all a farce

"When George H. W. Bush in the 1970s and 1980s threatened to “unleash Chang” on his..."

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:32:31 -0800

“When George H. W. Bush in the 1970s and 1980s threatened to “unleash Chang” on his tennis opponents, he was referring to China’s onetime strongman and thereafter Taiwan’s dictator Chiang Kaishek, leader of the Nationalist Party, the man who had largely reunified China in the 1920s with his army’s “Northern Expedition,” lost the Chinese Civil War to Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party, and then taken refuge with his Guomindang party cadres on Taiwan. After the start of the Korean War, the American 7th Fleet protected Chiang (and Taiwan) from Mao’s People’s Liberation Army. Republican wingnuts, however, pretended that the 7th Fleet actually protected Mao’s Communists (who had, after all, won the Chinese Civil War) from Chiang’s Nationalists (who had, after all, lost it) by keeping Chiang Kaishek leashed. They periodically called for the U.S. to “unleash Chiang Kaishek”—so that Chiang, you see, could invade and conquer the Chinese mainland. When George H. W. Bush, playing tennis (and losing) in the 1970s and 1980s, would threaten to “unleash Chiang,” he was mocking the right-wing nuts of his generation. But George H. W. Bush’s sons—even the smart one, Jeb—never got the joke. They, you see, didn’t know enough about world history or even the history of the Republican Party to know who Chiang Kaishek was, or what “Unleash Chiang!” meant. Hence Jeb Bush’s explanation that twentieth-century Chinese nationalist, socialist, general, and dictator Chiang Kaishek was a “mystical warrior… who believes in conservative principles, believes in entrepreneurial capitalism, believes in moral values that underpin a free society.””

- Brad DeLong: Hoisted from the Archives: Unleash Chiang Kai-Shek!!

George Saunders, "Tenth of December"

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 20:43:09 -0800

George Saunders, "Tenth of December"

"Imagine for a moment a world where all of the Repair shops and Automobile Mechanics in the country..."

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 10:34:51 -0800

“

Imagine for a moment a world where all of the Repair shops and Automobile Mechanics in the country formed an association. As part of that union, they all agreed that no one would work on any vehicle unless the car owner signed an arbitration agreement. Same goes for the hiring of mechanics — they had to sign as well.

Now imagine when you had a dispute over a repair, you went to the Repair Garage & Automobile Mechanics Arbitration Association. How do you think that would turn out? That is the FINRA arbitration system, only instead of disputes over $600 repairs, its $100,000 of losses — in some cases millions of dollars. What are the odds you will get a fair hearing in this private, opaque, non transparent, literally Wall Street owned system. Its a national embarrassment, a legal sham.

Welcome to the Kangaroo Court of Wall Street.

”

- The Kangaroo Court of Wall Street | The Big Picture

"Back in 2005 I did an evil, evil thing. Discovering the proliferation of websites where student..."

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 06:57:30 -0800

“Back in 2005 I did an evil, evil thing. Discovering the proliferation of websites where student plagiarists could copy essays, I wrote a Trojan horse paper about the Magna Carta and seeded it on a few plagiarism sites. The essay is basically wrong from beginning to end. Amongst other silliness, it claims that King John’s titles included Duke of Hazzard, and observes that “peasants were reduced to eating burage and socage.” It also invents a fictitious war against Flanders Fland (a region on the coast of Luxembourg) and cites such scholarly tomes as Bollock and Maidenhead’s classicInterminable History of the English Law.”

- College Misery: Henchminion Sends In the Tale of “The Magna Carta Essay!”

"…like a gambler admitting the fiction of a pack of cards, a corruptible paradise of two-headed..."

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 12:04:23 -0800

“…like a gambler admitting the fiction of a pack of cards, a corruptible paradise of two-headed people.”

- Jorge Luis Borges, “The Art of Verbal Abuse”

"In the first part of the paper, D&S analyze the optimal tax rate on top earners. And they argue..."

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 07:55:17 -0800

“

In the first part of the paper, D&S analyze the optimal tax rate on top earners. And they argue that this should be the rate that maximizes the revenue collected from these top earners — full stop. Why? Because if you’re trying to maximize any sort of aggregate welfare measure, it’s clear that a marginal dollar of income makes very little difference to the welfare of the wealthy, as compared with the difference it makes to the welfare of the poor and middle class. So to a first approximation policy should soak the rich for the maximum amount — not out of envy or a desire to punish, but simply to raise as much money as possible for other purposes.

Now, this doesn’t imply a 100% tax rate, because there are going to be behavioral responses – high earners will generate at least somewhat less taxable income in the face of a high tax rate, either by actually working less or by pushing their earnings underground. Using parameters based on the literature, D&S suggest that the optimal tax rate on the highest earners is in the vicinity of 70%.

