I’m currently reading a book I bet many of you have read, Nassim Taleb’s “The Black Swan”. I’m quite enjoying it so far.
He has an interesting discussion about choosing a profession which I shared with our 10th graders since, after all, they’ll be doing that pretty soon. He says the most important piece of advice he was ever given was:
A second-year Wharton student told me to get a profession that is “scalable,” that is, one in which you are not paid by the hour and thus subject to the limitations on the amount of your labor.
To elaborate, he divides jobs into professions that are “scalable”, which are part of Extremistan (more on that in a moment), and professions that are “unscalable" and part of Mediocristan.
Unscalable jobs
Most of you probably have unscalable jobs, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In an unscalable job, your income is directly connected to how much work you do. If you work in a paper mill and want to make more money that month, you can work overtime at the plant. If you’re a baker and want to make more money, you can sell more bread, which you have to bake first. Not exactly, but approximately, if you want to double your income, you have to double your work.
Now it doesn’t sound very appealing to live in Mediocristan, but I think Taleb (despite the advice he was given) would recommend that most people should live there. Just about anybody can hack it in Mediocristan, and importantly, there is predictability and stability there. It’s nice to get a highly-reliable paycheck from an employer. Stability helps people buy homes and start families and stuff. Stability is good.
Scalable jobs
In a scalable job, there is the potential to greatly increase your income with little additional work. If a younger J.K. Rowling writes a novel and it sells a hundred copies, she is hungry. But if it sells a hundred million copies she is very happy, and to just sell more requires little additional work on her part. Maybe a better example, if you trade stocks for a living, the amount of work required to trade ten shares and ten million shares is nearly the same. That’s a potential one million times gain in income with very little additional work. That’s a scalable profession.
So I share this with our tenth graders knowing, bunch of risk-taking young men (our tenth grade class is entirely male, actually), I’m sure the scalable jobs sound much more fun (they sound more fun to me too). But the danger, Taleb says, is that scalable jobs are part of Extremistan. It’s closer to a winner-takes-all field. For every J.K Rowling that has tremendous success, how many failed wannabe authors are there? A whole whole whole bunch. It’s dangerous in Extremistan.
But the world is becoming more extreme
But the world is becoming more extreme and, in fact, professions that used to live in Mediocristan have (usually because of technological changes) been moving over to Extremistan. A couple hundred years ago (and Carl Trueman regularly makes this point too), to enjoy music was a live, communal activity. If you were a good pianist in a city the size of Lansing, say, you might make a good living being regularly hired by people here and there to come play at their event. But today, if you want to hear a concert, do you go hire someone? No, you probably just open Spotify. And so now a very few people, worldwide, have everyone listening to them, and if your good local pianist is paid at all for their piano playing maybe they’re offering tutoring to children. The profession has moved from Mediocristan to Extremistan.
Maybe even more obvious would be acting / theater. If you want to go see a “production”, do you go see a locally produced play? Every once in a long while perhaps, but most Americans would just go to a movie theater (or watch at home) and watch a film produced by some production company in California. The number of people required to produce modern films is much smaller than the number required to produce local plays all across the country. The few actors who star in those films do very well financially (they were the successful people in Extremistan), whereas the vast majority of America’s actors make little or no money at all.
(I’m a teacher, and for the moment most teaching is still done locally. How long shall that persist?)
And it isn’t just professions
And, to end on a scarier note, this isn’t just about professions, the whole world has become more extreme, more unpredictable. A few thousand years ago, if you wanted to kill ten thousand of your enemies, you had to dispatch ten thousand of your own men to hack them with swords or something. Today one person could press a button.
Indeed, a “graph” that comes to mind from time to time is the number of other humans, one human (or a very small group, let’s say disease researchers at a lab in China for example) could conceivably kill. The number has gone up and up over time, and I see no reason at all why it will not eventually equal the population of the entire planet. That’s one of our dangers today, and I do think it’s a reason techno-optimists like Elon Musk so much want to get some humans off the planet. Just from the technological-danger perspective, anyway, it’s risky to have us all here.
It is also much easier to improve the world at scale now. Plant and animal breeding/genetics is a good example. 700 years ago an especially productive corn plant perhaps never got out of the valley in southern Mexico in which it emerged. Now, it can quickly spread to every continent corn is grown on.