Minimum Wage Laws
Tag: freedom
Three Daily Questions
From the Praxis Blog.
- Do I like what I’m doing?
- Is it getting me somewhere I want to go?
- What am I giving up to be here?
These seem like simple questions. Obvious even. No need to be reminded of them.
Yet so much of what we do is the result of habit, social norms, envy, fear, outside pressure, or laziness in thought and action. We follow paths already worn whether or not they’re a good fit for us. The first step in the process of waking up to a full and free life is asking these simple questions.
It’s harder than you think.
It will take more time to answer than you think.
That’s OK. Take your time. Wrestle with the questions. Don’t lie to yourself. Don’t ask them with a preconceived idea of what kind of person answers this way or that. If you do you’re likely to give answers that reflect the person you think others will find cool rather than the person you actually are.
Even if everyone in the world envies what you’re doing and thinks it’s the pinnacle of success, fun, or fulfillment, if you don’t like it be honest with yourself. I know so many people who stay in crappy situations simply because they feel guilty about not liking something others would love. You’re not them. And there’s nothing noble about suffering through something you hate unless you are firmly committed to it as a clear and definite route to something you love in relatively short order.
If you don’t know where you want to go it’s especially bad to suffer through things you don’t like. You’re suffering for no particular reason with no known payoff. It’s OK to not know where you want to go. If you don’t, start exploring things until you get a better idea. The fastest way to find out where you want to go is to try things and eliminate the ones you really dislike.
Finally, even if you have an idea where you want to go and you’re doing something you dislike right now to get there, you need to compare to the alternatives. Just because an elaborate and expensive exotic diet and mountainside yoga routine could help you lose 10 pounds, could you have lost the same weight doing something cheaper and less painful like portion control and a little cardio?
The danger of having someplace you want to go – a goal – is that it can blind you to opportunity cost. If you know you want to reach X, and you know Y is a way to do it, you may overlook the fact that X is a lot more painful than A, B, or C, all of which could also get you to X and give you a lot more in the process. Just because you have a goal doesn’t mean the common path to reach it is the only or best.
Ask yourself these questions a lot. Don’t get panicky. Don’t walk out on your boss in the middle of work because you got bored for a few minutes. This isn’t about being flaky or avoiding difficulty. It’s about being resolute and facing difficulty and fear head on but knowing why you’re doing it. It’s not about the path of least resistance, it’s about having a reason – your reason – for fighting. It’s about choosing your own challenges instead of floating downstream just because.
You might be amazed how many things you’re doing that you dislike, that have no connection to somewhere you want to go, and that are causing you to miss amazing and valuable experiences.
Questions are powerful things.
Get Off the Conveyor Belt
Excerpted from Freedom Without Permission.
The reason many people fear opting out is because of a paradigm of linear, externally-defined progress that I call the conveyor belt mentality. This mentality is holding you back and must be demolished. It goes something like this:
You are plopped onto a production line at whatever stage you’re supposed to be based on arbitrary things like your age, class, and gender. Then you let the belt do the work. By essentially doing nothing but what you’re told, you get handed certificates at each next stage. 18? Unless you did something truly outrageous, here’s your diploma. 22? Here’s your degree. Degree? Here’s your job (or so you’re led to believe).
Most people believe this and live it. It’s revealed in the kinds of questions we ask strangers. “What grade are you in?” “What’s your major?” “What kind of job do you have?” If your answer is not the appropriate one for your age and assumed station in life, people worry. “I dropped out of school to do X” is cause for concern to almost everybody, no matter what X is. “I’m a sophomore at university Y” is cause for comfort to almost everybody, no matter what you’re actually doing with your time at Y. So long as you’re at your station, no one much cares if you’re productive, happy, successful, fulfilled, or free.
Parents obsessively check their child against a list of averages on everything from height to reading ability and stress if junior is not “on track.” No one really ever asks who built the track, where it’s going, or whether junior has any interest in arriving there.
The conveyor belt sucks. It’s not taking you where you want to go. Aggregates are not individuals and your goals and abilities are not definable by summing the abilities and behaviors of everyone your age and dividing by the population size. Time to get off.
It’s scary at first, because your mind is trained to think that progress is defined by moving on the conveyor belt in the only direction it goes. Maybe really special or hard working people go faster, like the people who run up an escalator instead of letting the machine do all the work, but everyone is channeled in the same narrow corral moving in the same direction. That’s not progress.
