(Title reappropriated from the reappropriation by Lenin)
This is a post about careers, life, liberty, law, and lobsters, flushing out some ideas I’ve held in my mind-vice for far too long. The logic goes that the best way to rigorously define an idea is to force yourself to put it into concrete form. The second best way is to blog it. I’ve chosen a hybrid form.
I would honestly and sincerely love any constructive feedback, in particular empirical criticism, proposed analytical strengthening, or related thinking and work on this subject that I should consider.
-Dave
A proposed analytical framework for career evaluation criteria (or, consider the lobster)
I shall argue that there are three criteria that we should use in evaluating potential career paths (or, minimally, as a framework for nixing options). I shall attempt to do so with a minor sense of humor, wit, and aplomb. And if I fail, I assure you it is not for want of caffeine.
Three criteria for evaluating a career:
1. Day-to-day enjoyment
How much do I enjoy the day-to-day work? Really! When I’m sitting, doing this job, do I hate life? Am I plotting my elaborate vengeance against God/Loki/Fate/Bill for this? Or do I kinda like it? Do I find myself wanting to go back to it after lunch, or work through lunch because it’s got me all riled up in a good way?
2. Impact
What impact, how impactful, and how important is that impact relative to others? And here I’m referring to *my marginal contribution*, not some nebulous output, like what my organization does, either chiefly or secondarily. I’m talking about the fact that my being at work this month and working hard yields what difference in the world. Put another way, both Philip Morris and the Gates Foundation have accountants (I’m guessing the pay grades are somewhat different; though, on second thought, maybe not).
3. Compensation
What standard of living do I want? What’s the minimum that would keep me satisfied, if I’m trading off for the other criteria? Does this career put me on a path to make enough when I’m forty that I’m also happy then with my compensation? (KIDS, UGH.) What things outside my work do I find joyful, and would my compensation allow for that? (Musicians shouldn’t be professionals; that’s not just on practical grounds. It’s an argument for another day, but an important one.)
Let’s get complicated!
Now, here’s the tough part: how you rank these really is up to you. There’s no straight-and-narrow answer, and be extremely wary of anyone who suggests otherwise. There’s a great deal of money in convincing people their own rank-order of these isn’t right [1][2]. That’s because, ultimately, this decision process is almost entirely governed by two rather tenuous factors: (1) ethical/moral questions which have no objectively “best” answers, and (2) empirical assessments of causation (aka, the-way-the-world-works) that are, at best, tenuous generalizations based on low-quality data and, at worst, dart throws.
The ethical questions are, honestly, quite tough. Read from the Greeks up through Hume all the way on through Rawls — being sure not to skip Bentham and Mill — and you’ll begin to see how the questions might well be legitimately construed as intellectual sinkholes when confronting a practical question like whose cube to reside for 9 hours tomorrow [3]. So I’ve gotten to the point of endorsing the Google approach: don’t be evil [4]. That’s pretty much the only criterion here that I really apply to other people in judgement: if they’re doing evil, know they’re doing evil, but are okay with that, the judgement-eyes come out. Otherwise, let people be. We’re all neurotic apes whose brains developed under conditions where contemplating the effect of one’s actions on more than a 50-being cohort was never an issue, so give folks a break. Unless they’re being evil. Then JUDGEMENT-EYES.
The empirical questions are, in theory, more tractable, but practically similar in difficulty. My paltry academic background is as a student of political economy: how the disparate logics of government, markets, and organizational complexity (overlapping both) can produce social value, and which structures serve to best produce the heterogeneous goods sought by people working frantically to achieve some sense of vague contentment. And the truth, in my humble opinion, is that the space for uncertainty in an empirical assessment of the impact of a given gig (from task on up to role and institution) is #$*#ing big. Really. Just *@#-all huge.