”

- http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/taxing-job-creators/

The incomplete logic of the American marketplace today

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 09:32:00 -0800

There’s an enabling logic in contemporary American capitalism that has put us where we are today. It goes like this: as a highly-skilled, well-educated member of society, there is in fact an ethical mandate to embrace cupidity and maximize profit to the exclusion of other goals. For, as you’ve been taught, when the most capable members of society are competing against one another in a marketplace with that single-minded purpose, society collectively benefits: consumer prices are lower, investors receive the highest return (meaning the highest retirement income for pensioners and 401k-holders), and technological innovation progresses at the fastest possible clip. By embracing profit, you are helping navigate the ship of humanity with maximal efficiency toward its Enlightenment-style singularity.

But this logic is incomplete. A market that produces these social outcomes is of a very particular structure: it is genuinely competitive. It is the second-order effects of that competitive pressure — the price reduction wars between competing managers, and concomitant cost-squeezing that entails — which actually produce these social outcomes, rather than profit maximization in isolation. Where profit maximization is not accompanied by competition, the social welfare is very simply not served by it.

And the key omitted element of this logic is that a competitive market requires two external forces: (1) effective contract-enforcement in all cases; and, (2) public-minded regulators in most cases. The first nearly goes without saying, but requires a legal system that values the general commercial concern over the specific. The second is derived from the fact that most goods in and of themselves are not of a structure conducive (without some set of external rules) to competition. A well-governed market ruleset that prevents severe dips into such disequilibria as monopoly is required to make competition work for the common good.

It is on this count that we’ve gone horribly off course. When policy influence and regulatory arbitrage became legitimized tools of competition — pursued to the exclusion of cost-cutting, of price reduction — we severed the link between profit maximization and social benefit. When changing the rules of the game became easier than improving under those rules, the market’s utility as social tool failed.

But the incomplete, enabling logic has calcified into ethos for too many. The map from profit maximization to social benefit is a powerful, counterintuitive insight. But at such a very high level of abstraction, it is simply not very useful or accurate. A more transparently absurd analogy would be saying that the big takeaway from medicine is that avoiding medical care will lead to better long-term health. There’s a kernel of truth here: if a person engages in healthy behavior that prevents illness and obviates the need for acute care, then they are more likely to be healthier in the long run. But you can see how this heuristic is terribly unhelpful for guiding the actual decisions people would confront. It’s too general; it doesn’t elaborate upon any of the causal nuances required to actually guide people toward the aim of better health. And the enabling logic of American capitalism today is equally dangerous.

I do not have some tangible policy prescription here, because I think such policies require a very basic level of political buy-in at the ideological level that isn’t feasible until we collectively agree to some very basic points:

- Collective social benefit is the aim of any type of societal enterprise.

- Markets and profit are means to the end of social benefit, not ends themselves.

- Profit itself does not make an activity socially beneficial.

- The burden of proof for social benefit is on those profiting, not society.

- When profit and social benefit are clearly at odds, social benefit should hold primacy.

Putting the cart back behind the horse, I think we just might have a starting point to make capitalism work again in America. And, if we actually put social benefit ahead of profit-as-evidence-of-benefit, who knows? Maybe some engineers and scientists just might get off Wall Street and back to playing the positive-sum games of society.

Most of economics can be done on the back of a napkin, but most things done on the back of a napkin...

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 17:56:34 -0700

Most of economics can be done on the back of a napkin, but most things done on the back of a napkin are not economics.

(Alternately: fuck you, Arthur Laffer.)

"Then, in the middle of the recall madness, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines opened. As the movie’s..."

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 17:51:59 -0700

“Then, in the middle of the recall madness, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines opened. As the movie’s leading machine, he was expected to appear on The Tonight Show to promote it. En route he experienced a familiar impulse—the impulse to do something out of the ordinary. “I just thought, This will freak everyone out,” he says. “It’ll be so funny. I’ll announce that I am running. I told Leno I was running. And two months later I was governor.” He looks over at me, pedaling as fast as I can to keep up with him, and laughs. “What the fuck is that? ””

- California and Bust | Business | Vanity Fair

I voted for Bustamante.

"@Nouriel Nouriel Roubini: US/EZ/UK sinking in a recession.Issue is no longer double-dip or not:..."

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 07:40:51 -0700

“@Nouriel Nouriel Roubini: US/EZ/UK sinking in a recession.Issue is no longer double-dip or not: rather whether mild 1 or a severe 1 with a new global financial crisis 4 minutes ago via Twitter for BlackBerry®”

- Nouriel Roubini Calls the Double Dip

"Jan Pen, a Dutch economist who died last year, came up with a striking way to picture inequality...."

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 22:15:55 -0700

“

Jan Pen, a Dutch economist who died last year, came up with a striking way to picture inequality. Imagine people’s height being proportional to their income, so that someone with an average income is of average height. Now imagine that the entire adult population of America is walking past you in a single hour, in ascending order of income.

The first passers-by, the owners of loss-making businesses, are invisible: their heads are below ground. Then come the jobless and the working poor, who are midgets. After half an hour the strollers are still only waist-high, since America’s median income is only half the mean. It takes nearly 45 minutes before normal-sized people appear. But then, in the final minutes, giants thunder by. With six minutes to go they are 12 feet tall. When the 400 highest earners walk by, right at the end, each is more than two miles tall.