Progress, for you, is moving towards your own goals and desires and becoming more fulfilled as you grow and overcome challenges. There are as many directions as there are people. Once you jump off the conveyor belt, the hardest part is actually discovering what makes you come alive, then being honest and unashamed of what you discover. It’s worth it. You can never start too soon.
The thing is, the mold-breakers who jump the belt don’t struggle any more or less than those who stay on. They have a hard time too. But it’s a different kind of pain. It’s the pain of working to achieve a goal they’re passionate about that has huge rewards when won, not the pain of subjugation to a monotony that brings you nothing in return.
Income Is Not Automatic
Ernst & Young no longer requires degrees for entry level jobs. A lot of people shared articles about the change on Facebook. On one thread I noticed the following comment:
“[T]his is great but it could also be an excuse to pay people less.”
The word “excuse” stuck out to me. Why would EY need an excuse? If they want to offer less pay they can do so at any time. Of course any potential hire can just as easily refuse the offer and only agree to work for more.
Employers want the best workers for the lowest possible price and workers want the best jobs for the highest possible pay. “Best” and “highest” of course include the entire bundle of compensation, benefits, work environment, etc. Both parties have an incentive to bargain. Both parties have an incentive to only agree if they don’t think they can get a better deal elsewhere. It’s a bet on the value they’ll receive from the other party.
The comment reveals a bizarre but common belief about work. There’s an idea that jobs and income are an automatic and deserved reward for moving on the conveyor belt and jumping through all the right hoops. It implies that pay is based on a rigid credential scale and companies can only adjust pay if they adjust the hoops to jump through. It implies that, with ironclad causality, a degree will automatically entitle the holder to higher pay and the only way to pay less is to hire those without one.
A degree has never made someone more valuable. What you can do determines the value you can create and demand. The degree is only a signal that, with more or less accuracy, tells employers that you are likely to be better on average than someone without the degree. That signal is no longer working for EY because the reality isn’t backing up the assumed correlation.
EY does potential employees a favor to announce and implement this policy. The degree is not signalling enough value to distinguish those with it from those without. Degrees are very expensive. Everyone who buys one assuming it will bring them a good EY job is buying under false pretenses. They need to create value to get hired.
EY is saving potential employees money and time by telling them what’s always been true: it’s about the value you can create, not the paper you have. The paper was used because it often correlated and it was a quick and dirty way to eliminate some weak applicants. Now the applicants with degrees are not sufficiently better than those without.
This represents not an excuse for companies to pay less, but an opportunity for young workers to pay less. You are not required to spend four years and six figures poured in cinder block walls with fluorescent lights to take tests on things you mostly have no interest in. You are free to learn to create value any way you can.
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Four Ideas I Don’t Think Are Crazy (but you probably do)
I think these ideas are so straightforward and unscary that the world wouldn’t even look that different tomorrow if we did this today. Shortly after tomorrow, the world would look significantly better.
- Stop funding the Post Office and replace it with nothing.
- End the TSA and let airlines do security however they wish.
- End the FDA and replace it with nothing.
- Scrap criminal law and let civil law handle everything.
What is College Really All About?
I’ve always found it amusing when someone makes the case that a college degree is not needed for material and career success and a professor responds that college is not about getting a better job or earning more money. They are offended at such a base standard by which to judge the service they provide, and remind of the wonderful and fulfilling aspects of a liberal education.
The reason it’s amusing is because, whether profs like it or not, the myth that college guarantees a better job is the thing paying the bills at just about every school. It’s also the thing colleges explicitly, repeatedly market and sell customers. The belief in the degree as a ticket to a better job is the number one driver of demand for college. After that probably access to artificially cheap money and overall wealth increases which allow many kids to purchase college as a consumption good; a four year fun time courtesy of other people’s money. A distant reason for a small number of people is the actual learning they can get from college. It’s not that the learning isn’t valuable, it’s just that an intellectually curious person has so very many ways to dive in to philosophy or history that it’s a tough case to convince them the only way is to spend tens of thousands and four years.