Think of the elements comprising the social safety net, generally provided by some combination of public sector bureaucracies (requiring such a scale to implement such programs for such large populations) and private philanthropic organizations. If you take some end (let’s say, domestic hunger reduction), there’s a behemoth causal logic to how that good (food) is provided. Food stamps are provided by a public sector actor, but the beneficiaries purchase goods sold by private market actors.
Hrm: so do I work for the USDA? Do I work in OMB? Or do I rise in a massive-growth food supplier that exploits economies of scale to lower food prices? What’s, honestly, my marginal impact from within if it’s profit-maximizing and there’s pretty much one way to do that? What if there are two ways? Argh.
And in this complex interaction, we also find that the question arises of quality versus quality. Was our goal keeping people satiated and safe of the sensation of hunger? Cheetos and soda do a great job of that, and at a great price! Unfortunately, as it turns out, our implicit operationalization of “hunger reduction” might had more to it. What about the decade-old Walmart argument? (Walmart brings in cheaper goods, and is a great boon for low-income communities, except that the boon need be discounted by whatever offsetting impact it has on employment. This — despite what either bureaucrats, lobbyists, academics, or advocates will state — is really, really hard to know.)
And once you start thinking with serious intellectual honesty about the production of social value, you start to realize that (1) unitary command and its concomitant big marginal impact for a given individual’s efforts is extraordinarily rare, and (2) where there *does* exist such big individual marginal impact, it’s largely governed by much bigger structural constraints that are, again, stochastic (or probabilistic). As an example, likely the biggest impact on SNAP (food stamps) would be a significant upping of funding and laxing of eligibility criteria. And if you watch enough West Wing, sure, you can see situations at a big negotiating table where Josh could make that happen. But what external political factors set up who was at the negotiating table? (Should we, then, like many eschew the programmatic/policy work for political ops, if that’s the larger governing factor? How much of election outcomes are genuinely about the efforts of the partisans versus bigger things, like, say, jobs? Should I then work at the Fed and try to push for… BAH.) Also, what had to be given up, and who does that affect? What’s the offset?
So: another intellectual sinkhole, albeit a more tractable one.
So, wait, uh, then, what *is* to be done?
Now that we’ve done our good job as undergraduate thinkers by deconstructing each proposition by negative argument [insert Foucault allusion/joke/knock], let’s get back to the positive side. We started with a proposed framework for evaluative criteria: enjoyment, impact, and compensation. Even admitting the complexity of the choice, we can at least use this framework to *eliminate* some career paths. For example: I believe quite firmly (and the NYT has, most recently, been disseminating the Good Word to the masses) that law school is a trap.
It’s a system of profound market failure that exploits the fact that most kids leaving undergrad don’t have *any* analytical framework beyond the broadly-held social heuristics and cognitive tactics that have gotten them through to this point. The problem is that all the little tricks and approaches to problems that working one’s way up in the institutional hierarchy of school imposes upon you — through positive/negative behavioral reinforcement — aren’t particularly helpful in the work-world, much less in the bizarre, certainly unique task of choosing a career. The problem does not bear the contours [5] of any practical problem or decision that people have had to make up to this point, least of all because it’s about broader life questions that are all but held constant by the institutional track we’re guided down.
Let’s get back to the specific case of law school since it’s just oh-so-much-fun. I recommend reading the above linked articles to get a better sense of the stylized empirics, but the synopsis goes like this: if you get into a top 10 school, want to do Big Law where you’re overworked but highly-compensated, or willing to do public-service work with low-compensation, *and* you intrinsically enjoy the work that lawyers practically do [6], then maybe go to law school. Otherwise, do something else. Really. The starting salary distribution of bimodal — one peak around $115k (Big Law) and one peak around $60k (everyone else). The lower peak is, once discounted by the debt repayment, a quite crappy return on your investment. Most people from upper middle class backgrounds who take for granted said lifestyle will be disappointed by the lifestyle afforded by a JD. Combine that with the fact that attorneys consistently rank among the lowest in terms of self-reported job satisfaction, and the fact that most of law is not profoundly impactful (and that which is on the margin is often not compensated well at all), and you have the makings of a low score from our framework.
