly unsupervised as in the past, they are just more out of sight than before.
(Old headline for reference: "Old People Have All the Interesting Jobs in America")
I think the title of this of this piece is poor and doesn't reflect a great question buried in there.
The piece reflects on how many high achieving young people choose finance, management consulting, and law and laments how those positions are low risk, high reward. The author implies it would be better for America in the face of slowing scientific progress to see young, smart individuals employ their skills in fields like chemistry or materials science.
A great question to be had is what can be done to encourage people to undertake high risk, high reward fields? I agree with the authors point that in a prisoners dilemma style way, at any given point in a young smart persons life, they may be inclined to undertake those professions (consulting, law, finance).
An important question to be asked covered by a poor headline
There is (or maybe was) a pipeline of grad students imported from India and China that are taking this risk. It makes no sense for highly qualified and by that I mean "academically educated" Americans to pursue PhDs in the sciences. Even the masters programs are largely foreign students since that is a way to get an H1B.
An important part of the reward is American citizenship, which Americans already have, so for them, it's a high risk low reward field.
As America makes it harder to immigrate, and other countries are catching up in opportunity and quality of life, there should be fewer foreigners spend many years and sacrifices in pursuit of the green card.
Or America will cut funding for science and make it more difficult to afford higher education or have a career in sciences while simultaneously making it harder to immigrate.
If you don't have a masters or PhD you aren't "highly qualified and academically educated." And undergrad is a basic degree these days, and you aren't considered to be an academic having gotten one.
I don't see what the fact that master's and PhD programs are filled with foreign students has to do with whether or not it makes sense to get a higher degree. Most of the brilliant people in North America are immigrants.
>I don't see what the fact that master's and PhD programs are filled with foreign students has to do with whether or not it makes sense to get a higher degree.
It's more competitive, low pay during school and lower odds of a well paying job at the end.
A US resident (citizen or child immigrant) can get a job at FANG with a bachelors. A foreigner needs a visa and a job interview, and grad school is a way to get a visa and get in reach of recruiters.
Since when are the sciences "high risk, high reward" fields?
They seem like high risk (of not getting one of the few jobs available) for low reward (the jobs that do exist pay extremely poorly compared to writing webapps).
I agree with your sentiment. I think the high reward would be breaking ground in a field or doing something prize-worthy or money-worthy (turning your research into a company or something).
I think the incentives are very misaligned against the hard sciences. This is coming from someone who loved physics in high school and materials science in college, but switched to computer science for economic reasons (I do really enjoy programming, but my first love was for other sciences).
Graduating with a huge student debt that needs to be repaid doesn't encourage exploration and risk-taking, so that would be one of the areas to focus on.
In my experience you are correct about STEM. I live in flyover country, most STEM people I know pay off student debt in around 3-5 years no issues. Only a sample size of ~35, but low cost of living and high wages in engineering goes a long way. Also fly over country tends to have good cheap state schools, so not sure how well my experience translates to the coasts
STEM isn't really STEM when it comes to money though, it's more like parts of TE or graduating from a 'good' school where there's a lot of recruiting. A B.S. in Math from ENMU isn't really any better placed for >50K lob than their BFA friends.
Computer related majors (software engineering, IT, networking, etc.) and most engineering generally pay off as long as you don't end up hating the work.
Hard science majors (especially biology) don't have it so well, unless they go to med school or pharmacy school.
Math is a pretty mixed bag, some math majors get well paying jobs as actuaries, statisticians, modeling, etc, but many (and all I know personally) end up in low paying jobs that you don't need a degree for.
I think that a high risk / high reward strategy works well in two cases.
1: You have little to lose, already so low at the bottom that a failure won't make you much worse off. Why not try something that could catapult you from there? Example: students running a startup from a dorm room.
2: You have so much that constantly losing a bit is inconsequential for you, even if the high reward only shows once in 100 tries. Example: a VC financing 100 startups.
But when you are in the middle, you can't afford to lose much. It will immediately make you so much worse off and close so many opportunities that you only want to play safe.
Stay hungry, stay foolish, they said. It's hard to follow such advice when you just stopped to be "hungry" and started to feel competent, and you don't want back.
> But when you are in the middle, you can't afford to lose much.
I agree with your analysis, and would also add that the increasing concentration of good jobs in expensive cities exacerbates this. When the best jobs are all in places where owning a home costs $500k+, it shouldn't be a surprise that people place a higher weight on their salary.
My own experience exemplifies this. I'm from the Phoenix area, where housing is relatively cheap. But when I graduated college, the only engineering jobs in the area were at Godaddy, boring old-school internal IT shops, or a couple of small consultancies. None of these seemed like they would make for a very rewarding career, so I applied in SF and NYC and took the first job that took me out of Phoenix. I got a more rewarding career out of it, but also got into a very challenging housing market.
Well if you go to "high paying low risk" on your tombstone will be written He lived the same year 70 times and called that a life. For a lot of people that is not their desire. So I think that there will always be supply of smart risk takers.