A lot of people in higher education are so confused about the actual product they sell and so blinded by the trappings of the university that they assume it is a robust, competitive market. Perhaps compared to government K-12 schools it’s a cornucopia of choice, but it hardly resembles a free market. Not only is the demand artificially high due to taxpayer grants, subsidies, scholarships, and loans, but a great many careers legally mandate degrees before an individual can even enter. Law, accounting, just about anything related to health, the growing range of bureaucratic government jobs, and more can get you fined or jailed if you dare practice without a degree. Laws prohibit employers in other fields from using other measures of ability like IQ tests in hiring. Add to this the pervasive belief that one simply cannot live a decent life without a degree – a belief more akin to religion than regulation for non-mandated fields – and you’ve got the current higher ed marketplace.
It’s competitive in a sense. Imagine if every city had a handful of DMV offices, and the offices had budgets partly determined by how many customers came to their particular office to get a license. This would incentivize marketing and enhancements to the experience as competition between offices emerged. You might have entertainment while waiting in line, or nicer lobbies to sit in, or food and drink (the price of which would just get added on to your license fee, which could be deferred and paid out over 20 years with subsidies from taxpayers), etc. Over time, the nicer buildings and other in-line offerings might distract from the actual reason customers were there in the first place. They had to get the legally mandated license to drive. Or, to make a closer comparison, maybe only half the people in line legally needed a license, and the other half could drive legally without one but their parents and friends would be ashamed of them and constantly tell them that they’d be better drivers if they got one.
To understand anything about higher education today we have to understand what the actual product is in this distorted, unfree market. Aside from those purchasing college as a consumption good and some small number purchasing college purely for the learning or “human capital” enhancements, the customer is buying the credential because it is legally or socially mandated. Object all you want, but it’s not hard to prove. Colleges themselves sell the degree-as-job-catcher angle harder than any other, and that’s the number one reason given by students for attending. Besides, even the consumption good and human capital aspects of the product could be easily had for free if you just moved to a college town and took classes without registering. The reason people don’t is because of the belief – sometimes true due to legal strictures – that they can’t make a decent living without a degree.
The discussion about problems in higher ed is not a discussion about learning or ideas or a liberal education. It’s phony to respond to a criticism of college with a defense of philosophy. It’s missing the point to respond to critiques of college with defenses of classroom style learning or other educational methods. To do so implies that learning valuable ideas is only possible through the arbitrary four year debt-fueled system. That is an intellectual arrogance of the highest order and a conflation of education and school that is dangerous for the former.
Good ideas are too important to be anchored to the current university system and its jobs focused mythos. Good careers need a lot more than a prefabricated four-year bureaucratically managed prep process. Separate the classroom from the credential and both will improve.
You Have Permission to Use Ideas
A good friend told me when he was younger he would dive deep into all kinds of topics, from philosophy to physics. His dad was an intelligent guy who took some interest in these subjects, but also a practical man focused on results. He was a businessman and a pastor, and looked for direct application of ideas.
My friend had a book on quantum mechanics sitting in the house, and his dad asked him what it was all about. A minute or two in to giving a breakdown, his dad said, “That sounds really interesting”, then moved on to whatever he was doing next. My friend assumed his dad was just humoring him. The next Sunday during the sermon his dad worked in some profound points relating concepts of quantum mechanics to the topic at hand. My friend was amused, impressed, and also a little frustrated.
How could his dad hear two minutes on the concept and then start using it to illustrate a point? My friend had read dozens of books on it and still did not feel the permission to write or speak on it with laypeople, or attempt to draw life lessons.
Here’s the thing. You don’t need anyone’s permission to use ideas. You can dive into new concepts and start playing with them and putting them to use the way a kid might if he discovered a new type of Lego block. It’s true, you may misunderstand or misuse them, but isn’t that what you did when you first jumped on a bike or first picked up a baseball bat?
Ideas people are so passionate about truth and understanding that they sometimes become slaves to expertise and fear any efforts to describe or utilize ideas. What if they’re wrong? It’s prudent to desire a firm grasp of something before you start spouting off, but there is a real danger in believing you can’t act until your understanding is complete. It’s a paradoxical kind of arrogance to keep your nose in books until you’ve mastered every angle of an idea, because it assumes that you can master every angle of an idea. You can’t. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, but it does mean you can give yourself permission to play with ideas, discuss them, test them, implement them even while you’re exploring them.
Yes, if you read the book instead of watching the movie version, or worse yet the preview alone, you will understand the story better. Still, a great many stories can be understood enough to be useful based on just the trailer. As long as you believe only experts can engage certain ideas you will operate with an extremely limited paradigm.