Just to be pedagogically sound (or pedantic), let’s review. A JD is, pretty much, a bifurcated good: Good A, the top-tier school (or best at not-top-tier school), or Good B, a not-top-tier degree [7]. Good A scores poorly on enjoyment, but well on *either* compensation or impact, though rarely both. Good B scores poorly on all 3 counts. So, to be incredibly, profoundly, almost stupidly simplistic: a top-tier JD scores 1/3, and a low-tier scores 0/3. This bodes poorly.
So what does this say? What it says to me first is that the old social heuristic that a law degree is a good straight-shot to the upper middle class is neither empirically accurate [8] nor a good choice if you go beyond the implicit values there (i.e., upper middle class compensation and status are the key metrics) and apply a broader judgement that includes values like impact and enjoyment.
And that’s a big message I’d like to convey: social heuristics are lagging, not leading, indicators. Don’t do what your parents would have you do; their data’s probably old. This, however, is the substance of a future argument.
I want to emphasize that I don’t blame people who go to law school at all: everyone’s faced the same terrible job market out of undergrad, and social heuristics have traditionally been very useful because good data was, traditionally, so expensive to acquire. What’s more, law schools are a cottage industry created by the confluence of a few distinct failures: federal guarantee of all student loans and the aid package structuring, federal law allowing student debt to remain even after bankruptcy, and the high-margin revenue model of such schools (which can be ethically justified in oh so many ways [9] by the academic administrators who seek to cross-subsidize the oh-so-unfortunate humanities departments, inter alia, doing so much uncompensated good for Knowledge).
But it doesn’t obviate a proposition I quite earnestly believe: if people thought more seriously about what they wanted out of a career as a part of life, the vast majority of people currently pursuing that path would not do so. This in turn would mean demand for law degrees (i.e., the willingness of people to attend such schools at such a price) would fall, and maybe — just maybe — this
Thus endeth the pedantic sermon from the Mount (or, to use a more appropriate geographical metaphor, the Valley) of No-Debt.
Okay, great; nice rant; but you still didn’t answer my question, schmuck
Fair enough. I’ll be honest. I’m not going to answer your question. I may have (*just* may have) misled you intentionally with the title, implying that I could resolve your existential angst in short order with but one blog post. I can’t do that. What I *can* do, is suggest a way to approach the problem that, I think, is relatively efficient, intellectually honest, and as rigorous as a poorly-defined problem can accommodate.
1. Set your goals
Figure out what values matter to you, figure out a way to honestly assess jobs/careers in light of these values, and then go.
2. Collect data
The world is much more transparent than it was even 5 years ago; “operationalizing” these broad values into tangible data (taking an idea and making it into something measurable) that you can collect and compare is easier than it has ever been, and only getting easier by the year/day/hour. The Bureau of Labor Statistics rules. So I say: go with Gauss, my son.
3. Critically assess everything
People are paid to influence actions; the job choice is, actually, arguably the biggest case of this phenomenon [10]. When you hear an argument, think about why it’s being made, and who/what end your buying it would serve. A nice rule of thumb (OH NO, A HEURISTIC) I’ve found is if a statement someone is making goes against their own interest in a situation, give it a bit more weight [11]. Or, more concisely, always be asking: “Cui bono?”
4. Don’t stress
Do you have food? Shelter? Maybe health insurance or just access to a free clinic? Then stop worrying. You’re still in the highest echelon of wealth in the world and, in fact, in human history. In the hierarchy of human needs, yours are almost certainly met. So relax, take your time, and think before jumping. There’s really no rush.