Counter: A low-risk, high-reward career maximizes my ability balance work and life. I am pretty much guaranteed the ability to take a long, extravagant vacation every year, spend weekends in the mountains, maintain expensive hobbies, etc.
High-risk, high-reward may be more fulfilling as a career, but the cost of failure is forgoing all those personal things.
For those where work is life and life is work, the high-risk, high-reward career makes sense. For the rest of us, there's consulting or building CRUD.
> I am pretty much guaranteed the ability to take a long, extravagant vacation every year, spend weekends in the mountains, maintain expensive hobbies, etc.
I don't know any management consultants, doctors, lawyers, or investment bankers that do any of those things. At best they have nice things, but they do not have free time. They are low-risk careers, not low effort or low time-commitment careers.
The real answer to the question, of course, is that people are at least somewhat rational, and so they're unlikely to race for high-risk, low-reward work when the opposite is plentiful.
Young people will take high-risk opportunities only when they offer higher reward than otherwise-available low-risk ones.
The key questions, then, are:
1) These "unloved" fields: do they actually create more value than the lower-risk fields the author laments young people choosing? If not, then the author's answer is simple: people are making the right choices. If so, however:
2) What forces are preventing workers in these high-value, high-risk fields from capturing as large a share of their productivity as workers in low-risk, high-reward fields can?
The author doesn't mention what seems to me must be an important factor: modern American society is completely geared around safety, and against risk-taking.
Consider all the commercials about how safety is job #1, and so forth.
Or the fact that "drive safely" and "have a safe trip" seem to be pretty much the default conversation closers.
I'd much rather that people wish me a rich, fulfilling experience than curse me with boring safety.
If people have a lot of debt from education then the safest course that can quickly recoup that debt is the best option isn't it? Who would choose to owe thousands of dollars and be able to choose something high risk and probably low reward? They want to start a family and so need to get rid of the debt as quickly as possible - so whatever pays the best.
I dunno, driving is not a good context in which to take risks.
My impression is that the United States is remarkably good in being able to manage risky technologies.
One example would be the development of the liquid metal fast breeder reactor.
We built the first one, it suffered a meltdown, it was small, really no big deal. (e.g. if you have liquid sodium around, radioactive iodine is going to react with it and the NaI dissolves in the Na or forms non-volatile molten salt droplets.)
We build a demonstration plant at Detroit, it had a partial meltdown, they fixed it, got it running again, decided it wasn't worth the trouble a few years.
After that we ran EBR II which had very little trouble, and we ran the FFTF which only got in the news because somehow Karen Silkwood died mysteriously making fuel for it. No nukes never talk about those two because there was no drama.
France built SuperPhenix and it was a screw-up from beginning to end. They couldn't even build a good roof for the turbine building.
Japan was the world leader in nuclear accidents in the 1990-2010 time frame with the criticality accident at Tokaimura and multiple problems at the Monju reactor. There was the time that a sodium fire burned for a long time before they noticed it, when they finally got it running again after a few years they dropped the refueling machine on top of the reactor, took a year to pick it up, and then lost their permit to move fuel around it.
With the squeezed out middle class and no safety net when your parents aren't rich yeah please take the risk to spend your life priced out the housing market, or worse living out of your car working two jobs living paycheck to paycheck, one medical encounter away from financial disaster.
Yeah take risks, sound advice for the young people.
If you are rich it is easy to take risks. If you have to work at a frustrating you hate job 9-5 and somehow find the energy to keep working on side projects it will take exponentially longer to reach viability versus someone who has the financial opportunity to work on it full time.
Young people are not rich. No shit they aren't taking risks because they either have no capital / opportunity to do so... or they are busy turning the gears for minimal payment without any promise real career advancement.
This is the real answer, unfortunately it is lost on the majority of hackernews who were probably wealthy enough as young people to not have to worry about things like this.
In a way, the opposite can also be said, but only if you have no kids.
If you're not rich, that also means you don't have much to lose. Whereas, if you've got a personal empire to maintain, with a husband/wife, kids, a home, 2 cards, etc., you're less inclined to do anything to upset the balance of that system.
But if you have no kids and you aren't rich, the worst thing that can usually happen is having to sleep on a friend's couch for a while and eat lots of ramen noodles, which may not be far off from the lifestyle you're used to.
This article frames the questions as "Why are young people entering safe fields?". But the fields they mentioned are not just low risk, they are also high paying. But the answer to the question "Why are smart young people going into low risk high reward occupations over high risk low reward occupations?" is pretty obvious.
If you think more young people should be spending their time doing research and development and less people should be doing management consulting then the answer is simple. Subsidize it.
You hit the nail on the head. If I could quietly do research the rest of my life I would probably do that, but only if I’m paid what I earn now year after year, I’m not going to be satisfied with some pitiful grad student level stipend.
The alternative is what I do now, building software that probably contributes to the degradation of society in exchange for generous money. I’m ok with that because I am insulated from most of the effects of my work.