Go ahead, tackle a new topic and see how you can use it right away. Sometimes the novice understanding opens up new avenues the experts are blind to.
Against Life Plans
Life plans seem pretty daunting to me. I know people who feel stressed and depressed because they don’t have a clear one. There are incredibly rare people who know beyond the shadow of a doubt what they want to do in great detail. If you are one of them, don’t let anything stop you. For the rest of us, I suggest we drop the notion of a life plan altogether.
I often talk about why trying to find what you love is not the best idea. How can you know with so many options? It might not even exist yet. Instead, I recommend making a list of what you know you don’t like. Don’t do those things, and everything else is fair game and moving you closer to the things you love.
But it’s not just about narrowing down and finding the things you most enjoy. It’s about enjoying the process. Try a bunch of stuff. But don’t waste time once you know for sure something makes you unhappy. Not only do you want to drop it because it’s not likely to be your long term sweet spot, but also because it’s not fulfilling right now.
Every day do your best to avoid things that truly make you unhappy and crush your spirit. Every day show up, create, work and do things that are fulfilling, even if (especially if) they are really hard work. You don’t have to plan your life, but you should live it. Fully alive. Fully awake.
If you’re not in a spot where you’re enjoying life right now, why not? Can you change it? Not two or ten year from now, but today. Every day get a little bit closer to only doing things you really enjoy. You’ll end up with a life better than what you would plan if you could.
How Change Happens – Higher Ed. Edition
The current higher education model is flawed. If we’re serious about changing it, first we need to get serious about understanding how social change happens. Intentions and action are not enough to bring about desired ends. We need an understanding of the causal relationships involved in order to effectively bring about change.
The great truth that flies in the face of civics textbooks and popular myth is that politics is not the source of social change. It’s more like the last in a line of indicators of cultural shifts that have already occurred. Politicians and the policies they create only change after the new approach is sufficiently beneficial to the right interests, and sufficiently tolerable to the public at large to help, or at least not harm, political careers. Of course some politicians guess wrong and suffer accordingly, but by and large the political marketplace tends toward preservation of the status quo until a new direction is imperative for survival.
An entire, and entirely fascinating, branch of political economy called Public Choice Theory examines the incentives at work in the political marketplace in depth, and I highly encourage anyone attracted to political action to gain a working knowledge of this field. It reveals, in short, that incentives baked into the democratic system create and perpetuate policies that are bad for the public at large, and good for particular concentrated interests. What Public Choice has a difficult time accounting for is the role of changing beliefs. There are countless policies that, based purely on the incentives of various interests, ought to be in place but are not, or vice versa. Some things are simply out of bounds, no matter how much a particular group might benefit and be willing to lobby, because the general public finds them unacceptable.
Contrary to the seemingly ironclad rule of interest driven politics, public beliefs can and do change, and dramatically sometimes, putting parameters around the area within which political actors can ply their trade. Slavery is a striking example. At one point, it would’ve been hard to get elected, at least in some areas, if you publicly supported abolition. Not too many decades later, it’s unthinkable to get elected anywhere if you’ve ever even joked about supporting slavery. There is certainly a complex relationship between changing economic incentives and public beliefs, but it is undeniable that the about-face on the ethics of slavery was more than a mere shift in power among competing interests. What most of the public found tolerable they now find reprehensible.
Our institutions are formed by incentives, and incentives are constrained by beliefs. That makes the beliefs of the public the ultimate key to change. Smaller changes might occur within the window of things already publicly acceptable, but major change requires a shift in that window. How to change those beliefs? There are two primary drivers, both of which feed each other; ideas and experiences.
Ideas are the raw data that form beliefs. If you accept the idea that minimum wage laws make lower skilled individuals less employable, and you accept the idea that a society with fewer unemployed persons is desirable, then you will have the belief that minimum wage laws are bad. If, on the other hand, you’ve never really thought about the economics behind minimum wage at all, but your low skilled neighbor lost his job when minimum wage increased, that experience might also cause you to believe minimum wage laws are bad.
I spent a good part of my life focusing entirely on disseminating ideas as a way of changing belief. It was fulfilling and, I think, valuable work. But it wasn’t until relatively recently that I began to understand the immense value of experience as a vital second prong when it comes to changing beliefs and the world.