”

- The rise and rise of the cognitive elite | The Economist

Notes Toward an Understanding of Obama's Economic Policymaking

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 06:23:31 -0700

Notes Toward an Understanding of Obama's Economic Policymaking:

Brad DeLong excerpts (and analyzes) Ron Suskind on the economic policymaking regime of the Obama Administration.

"The problem starts somewhere around the mid-20s, when we get thrown out into the world to do..."

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 01:13:24 -0700

“The problem starts somewhere around the mid-20s, when we get thrown out into the world to do “whatever we want to” and we realize that the majority of that time will be spent surviving and helping others to survive.”

- 80% of People Quietly Despise Their Lives | How To Split An Atom

"If people do make history, as this democratic view suggests, then two people make twice as much..."

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 23:50:58 -0700

“If people do make history, as this democratic view suggests, then two people make twice as much history as one. Since there are almost 7 billion people alive today, it follows that they are making seven times as much history as the 1 billion alive in 1811…By this reckoning, over 28% of all the history made since the birth of Christ was made in the 20th century. Measured in years lived, the present century, which is only ten years old, is already “longer” than the whole of the 17th century…Over 23% of all the goods and services made since 1AD were produced from 2001 to 2010…”

- Quantifying history: Two thousand years in one chart | The Economist

"Listening to the graduating students… Those majoring in peace and conflict studies,..."

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 20:38:28 -0700

“Listening to the graduating students… Those majoring in peace and conflict studies, development studies, and rhetoric… It seems, reading through the lines of what they say, that the modal teacher in those programs approaches their educational mission as though they have a dire and urgent need to deprogram young minds that have been enslaved to the harsh market-ueber-alles doctrines of neoliberal capitalism and classical economics. The problem is that these nineteen year olds are from the upper-middle class of twenty-first century California and are at base do-gooder meritocrats deeply suspicious of large greedy corporations that repeatedly and recurrently try to sell them junk that they don’t really need. They have not only not been programmed by the ideologies of neoliberal market capitalism and classical economics, they barely know that they exist at an ideological level. So their teachers come off, much of the time, as people who look like they are engaged in a desperate hand-to-hand struggle with a vicious antagonist—but one who is not only invisible but who isn’t really there—and so they come off as unbalanced themselves… If you are going to turn every class into a wrestle with the ghosts of Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Robert Nozick, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher, you will look silly unless you first make sure your students know who you are wrestling with, and why your struggle is such a desperate one—why their arguments have force and power…”

- Note to Self: Stray Thoughts on Some Undergraduate Majors Here at Berkeley that I Do Not Influence at All…

"Also, I remember that everything at that time was very fuzzy and abstract. I took a lot of..."

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 22:29:09 -0700

“Also, I remember that everything at that time was very fuzzy and abstract. I took a lot of psychology and political science, literature. Classes where everything was fuzzy and abstract and open to interpretation and then those interpretations were open to still more interpretations. I used to write my class papers on the typewriter the day they were due and usually I got some type of B with ‘Interesting in places’ or ‘Not too bad!’ written underneath the grade as an instructional comment. The whole thing was just going through the motions; it didn’t mean anything—even the whole point of the classes themselves was that nothing meant anything, that everything was abstract and endlessly interpretable. Except, of course, there was no argument about the fact that you had to turn in the papers, you had to go through the motions themselves, although nobody ever explained just why, what your ultimate motivation was supposed to be.”

- David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (§22)

"I’m not claiming this is because I’ve achieved some kind of zenlike detachment from..."

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 08:16:36 -0700

“I’m not claiming this is because I’ve achieved some kind of zenlike detachment from material things. I’m talking about something more mundane. A historical change has taken place, and I’ve now realized it. Stuff used to be valuable, and now it’s not.”

- Paul Graham, “Stuff” http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html

"Progressives tend to be enthusiastic about sticking it to every available Man other than the one who..."

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 07:31:27 -0700

“Progressives tend to be enthusiastic about sticking it to every available Man other than the one who conferred their prized college degree. People who are born with an abundance of genetic, financial, and social advantages are least susceptible to the profound academic and managerial shortcomings of higher education. It’s the marginal students who get hurt when costs rise and teaching is neglected. But those people tend not to work for legislatures, think tanks, and magazines.”

- Kevin Carey, Education Sector: http://www.educationsector.org/publications/rick-perry-higher-education-visionary-seriously-0

"Two-thirds of the world’s poorest people—those with less than $1.25 a day—live in middle-income..."

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 08:51:48 -0700

“Two-thirds of the world’s poorest people—those with less than $1.25 a day—live in middle-income countries, such as India, which increasingly are donors as well as recipients.”

- Official development assistance: Aid 2.0 | The Economist

WHAT IS TO BE DONE? (by us, overeducated, underexperienced, putzy beings confused as hell, like a child wandering into a theater, except that this theater is, in actuality, the harshest job market in 30 years, and instead of children, we're ostensibly adults, albeit ones who have been institutionalized for the entire duration of our existence to this point)

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 12:10:29 -0700

(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.