Only today I've reopened my Euclid's Elements [1] and longed for the PhD days when I would read it all day long dreaming I would do maths and physics for the rest of my existence.
> building software that probably contributes to the degradation of society in exchange for generous money
Not sure why you're being downvoted I honestly agree with your assessment. I left research because raising a family would've been impossible with the amount I would have been paid and how often I'd have to change jobs/travel.
This is basically analogous to "We chronically devalue and underpay our public school teachers. We require them to perform to lowest-common-denominator testing, constant interventions, rigorous, standards-based teaching, work samples, documentation, and other requirements. Why is nobody interested in getting into teaching?"
Agreed, these sorts of pieces really irritate me because they almost seem to be blaming young people for following basic incentives. Want people to go into an abandoned field? Great, pay them more than jobs they are equally well suited for, give them autonomy, grant them social status, or give them a great lifestyle. No one with other prospects is going to come to a profession if they are paid like shit，treated with no more deference than a fast food worker, saddled with a million regulations from the government, given no autonomy, and / or granted no job security without commensurate upside potential. This is not hard to understand.
The government / employers simply don't want to put their money where their mouth is.
> saddled with a million regulations from the government
How acute is this, in general? I'm not from the US and I have no clue about it. From the outside it seems that everything is going well, creativity is abundant and freedom is running wild in the streets. Your comment kinda negates that and I'm a little surprised by it.
There is reasonable concern about some kinds of bureaucratic requirements and government-mandated busywork in certain fields, but for the most part, what holds individuals back in our country is the gross inequality in the system, manifesting in a variety of forms.
One of those forms, of course, is regulatory capture, allowing certain industries to maintain high barriers to entry because the people running the governmental agencies tasked with ensuring those industries are being run safely and for the public benefit are mostly former and/or soon-to-be industry executives and lobbyists.
This makes it much easier for the anti-government "look how horrible things are with regulation" rhetoric, when the actual cause is still overwhelming corporate power.
The parent comment is very accurate in regards to teachers within the public school systems in the US. For other industries it is the general rule that the top companies are very creative as they are bending, breaking, or rewriting the laws in some way.
> But the answer to the question "Why are smart young people going into low risk high reward occupations over high risk low reward occupations?" is pretty obvious.
Indeed, but it also highlights something that may be less obvious, and that is the proper allocation of reward. The deeper question is: why do we systematically undervalue the very fields that contribute the most to society? Careers in education, healthcare, research, and less stable creative ventures should not need subsidies if we acknowledged their inerrant long term value.
David Graeber also pointed this out and came up with a rule of thumb: how much a job contributes to society is inversely proportional how much someone is paid to do it.
I don't think it's unfair to consider the historical demography of those (service) jobs, in addition to considering the network effects on perceived value in work that is often done in the background.
"The deeper question is: why do we systematically undervalue the very fields that contribute the most to society?"
The answer for most of them is simple: oversupply. Being a teacher is generally something a lot of people want to be, and especially for K-12, almost by definition, the intellectual bar is "finished K-12 reasonably well". (If you read curricula for teaching schools, you'll find that while teachers are generally educated maybe a year or two's worth past the high school level in their chosen teaching subjects, that's generally it for the requirements.) Accomplishing the "bullet point" objectives of being a teacher is not a difficult enough bar to filter out enough people.
(I phrase it that way to forstall hiking the goalpost to the sort of astonishing, life changing teacher whose slightest jiggling of their eyebrows inspire students to new heights of knowledge and curiousity. Those may not be all that common, but that's not the bar in question. Most teachers are pretty close to average.)
When you imagine yourself in the role of teacher (the inspiring kind, I'm sure) or researcher (who is, of course, hot on the trail of the cure of cancer, not researching some workaday research question), it's easy to imagine how you should be paid more. But if you put yourself in the position of paying for these things with your money, and you offer $100,000/yr to be an elementary school teacher in some medium-sized town in the country because wouldn't that just be awesome, and you get your first 10,000 applications today with another 10,000 coming tomorrow, it's not long before you start thinking "Hmmm.... maybe I don't have to part with quite $100,000/yr to fill this position.... maybe $90,000 isn't such a bad idea, and I can use that $10,000 to do some other $WORTHY_THING..." (Or... maybe I could use this money to hire two teachers....)
It's easy to imagine how someone else should pay teachers three or four times more... it would be a lot more challenging if you were the one doing it.
it's not clear to me that the current set of teachers aren't good enough. in my state, the qualifications and pay for a private school teacher are actually lower.
I suspect marginal increases in teacher quality just don't matter that much when you make them teach classes of 30+ students. it seems to me that allocating funds to hire more teachers at the same pay would be more effective than just paying more for the same job.
That's another thing that may feel good to say, but trying to manifest it in practice is really difficult. What more can you ask for from, say, a middle-school algebra teacher other than that 1. they know the material well enough to teach it 2. they are capable of maintaining basic classroom discipline and 3. they are conscientious enough to grade papers and run the mechanics of a classroom and 4. don't have some sort of other spoiler disqualifier here like being abusive or pathologically impatient or something?