Consider the difficulty of convincing your mother that the New York City taxi cartel is inefficient or immoral. It requires a great deal of economic theory or philosophizing about rights and coercion. Your mom might have other things she enjoys more than reading books on these subjects. Even if you convince her, her newfound belief will probably barely register among things she cares about. Sure, taxis aren’t the greatest. So what? She’s never had that bad an experience. Even if a policy change to end the cartel were possible, your mom mighn’t pay any attention, or she may be concerned about what the new world without cartels would look like in practice.
Now consider recommending your mom use Uber on her next trip in to Manhattan. She uses it, likes it, and becomes a regular customer. She may be completely ignorant of the current cab cartel and the problems with it, but she’s now a believer in an alternative system. If Uber comes under attack from vested interests, she’ll defend it. If the chance to end the cartel comes up, she won’t fear because she already knows what the world looks like without it. She can’t easily be convinced out of her experience.
It is for this reason that dictatorial countries not only ban literature that propagates new ideas, but also goods and services that compete with government monopolies and let people experience something better. The Soviet Union feared blue jeans, jazz, and Marlboro cigarettes as much as free market textbooks.
If we want to break out of the educational rut it requires new ideas and new experiences. We mustn’t only talk about new approaches, we must build alternatives. The best part is, you don’t have to wait on anyone. You can take your own path right now, and by so doing not only improve your life, but serve as an example to others of what’s possible outside the status quo. Educational entrepreneurs, not just intellectuals, will change the hidebound approach to education. It’s already happening.
While policymakers, pundits, professors, and provosts squabble about the future of higher education and jockey to secure their position, entrepreneurs are busy creating and delivering alternatives across the globe. The educational consumer is enjoying new experiences and getting new ideas about education in the process. The old guard can argue any which way they like, but at the end of the day they’ll have to prove more valuable to the learner than the myriad new options. All the protections and advantages in the world can’t stop competition now. Technology has helped break it wide open.
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Excerpted from The Future of School.
How Information Destroys Dictators (Are Demagogues Next?)
I recently saw a presentation by economist Antony Davies on the basics of Public Choice Theory and the predictable problems with democratic systems. Ant laid out the median voter theorem, then observed that national elections continue to get tighter and tighter as candidates become more and more similar in an effort to win the median voter.
This process is accelerated by the information age. Candidates don’t have to determine a platform and then go try to sell it, hoping a large chunk of people already agree. They don’t even have to study opinion research and craft a platform most likely to win. They can A/B test in real time. Campaigns can go to Twitter and try out some slogans or positions, they can react immediately and pivot their posture. The old saw that politicians put their finger in the wind is true as ever, but fingers are no longer necessary when you have a digital weather vane plus anemometer streaming real-time measurements to your smartphone.
In other words, power hungry politicians are more accountable to the shifting moods of the public than ever. Don’t get too excited. This is far worse than a free and open market society in terms of decision-making and individual and public good. People behave differently when voting or tweeting than they do when their own skin is in the game, and a system that caters to the costless whims of the majority is far scarier than a truly free society.
Still, it might be better than a pure dictatorship. I suspect the days of a charismatic, strong leader who wins over throngs of people with good speeches are numbered. Absent a better means of communication, societies rally around symbols because they can convey quickly a complex set of feelings and ideas. They can also be more easily exploited. Simplistic urges like nationalism, shared hatred of perceived enemies, moral crusades, and other dumbed down tales of us vs. them are the stuff of dreams for power-hungry tyrants. Whip them up into a sense of unity around a common (often violent, envy-based) cause, and you can own the country. This is harder than it’s ever been.
More and more citizens around the world can jump online and see pictures of their supposed enemies. They can see the other side. Humans seem to have limited compassion, and proximity is one of the rationing mechanisms. The information age brings the world closer, and therefore makes compassion able to span the globe. A fine speech about barbarians at the gate can create a wave of support for a hawkish autocrat, but when you can see those ‘barbarians’ with your own eyes, read their stories, and talk with them, it’s harder to get behind.
The ease with which information flows – what economists would call a reduction in transaction costs – is dramatically reshaping the way we do business, culture, life, and politics. At first we’ll see political figures that appear more like focus-group generated spokespersons, as they get better at following the trends. The switch from forceful dictator to savvy demagogue is perhaps a small improvement. But I don’t think it will stop there.
