"I’m trying to explain why “worker productivity holding capital constant” is so high."
But is there evidence that productivity has gone up much once you fully control for capital, both quantity and quality i.e. technology improvements? That's to say I'm curious what your evidence is that there's much of anything to explain here beyond technology/capital improvements?
I helped put up insulation in our church's new addition the other day. In just a couple of hours, I improved vastly in my technique, and I was helped by someone who got there earlier (sort of unroll it up, starting from the bottom, up to the top where you stand on top of the 12 foot ladder in a way that would horrify OSHA). Experience teaches all kinds of little tricks, if you keep on doing the same task over and over with minor variations. For flexibility, tho, education can help.
I agree with the point but it is hilarious that Bryan just openly admits that, yeah tenure and teaching are a pretty cushy gig but are almost completely unnecessary. Refreshing when you could never torture most liberal arts profs enough to get them to give up the mental gymnastics they do to defend formal education, despite their own students poor outcomes and irrelevancy of their teaching.
Overall I like the post, but I have to push back on “ In the pre-modern world, these practice opportunities were simply unavailable.”
The guild system that blanketed the European continent in the pre-Industrial era played a very important role in what was effectively on the job training for youths and young men. They also played a very important role in diffusing artisanal skills across the continent. When journeymen “graduated” they often had to relocate to a different city to establish their own workshops.
Yes, the guild system regulated price, quality and labor in individual cities, but this should not cause us to dismiss their important contributions to passing on skills to the next generation.
For more on the importance of skills to progress, you might want to read my post:
My attempt to combine Bryan's two guesses: We seem to realize, at increasingly younger ages, that mimicking a successful person leads to success (whether the mimicry is from direct training by a successful person or research). Many "tools" that we develop for training purposes are also meant to reproduce the knowledge/habits of effective/trained workers in less effective/untrained workers.
What if we studied a pin factory? Might find that division of labor, allowing an individual to be more specialized, was the key. That if that led to innovations that lowered transportation costs, then the extent of the market would increase, enabling even more specialization. But maybe some economist already looked at that.
I’m not sure I totally buy this, I’m an engineer and have also studied maths and both of them have been pretty useful in my actual job as an engineer and oil refinery commercial planner and optimiser. Granted I have forgotten a lot of both subjects but the grounding in the basics from formal education I think was pretty important. Could I have learnt all this just rocking up out of high school? Maybe but it would have been pretty annoying for those teaching me. The mass education of the basics, of one teacher and 60 students was an efficient way of doing this rather than one craftsperson one student. There is still a lot of on the job training that gets instilled.
Also for creating new stuff I think maybe not on the job site might lead to more new ideas, probably some dumb ones but also some good ones.
The efficiency argument might trump this though one master can maybe train 30 apprentices in their career but in a different setting such as a university that might scale to 1000. School for the sake of learning might also be useful. Russ Roberts from econtalk has this view, not sure if he is correct but he is pretty keen on it
Ultimately, productivity is a function of relevant knowledge. Definitions of economics which reference "scarce resources" are incorrect. What is scarce is relevant knowledge to recognize and utilize abundant quantities of previous useless stuff.
I think there is a difference between saying that individual workers don't become more productive by having more years of schooling and saying that overall societal levels of education are irrelevant.
Sure, probably most of that education isn't important even at a societal level but it does seem like different societies end up with different levels of baseline ability to cope with abstraction and other ways of thinking.
"I’m trying to explain why “worker productivity holding capital constant” is so high."
But is there evidence that productivity has gone up much once you fully control for capital, both quantity and quality i.e. technology improvements? That's to say I'm curious what your evidence is that there's much of anything to explain here beyond technology/capital improvements?
I helped put up insulation in our church's new addition the other day. In just a couple of hours, I improved vastly in my technique, and I was helped by someone who got there earlier (sort of unroll it up, starting from the bottom, up to the top where you stand on top of the 12 foot ladder in a way that would horrify OSHA). Experience teaches all kinds of little tricks, if you keep on doing the same task over and over with minor variations. For flexibility, tho, education can help.
I agree with the point but it is hilarious that Bryan just openly admits that, yeah tenure and teaching are a pretty cushy gig but are almost completely unnecessary. Refreshing when you could never torture most liberal arts profs enough to get them to give up the mental gymnastics they do to defend formal education, despite their own students poor outcomes and irrelevancy of their teaching.
> Modern programmers get good at programming by practicing programming, under the tutelage of skilled programmers.
Not really. Code is reviewed but the newly hired graduate is expected to write their own code largely unsupervised.
Overall I like the post, but I have to push back on “ In the pre-modern world, these practice opportunities were simply unavailable.”
The guild system that blanketed the European continent in the pre-Industrial era played a very important role in what was effectively on the job training for youths and young men. They also played a very important role in diffusing artisanal skills across the continent. When journeymen “graduated” they often had to relocate to a different city to establish their own workshops.
Yes, the guild system regulated price, quality and labor in individual cities, but this should not cause us to dismiss their important contributions to passing on skills to the next generation.
For more on the importance of skills to progress, you might want to read my post:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/technology-is-useless-without-the
My attempt to combine Bryan's two guesses: We seem to realize, at increasingly younger ages, that mimicking a successful person leads to success (whether the mimicry is from direct training by a successful person or research). Many "tools" that we develop for training purposes are also meant to reproduce the knowledge/habits of effective/trained workers in less effective/untrained workers.
What if we studied a pin factory? Might find that division of labor, allowing an individual to be more specialized, was the key. That if that led to innovations that lowered transportation costs, then the extent of the market would increase, enabling even more specialization. But maybe some economist already looked at that.
I’m not sure I totally buy this, I’m an engineer and have also studied maths and both of them have been pretty useful in my actual job as an engineer and oil refinery commercial planner and optimiser. Granted I have forgotten a lot of both subjects but the grounding in the basics from formal education I think was pretty important. Could I have learnt all this just rocking up out of high school? Maybe but it would have been pretty annoying for those teaching me. The mass education of the basics, of one teacher and 60 students was an efficient way of doing this rather than one craftsperson one student. There is still a lot of on the job training that gets instilled.
Also for creating new stuff I think maybe not on the job site might lead to more new ideas, probably some dumb ones but also some good ones.
The RIGHT education helps. As you said, apprenticeship under a master. Going to school just to get more education does not improve productivity.
The efficiency argument might trump this though one master can maybe train 30 apprentices in their career but in a different setting such as a university that might scale to 1000. School for the sake of learning might also be useful. Russ Roberts from econtalk has this view, not sure if he is correct but he is pretty keen on it
Ultimately, productivity is a function of relevant knowledge. Definitions of economics which reference "scarce resources" are incorrect. What is scarce is relevant knowledge to recognize and utilize abundant quantities of previous useless stuff.
Is holding capital constant easy to do? Won’t many people want to call these other factors human capital?
I think there is a difference between saying that individual workers don't become more productive by having more years of schooling and saying that overall societal levels of education are irrelevant.
Sure, probably most of that education isn't important even at a societal level but it does seem like different societies end up with different levels of baseline ability to cope with abstraction and other ways of thinking.