Maybe a better way of phrasing it wouldn't be to say that the job of teacher is "easy" per se, but that it's something built into our genes. Teaching is a thing humans do, like talking or throwing, as a subset of our general human bonding skills. Being a decent teacher is obviously a bit more exclusive than "able to talk", but it's just not that exclusive in our species, it's a widely shared skill that has been selected on for many tens or hundreds of thousands of years. It's hard to imagine a stable economic situation where it isn't something we have an oversupply of.
It may be something we just ‘do’ but there is enormous variation in method and skill and use of materials and technologies. And we can today do things we couldn’t do even 20 years ago.
In this way it’s comparable to cooking, which is also something we just ‘do’.
I think there's a supply & demand thing. Most people are not that excited about finance, or sales, or computer science. And there's a need for a few million of those people across the US economy to do those jobs. Whereas there might be a similar amount of people interested in being a professional musician at the same degree, but the commercial demand means that say 5,000 of those people can afford to go full time.
Anecdotally, a lot of my friends went into teaching / nursing because it was seen as stable, and pretty easy to get into.
> "If you think more young people should be spending their time doing research and development and less people should be doing management consulting then the answer is simple. Subsidize it."
From the opening of their application which he shared on his blog:
> "We want to jumpstart high-reward ideas—moonshots in many cases—that advance prosperity, opportunity, liberty, and well-being. We welcome the unusual and the unorthodox.
> Our goal is positive social change, but we do not mind if you make a profit from your project. (Indeed, a quick path to revenue self-sufficiency is a feature not a bug!)
> Projects will either be fellowships or grants: fellowships involve time in residence at the Mercatus Center in Northern Virginia; grants are one-time or slightly staggered payments to support a project.
> We encourage you to think big, but we also will consider very small grants or short fellowships if they might change the trajectory of your life. We encourage applications from all ages and all parts of the world."
Incredibly, they're taking no stake in successful ventures. They're just subsidizing high-reward ideas to encourage them.
If you read The Complacent Class and Stubborn Attachments—both highly recommended, you'll get a better idea of where Tyler is coming from and why this issue of decreasing dynamism is an issue he's so concerned about.
What happened to student loans? I don't see that mentioned, yet you'd think the main reason people pick a high paying job with good fallbacks is to be able to service the loan. Same reason why we don't get more people taking a chance and starting a new business.
I also get the feeling there's an issue with skills recognition. Everyone has a lot of paper saying they know machine learning or finance, but very few people are confident they can identify someone who actually knows these skills. So we fall back on credentialism, and every job seeker knows that, and acts accordingly.
You can't say "tech" is where innovation happens, that's a tautology. Technos actually means new stuff. If I invent a new horse carriage, I've created new horse carriage tech. What might be more of a question is why software, or why batteries, or why mobile phones.
I think you've definitely hit on part of it. People want to pay off those loans.
That said, a high-paying job can pay off your average student loan (~$31000) in 5-7 years without too much grief. What comes next tends to be that people find they like the lifestyle enabled by a low risk high income.
yep. if the choice is "taking a risk" and burning down your meagre savings without the promise of a payout, or grinding away at a low-risk and low-reward job, the choice is exceedingly clear for most people.
you need slack capacity to take risk. millenials haven't ever had it, and they've repeatedly recieved strong economic signals to carefully hoard any slack they can find rather than risk it to get more.
95% of academia is unnecessary. The part that makes this notably different from Sturgeon's law is that we know which parts that is and if we ever go through a resource crunch we'll find out.
Ask yourself how you'd allocate money as the sum available becomes less and less. The answers are obvious.
This seems like a good framing to get non-progressives behind social safety net programs - lowering the cost of risk taking/innovation and allowing for more ideas for the market to sort out.
I'm a 'non-progressive' and can see you're view point. I think it is worth exploring and I like where you're going. I can tell you that the main point of contention will be that the government caused the inability to take risk (i.e. subsidizing student loans and housing costs). I am however more open to social programs when you word it like that
Cowen: "Start with the Ivy Leaguers. I have no rancor against lawyers, financiers or management consultants, but the pursuit of these careers seems like a misallocation of human creativity. Those jobs do not comprise most of the value of the U.S. economy, so why are they such a magnet?"
Pretty simple: the US is all about rent seeking these days. It's in the sciences as well; most people gravitate to fashionable woo which isn't particularly reproducible, and may fall entirely outside of the class of falsifiable science. Look at all the noodle theorists, cosmologists and other such wankers in physics departments. Look at the travesty that is the F35, or the laughable efforts of the center of the tech world taking billions of dollars to build a mile of freaking subway.
Just getting into some Ivy League hole like Harvard; there's a huge industry of ding dongs who will set up non-profits, fake admission essays, and either tutor or fake test results; allowing sons and daughters of the ambitious to appear competent and useful citizens rather than parasites. This sort of travesty doesn't select for "creative," it just breeds an "elite" of rent-seeking sociopathic scammers.