This reduction in transaction costs also means all the things previously thought to be collective action problems solvable only through the clumsy and corrupt mechanisms of voting and politics can be tackled through voluntary markets. Imagine your neighborhood HOA, instead of voting on higher fees for a new park, letting residents access a Kickstarter-like app where they can pledge an amount they’re willing to pay and the project only goes forward when it hits its goal? The political figureheads and representatives can be eliminated just as Bitcoin eliminates financial gatekeepers.
The easier it is for individuals to connect and share ideas and goods with each other, the less powerful political gatekeepers trying to take their cut and regulate our relationships become. Ultimately, information will beat oppression.
‘Easy for You to Say’ is a Dumb Phrase
I wrote an article not long ago about how I learned to get a lot done without being busy. A lot of people liked it and shared stories and thoughts, almost all positive. I did get something I didn’t expect, however, from a small number of people. Some women Tweeted comments to the effect of, “Easy for you to say, you’re a man. I bet you foist all the work onto your wife.” I did not take offense and offered lighthearted responses, but it got me thinking. What does that kind of comment, or the mindset from which is springs, actually accomplish?
Examples of this are common. A wealthy investor might write an article with tips on how to make money in the market, and commenters will say something like, “Easy for you to say, you had millions already and all the expert tools and advice to take such gambles.” My friend told me about an article where a young guy claimed to be reading a book a day and described the huge benefits of massive book consumption. My friend admitted he had to check his first reaction, which was, “Yeah, I bet he doesn’t have a wife or a lot of financial obligations, so it’s easy for him to read that much!” He checked that reaction because he knew it was stupid and utterly useless. In fact, it’s worse than useless. It’s destructive.
No one has the same set of circumstances. An article with advice is either useful to you or it’s not. You either agree or disagree with the points and claims therein. What kind of life the person writing it leads is irrelevant to the value of the information for you. Until this sinks in, you’ll spend a lot of energy looking to play “gotcha” and pointing out when good advice isn’t universally applicable. So what. No advice is universally applicable. All that matters is whether it’s helpful to you. If it is, implement it. If not, move on and find some that is.
I got to thinking about the responses to my article about busyness. The comments seem to imply that it is impossible for me to be both productive and not busy without also forcing my wife to do a lot of things she doesn’t want to do and suffer for my freedom. Do they really believe there is no possible way to be productive and not busy without abusing a spouse in some way? If so, why read articles like mine anyway? If not, why make the comments? Even if my wife was stressed and bearing the brunt of our joint venture, that wouldn’t make my advice more or less useful to someone else. Again, it either works or it doesn’t.
I suspect people look at advice on how to be happy, financially successful, informed, artistic, healthy, or whatever, and if they feel guilty that they are not they want to find some reason to prove that it’s impossible to be. Saying, “A ha! This author is only (insert desired trait) because they have something I don’t!” is an easy way to excuse yourself. It’s also terrible for you. Who cares if it’s true? So what? So the author can invest more money than you can. Does it follow that you can’t improve on any margin? If you think that’s the case, stop reading how-to’s. If you have no chance of gaining from anyone’s advice because they might not have identical circumstances, why not just give up? Eat, drink, and be merry, for there is no possible way to learn ways to progress!
You gain nothing by attempting to prove that the bearer of some advice has some special advantage that makes implementing it easier for them. Take it or leave it, but for your own sake, don’t look for an excuse to believe you are incapable of improving your life.
Build a Better Signal
Why pay a university to do something you can do better yourself?
From Medium.
A college degree is a signal.
It’s a signal to the world of your value in the market. It conveys information about your ability, skill, and intelligence. There is a lot of noise in the world of work, and it’s hard to figure out who’s worth working with. A degree cuts through some of that noise and puts you in a smaller pool of competitors.
The thing is, this signal is not that valuable. It’s also very expensive.
Not long ago a degree may have been the best signal most people could get. There weren’t many ways to demonstrate your value to the market, so a degree was one of the better bets. Things have changed dramatically. Technology has opened up the world. The tools available to you now have lowered search and information costs, and you can create signals of your own that are far more powerful than a degree.
What’s Better?
A person with a strong GitHub profile has a signal that beats a degree. If you’ve launched a startup, even if it lasted only six months and ultimately failed, you’ve done something that sends a more powerful signal than a degree. If you’ve raised money, sold products, done freelance work, produced videos, run social media campaigns, mastered SEO or AdWords, built a website, designed logos, started a nonprofit, been published in a handful of outlets with good content, had valuable work experience, or even just have an amazing online presence via a personal website and/or excellent LinkedIn and social media profiles, you have a signal more valuable than most degrees.