Potential future related posts:
- The supply-demand dynamics of the career market (or, why being selfish ain’t so bad, as long as you’re also being honest with yourself, and not evil)
- Social heuristics are lagging, not leading, indicators
- Law services: structural supply transformation, commodification, and, oh crap, I’m underwater on my loans
- Developing an efficient search algorithm for careers (what makes for a good early-career job, and why is that choice different from the career choice)
- Don’t network, just geek out
- Let them wear Prada: living off capitalism’s leftovers
Endnotes:
[1] Take the HR reps at an Ivy League career fair: do you really think every kid who goes Analyst at [Input: I-Bank/Consulting Firm] really believes in the impact of their role or the day-to-day enjoyment *isn’t* a meaningful evaluative metric when he or she steps into the (pristine) banquet hall? Hardly. But there’s a lot of money in being able to recruit kids who have shown themselves willing and able to be worked to the bones on things of trivial ultimate consequence/enjoyment (read: winning the Ivy League admissions tournament out of high school). Why? If one of your core value propositions is the ability to get a client question answered out of a Thursday evening meeting by the Monday market opening, you require people who will not simply up and refuse when you call them away from their niece’s first birthday to crunch Nebraskan municipal bond data that’s, at best, tangentially relevant to what the client will ultimately decide. (But always overdeliver: especially when you can do it on the back of someone else’s labors. This, my friends, is a foundational MBA approach.) But if this is a product your firm offers, then you require that scalable labor; heavily-indebted Ivy League graduates without any tangible skillset beyond general intelligence, meticulous attention to detail, and sleep-deprivation endurance represent the commodity tier of the symbolic analyst labor market. James Kwak has a nice piece on the Ivy League graduate’s mentality if you’re further interested in entertaining this rant.
[2] Similarly, do not underestimate the *non-monetary* incentive for people to try and re-work your life choices. People, particularly those well into their careers with no hope of movement, are possessed of an intrinsic psychological drive to affirm their own choices. This manifests itself in the questioning of others’ without much consideration for divergent values, or hierarchical ranking of values like the above. The next time a tenured professor tells you you should really consider the academic route, ask her what the tenure-track placement rates for her advisees were this past year. (Actually, don’t ask that just then. Ask someone who doesn’t have the ability to scuttle your future with a bad letter of rec.)
[3] Consider, for example, that there is no formal, rigorous philosophical proof affirming the notion of the counterfactual. If you set the bar that high, it turns out most of normative social science is in fact underspecified and invalid. Bummer. I guess kids who get the question on opportunity costs wrong on their Econ 1 final are actually the raw material of moral philosophers; or zen masters; or maybe just alcoholics, hard to parse out the causal chain here since there’s bound to be heterogeneity.
[4] Editorial note: love the sort of engineering mentality implicit here; specify your function only to the level of practical utility.
[5] Worse yet is when it looks to one like a problem that one has confronted before. But one is wrong. Oh, lord, how wrong.
[6] This is *not* the work of law school itself. Perhaps my favorite joke on this matter is that there are two types of lawyers: those who loved law school but hate practicing law, and those who hated law school and hate practicing law.
[7] Note a big advantage for applicants is that you more or less know where you’ll end up before committing to the cost. That said, we’re assuming applicants aren’t already emotionally committed having fought the annoying battle of the LSAT, recommendation, and admissions game. I’d like to hope people would see these sunk costs as such, but, hey, I’d be pissed too and might make an irrational choice after so much work and annoyance.
[8] Seriously. Look at the salary data for recent grads, *not* historical earnings.
[9] This is not to say these are good, rigorous, or intellectually honest justifications, but hey, that’s not their job.
[10] I’m tempted to get straight-up political here, and go all Weber, with some ideology and Protestant ethic and yadayada — but I’ll hold back.
[11] I swear to God, if someone makes criticizes me for borrowing from law in this regard, and concomitantly being a hypocrite, I will lose my #%@&: I did not pay $120,000 to learn the statement-against-interest exception, nor is it anything more than sheer common sense, a.k.a., the business school literature.