The last 20 years of Silicon Valley/Bay Area development are effectively rent seeking. Google and company blew up newspaper advertising while cannibalizing newspaper content. Uber, AirBnB, etc, all the same. Really the big winners in the Bay Area were the goddamned landlords; turning Boomer retirement dollars invested in "new technologies" into huge returns on real estate.
There are entire books of historical philosophy and economics on this sort of thing: Brooks Adams recognized rent seeking as deadly to civilizations. Georgists were a similar intellectual current. I don't see it as even being recognized as a problem. Cowen at least notes that progress has slowed; an idea which meets with screeches of terrified denial from the "muh ipotato" crowd. At its core, though, is a problem with rent seeking.
"The last 20 years of Silicon Valley/Bay Area development are effectively rent seeking. Google and company blew up newspaper advertising while cannibalizing newspaper content"
What do you think rent seeking is? How is quoted sentence #2 an example?
"Rent seeking" is placing yourself in a position where you risk nothing, create nothing and parasitize society. Google destroyed publishing, destroyed many potentially profitable internet businesses and effectively risks and creates nothing.
Most monopolies fit the definition of rent seeking blood suckers, but Google really does. The Bell System provided a useful telephone network at least, as well as inventing the future with their research lab.
Answer: Repeal the exclusionary zoning laws in this country's most overpriced real estate markets that are making it so difficult for young people to purchase their first homes. In fact, the regressive zoning laws are artificially inflating the price of many older folks' homes, which is precisely what is allowing them in many cases to pursue the more creative, higher risk career paths.
According to his Wikipedia page, Tyler Cowen is a committed free-market ideologue who still believes in the "meritocracy myth" (also formerly known as the "American Dream").
Got news for Cowen, this country's economy has long moved on since the days back when he earned that Harvard PhD!
As a next semester reading assignment for Cowen, I'd like to suggest Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
Tyler Cowen runs the George Mason University Mercatus Center, which is directly funded by the Koch bros; one of the Kochs is directly on the Mercatus board. In other words, they have a very specific economic and political axe to grind.
Mr. Cowan's food blog of DC/NoVA restaurants is pretty good though.
The trend I've noticed is most good opportunities (and even plenty of the less-good ones) now have ridiculous amounts of red tape and frankly gatekeeping. Just to become a hairdresser in Arizona requires expensive and time-consuming schooling (to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars). And that's just one example of what I would consider a fairly average-skill-level position, nevermind doctors, lawyers, or engineers.
>It might be better for the country if more of these individuals started businesses...
It's subtle but I think this is an important sentence in the article. The US has gone further and further down a path that signals to every young person that they are on their own. The safety nets are being eroded, and politicians are signaling that they want to erode them more. The young adults are paying into systems like Social Security that they expect to never benefit from, while the older generations keep voting to ensure that they get the benefit and the younger generations can deal with the fallout.
Why would any intelligent young person whose weighing the pros and cons, take a risk that might be a net benefit for the country, when the country wont help them in return?
I mean people are still working until they can't but that time period is getting longer and longer. Partly out of boredom, partly because retirement is a pipe dream for a lot of people. But the end result is the same, the higher level jobs are rarely if ever vacated so committing to those fields with the goal of making it to the top is unrealistic. Combine that with the boom in working population, more educated, more gender diverse now with woman a much more significant portion of job seekers and you get the current status quo. Highly paid, very safe job fields are the ideal option for the young. It's certainly no easier to make it to the highest levels in safer fields but you will be far better compensated along the way as you try and likely enjoy a better quality of life too.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] thread... because they're the most experienced? When in human history has this not been the case? And what in the world makes you think this isn't the way it should be?
Also see Pareto on foxes and lions.
Found this link:
https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2017/3/6/paretos-two-types-of...
>Who wants to work on mastering a complex task for 10 or 15 years, with no real guarantee of commercial success?
This means those occupying the "top" jobs have a much, much, much longer tenure than their predecessors.
This is coupled with massive consolidation in industry and politics meaning there is less and less of those jobs in the first place.
Hence much of the dissatisfaction of the younger generation.
"Much, much longer tenure" is a bit of a stretch. This is more about scarsity of certain jobs. We require a lot of 'on the ground' workers, e.g. software developers, and orders of magnitude fewer CEOs, CIOs, directors, etc.
It's similar to someone wanting to get into a management position. Once the position is filled, and the person is doing at the very least "slightly above awful" job, you won't hire a manager for that team for quite some time.
I'll be working well past retirement age, not necessarily because I won't want to retire, but because there's no way I'll be able to afford it.
Nobody ages out and opens up their spot anymore. It's a problem when that means the pipeline gets stalled, and causes a lot of problems when the old guard does finally retire or die off, and there are not enough suitable candidates waiting in the wings to pick up, because they have gotten tired of waiting around.
But come on, is your claim really supported by Tom Brady being 42 and not 38? Or by the falling US life expectancy? Or by social security retirement age changing from 65 to 67?
It seems like tenure would only increase if the "top" positions were staffed with individual of an age consistent with the past.
At face value, I think it is equally plausible that tenure has stayed to same but entry age to the top positions has increased.
At this point Prince Charles is so old that he may well just abdicate his kingship to his son.
Maybe not. But for most purposes he has been eclipsed by his son.
Let me take you on a walk down Soma.
Age and income are inversely correlated.
The last generation to know freedom from planned activities during their school years.
Then again, I grew up in rural Iowa, and I've heard cultural trends take a decade or so to make their way from the coast all the way inland.
But I think some of it is also just a matter of what you are focusing on. I'd guess there are plenty of kids growing up similarly unsupervised as in the past, they are just more out of sight than before.
I think the title of this of this piece is poor and doesn't reflect a great question buried in there.
The piece reflects on how many high achieving young people choose finance, management consulting, and law and laments how those positions are low risk, high reward. The author implies it would be better for America in the face of slowing scientific progress to see young, smart individuals employ their skills in fields like chemistry or materials science.
A great question to be had is what can be done to encourage people to undertake high risk, high reward fields? I agree with the authors point that in a prisoners dilemma style way, at any given point in a young smart persons life, they may be inclined to undertake those professions (consulting, law, finance).
An important question to be asked covered by a poor headline
As America makes it harder to immigrate, and other countries are catching up in opportunity and quality of life, there should be fewer foreigners spend many years and sacrifices in pursuit of the green card.
I don't see what the fact that master's and PhD programs are filled with foreign students has to do with whether or not it makes sense to get a higher degree. Most of the brilliant people in North America are immigrants.
It's more competitive, low pay during school and lower odds of a well paying job at the end.
They seem like high risk (of not getting one of the few jobs available) for low reward (the jobs that do exist pay extremely poorly compared to writing webapps).
I think the incentives are very misaligned against the hard sciences. This is coming from someone who loved physics in high school and materials science in college, but switched to computer science for economic reasons (I do really enjoy programming, but my first love was for other sciences).
Is that not the case?
I guess it can be argued that those fields fall under "exploration and risk taking" though...
Hard science majors (especially biology) don't have it so well, unless they go to med school or pharmacy school.
Math is a pretty mixed bag, some math majors get well paying jobs as actuaries, statisticians, modeling, etc, but many (and all I know personally) end up in low paying jobs that you don't need a degree for.
1: You have little to lose, already so low at the bottom that a failure won't make you much worse off. Why not try something that could catapult you from there? Example: students running a startup from a dorm room.
2: You have so much that constantly losing a bit is inconsequential for you, even if the high reward only shows once in 100 tries. Example: a VC financing 100 startups.
But when you are in the middle, you can't afford to lose much. It will immediately make you so much worse off and close so many opportunities that you only want to play safe.
Stay hungry, stay foolish, they said. It's hard to follow such advice when you just stopped to be "hungry" and started to feel competent, and you don't want back.
I agree with your analysis, and would also add that the increasing concentration of good jobs in expensive cities exacerbates this. When the best jobs are all in places where owning a home costs $500k+, it shouldn't be a surprise that people place a higher weight on their salary.
My own experience exemplifies this. I'm from the Phoenix area, where housing is relatively cheap. But when I graduated college, the only engineering jobs in the area were at Godaddy, boring old-school internal IT shops, or a couple of small consultancies. None of these seemed like they would make for a very rewarding career, so I applied in SF and NYC and took the first job that took me out of Phoenix. I got a more rewarding career out of it, but also got into a very challenging housing market.
High-risk, high-reward may be more fulfilling as a career, but the cost of failure is forgoing all those personal things.
For those where work is life and life is work, the high-risk, high-reward career makes sense. For the rest of us, there's consulting or building CRUD.
I don't know any management consultants, doctors, lawyers, or investment bankers that do any of those things. At best they have nice things, but they do not have free time. They are low-risk careers, not low effort or low time-commitment careers.
Young people will take high-risk opportunities only when they offer higher reward than otherwise-available low-risk ones.
The key questions, then, are:
1) These "unloved" fields: do they actually create more value than the lower-risk fields the author laments young people choosing? If not, then the author's answer is simple: people are making the right choices. If so, however:
2) What forces are preventing workers in these high-value, high-risk fields from capturing as large a share of their productivity as workers in low-risk, high-reward fields can?
Consider all the commercials about how safety is job #1, and so forth.
Or the fact that "drive safely" and "have a safe trip" seem to be pretty much the default conversation closers.
I'd much rather that people wish me a rich, fulfilling experience than curse me with boring safety.
I hate that line. To me it implies that the trip is dangerous. How about "Enjoy your trip"?
My impression is that the United States is remarkably good in being able to manage risky technologies.
One example would be the development of the liquid metal fast breeder reactor.
We built the first one, it suffered a meltdown, it was small, really no big deal. (e.g. if you have liquid sodium around, radioactive iodine is going to react with it and the NaI dissolves in the Na or forms non-volatile molten salt droplets.)
We build a demonstration plant at Detroit, it had a partial meltdown, they fixed it, got it running again, decided it wasn't worth the trouble a few years.
After that we ran EBR II which had very little trouble, and we ran the FFTF which only got in the news because somehow Karen Silkwood died mysteriously making fuel for it. No nukes never talk about those two because there was no drama.
France built SuperPhenix and it was a screw-up from beginning to end. They couldn't even build a good roof for the turbine building.
Japan was the world leader in nuclear accidents in the 1990-2010 time frame with the criticality accident at Tokaimura and multiple problems at the Monju reactor. There was the time that a sodium fire burned for a long time before they noticed it, when they finally got it running again after a few years they dropped the refueling machine on top of the reactor, took a year to pick it up, and then lost their permit to move fuel around it.
Yeah take risks, sound advice for the young people.
Young people are not rich. No shit they aren't taking risks because they either have no capital / opportunity to do so... or they are busy turning the gears for minimal payment without any promise real career advancement.
If you're not rich, that also means you don't have much to lose. Whereas, if you've got a personal empire to maintain, with a husband/wife, kids, a home, 2 cards, etc., you're less inclined to do anything to upset the balance of that system.
But if you have no kids and you aren't rich, the worst thing that can usually happen is having to sleep on a friend's couch for a while and eat lots of ramen noodles, which may not be far off from the lifestyle you're used to.
If you think more young people should be spending their time doing research and development and less people should be doing management consulting then the answer is simple. Subsidize it.
The alternative is what I do now, building software that probably contributes to the degradation of society in exchange for generous money. I’m ok with that because I am insulated from most of the effects of my work.
> building software that probably contributes to the degradation of society in exchange for generous money
Same.
https://www.amazon.com/Euclids-Elements-Euclid/dp/1888009195
The government / employers simply don't want to put their money where their mouth is.
How acute is this, in general? I'm not from the US and I have no clue about it. From the outside it seems that everything is going well, creativity is abundant and freedom is running wild in the streets. Your comment kinda negates that and I'm a little surprised by it.
There is reasonable concern about some kinds of bureaucratic requirements and government-mandated busywork in certain fields, but for the most part, what holds individuals back in our country is the gross inequality in the system, manifesting in a variety of forms.
One of those forms, of course, is regulatory capture, allowing certain industries to maintain high barriers to entry because the people running the governmental agencies tasked with ensuring those industries are being run safely and for the public benefit are mostly former and/or soon-to-be industry executives and lobbyists.
This makes it much easier for the anti-government "look how horrible things are with regulation" rhetoric, when the actual cause is still overwhelming corporate power.
Indeed, but it also highlights something that may be less obvious, and that is the proper allocation of reward. The deeper question is: why do we systematically undervalue the very fields that contribute the most to society? Careers in education, healthcare, research, and less stable creative ventures should not need subsidies if we acknowledged their inerrant long term value.
See also game programming.
The answer for most of them is simple: oversupply. Being a teacher is generally something a lot of people want to be, and especially for K-12, almost by definition, the intellectual bar is "finished K-12 reasonably well". (If you read curricula for teaching schools, you'll find that while teachers are generally educated maybe a year or two's worth past the high school level in their chosen teaching subjects, that's generally it for the requirements.) Accomplishing the "bullet point" objectives of being a teacher is not a difficult enough bar to filter out enough people.
(I phrase it that way to forstall hiking the goalpost to the sort of astonishing, life changing teacher whose slightest jiggling of their eyebrows inspire students to new heights of knowledge and curiousity. Those may not be all that common, but that's not the bar in question. Most teachers are pretty close to average.)
When you imagine yourself in the role of teacher (the inspiring kind, I'm sure) or researcher (who is, of course, hot on the trail of the cure of cancer, not researching some workaday research question), it's easy to imagine how you should be paid more. But if you put yourself in the position of paying for these things with your money, and you offer $100,000/yr to be an elementary school teacher in some medium-sized town in the country because wouldn't that just be awesome, and you get your first 10,000 applications today with another 10,000 coming tomorrow, it's not long before you start thinking "Hmmm.... maybe I don't have to part with quite $100,000/yr to fill this position.... maybe $90,000 isn't such a bad idea, and I can use that $10,000 to do some other $WORTHY_THING..." (Or... maybe I could use this money to hire two teachers....)
It's easy to imagine how someone else should pay teachers three or four times more... it would be a lot more challenging if you were the one doing it.
I suspect marginal increases in teacher quality just don't matter that much when you make them teach classes of 30+ students. it seems to me that allocating funds to hire more teachers at the same pay would be more effective than just paying more for the same job.
Maybe a better way of phrasing it wouldn't be to say that the job of teacher is "easy" per se, but that it's something built into our genes. Teaching is a thing humans do, like talking or throwing, as a subset of our general human bonding skills. Being a decent teacher is obviously a bit more exclusive than "able to talk", but it's just not that exclusive in our species, it's a widely shared skill that has been selected on for many tens or hundreds of thousands of years. It's hard to imagine a stable economic situation where it isn't something we have an oversupply of.
In this way it’s comparable to cooking, which is also something we just ‘do’.
The bar can be set as high as we want.
Anecdotally, a lot of my friends went into teaching / nursing because it was seen as stable, and pretty easy to get into.
He is. Tyler Cowen lead the creation of Emergent Ventures. (https://www.mercatus.org/emergentventures)
From the opening of their application which he shared on his blog:
> "We want to jumpstart high-reward ideas—moonshots in many cases—that advance prosperity, opportunity, liberty, and well-being. We welcome the unusual and the unorthodox.
> Our goal is positive social change, but we do not mind if you make a profit from your project. (Indeed, a quick path to revenue self-sufficiency is a feature not a bug!)
> Projects will either be fellowships or grants: fellowships involve time in residence at the Mercatus Center in Northern Virginia; grants are one-time or slightly staggered payments to support a project.
> We encourage you to think big, but we also will consider very small grants or short fellowships if they might change the trajectory of your life. We encourage applications from all ages and all parts of the world."
Incredibly, they're taking no stake in successful ventures. They're just subsidizing high-reward ideas to encourage them.
If you read The Complacent Class and Stubborn Attachments—both highly recommended, you'll get a better idea of where Tyler is coming from and why this issue of decreasing dynamism is an issue he's so concerned about.
I also get the feeling there's an issue with skills recognition. Everyone has a lot of paper saying they know machine learning or finance, but very few people are confident they can identify someone who actually knows these skills. So we fall back on credentialism, and every job seeker knows that, and acts accordingly.
You can't say "tech" is where innovation happens, that's a tautology. Technos actually means new stuff. If I invent a new horse carriage, I've created new horse carriage tech. What might be more of a question is why software, or why batteries, or why mobile phones.
That said, a high-paying job can pay off your average student loan (~$31000) in 5-7 years without too much grief. What comes next tends to be that people find they like the lifestyle enabled by a low risk high income.
you need slack capacity to take risk. millenials haven't ever had it, and they've repeatedly recieved strong economic signals to carefully hoard any slack they can find rather than risk it to get more.
Ask yourself how you'd allocate money as the sum available becomes less and less. The answers are obvious.
This is one of the reasons I read HN daily, most of the time going straight for the comments and not to the article itself.
So thank you all who contribute and pour your hearts out around here!
Pretty simple: the US is all about rent seeking these days. It's in the sciences as well; most people gravitate to fashionable woo which isn't particularly reproducible, and may fall entirely outside of the class of falsifiable science. Look at all the noodle theorists, cosmologists and other such wankers in physics departments. Look at the travesty that is the F35, or the laughable efforts of the center of the tech world taking billions of dollars to build a mile of freaking subway.
Just getting into some Ivy League hole like Harvard; there's a huge industry of ding dongs who will set up non-profits, fake admission essays, and either tutor or fake test results; allowing sons and daughters of the ambitious to appear competent and useful citizens rather than parasites. This sort of travesty doesn't select for "creative," it just breeds an "elite" of rent-seeking sociopathic scammers.
The last 20 years of Silicon Valley/Bay Area development are effectively rent seeking. Google and company blew up newspaper advertising while cannibalizing newspaper content. Uber, AirBnB, etc, all the same. Really the big winners in the Bay Area were the goddamned landlords; turning Boomer retirement dollars invested in "new technologies" into huge returns on real estate.
There are entire books of historical philosophy and economics on this sort of thing: Brooks Adams recognized rent seeking as deadly to civilizations. Georgists were a similar intellectual current. I don't see it as even being recognized as a problem. Cowen at least notes that progress has slowed; an idea which meets with screeches of terrified denial from the "muh ipotato" crowd. At its core, though, is a problem with rent seeking.
What do you think rent seeking is? How is quoted sentence #2 an example?
Most monopolies fit the definition of rent seeking blood suckers, but Google really does. The Bell System provided a useful telephone network at least, as well as inventing the future with their research lab.
That's exactly what I think of people who destroy the value of useful words by misusing them. However, it's not rent seeking.
According to his Wikipedia page, Tyler Cowen is a committed free-market ideologue who still believes in the "meritocracy myth" (also formerly known as the "American Dream").
Got news for Cowen, this country's economy has long moved on since the days back when he earned that Harvard PhD!
As a next semester reading assignment for Cowen, I'd like to suggest Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
Mr. Cowan's food blog of DC/NoVA restaurants is pretty good though.
It's subtle but I think this is an important sentence in the article. The US has gone further and further down a path that signals to every young person that they are on their own. The safety nets are being eroded, and politicians are signaling that they want to erode them more. The young adults are paying into systems like Social Security that they expect to never benefit from, while the older generations keep voting to ensure that they get the benefit and the younger generations can deal with the fallout.
Why would any intelligent young person whose weighing the pros and cons, take a risk that might be a net benefit for the country, when the country wont help them in return?