If you are not very talented or ambitious and you are unable to do anything like the above, a degree might be the best signal you’re capable of getting. When you realize that all the other students half asleep around you in class will walk away with the same signal, it becomes clear that it doesn’t carry that much weight. It says, “I’m no worse than everyone else with a BA.” If getting a BA is a really hard task for you and building something better is overwhelming, the signaling power of a degree might be worth it. But if you are able and willing to do more — if you are above average and can excel in most environments, than you have in your power right now the ability to build a better signal than a degree.
You have at your fingertips tools that young work-seekers and employers a few decades ago didn’t. Never has it been easier and cheaper to start a business, offer freelance services, learn to code, show off your writing or artistic skills, and build a portfolio of value created.
Don’t Just Tell Them, Show Them
Consider the woman who created this website in an effort to get hired at AirBnB. Her resume listing her academic accomplishments and other common signals was lost in the noise. So she built a better signal.
The website is far more valuable than any degree or honor roll listing. AirBnB took notice, and I can guarantee that website alone has created more job offers and interest than she can handle. In fact, so entrenched is the degree-as-signal mindset that this woman’s effort went viral immediately. The competition among degree holders is fierce, while the competition among those who build a better signal is almost nonexistent.
There is nothing in her story that required a degree. If you want to work for a cool company, you can do something like this yourself right now regardless of educational status. Why settle for a dated, baseline signal that says you’re no worse than every other degree holder?
What Happens to College?
Here’s the interesting thing: The more young people begin to build better signals, the better college will become.
Fewer people will go because most students attend to purchase the signal and that only. But those who stay will be there for the best reasons. They’ll be there because they love the college experience, the lectures, the professors, and the rest of the bundle.
Losing all those customers who are just suffering through the courses to get the signal will hurt the bottom line of most universities. Some might go under entirely. But for those who care deeply about higher education in its best form, this will be a welcome change. Schools will get sharper and better as they face competition. Instead of contenting themselves with delivering mediocre product because they have consumers who feel captive to the need to get that degree, colleges will begin to become more accountable to the customers there to gain knowledge.
Professors — good ones at least — will love this change. Students in their classes will be the ones who actually want to be there for the value of the classroom experience itself. Severing the credential from the classroom will enhance the quality of both.
How Do I Do It?
Most young people don’t know how to take advantage of this new world where they can craft their own signal. They’ve spent years in a conveyor belt education system that has instilled in them a rule-following, paper accolade chasing mentality. They see degrees and grades as safe, as fallbacks that will magically keep them afloat in hard times. They overestimate the signaling power of paper and underestimate their ability to create product. Product beats paper in the world of signals.
Entrepreneurship is becoming more than just an activity that a tiny number of company founders engage in. We once shifted from farming to factories, then from factories to offices. Today a shift from corporate offices to remote workers, freelancers, intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs is happening fast. Those who learn to think entrepreneurially, whether or not they ever launch their own company, and see themselves as their own firm, regardless of where their paycheck comes from, will build the future.
It’s hard to internalize and act on the opportunity in this new world. That’s one of the main reasons behind Praxis, the entrepreneur education company I launched. We want to help you build a signal that is more valuable than a degree. We want to help you do it in one quarter the time and for zero cost. We want you to have fun and become excellent in the process. We want to help you use the tools available and create your own future.
That’s why we place participants with growing companies to get work experience. That’s why we help them create personal development projects, tangible skills training, portfolio projects, and personal websites.
Praxis is just one way to help young people take advantage of the opportunity to build a better signal. The options are limited only by your imagination. Find one that works for you.
Carpe Diem
The future is bright. You have in your hands the power to create your own brand, to broadcast it to the world, to demonstrate your ability to create value. You can built a better signal than the generic one in the hands of tens of millions of other young people.
What will it be?
The Freedom of Complexity
Lives are nodes not links
A living network that thinks
Not a chain that clinks
The Shortest Summary of How to Change the World
Help people imagine new things by introducing new ideas.
Help people experience new things by creating new alternatives.
These two things – ideas and experiences – change people’s beliefs about what’s possible, and their beliefs about what’s possible are the binding constraint on the institutions we live under.
If you want to change the world, spread new ideas and create new experiences.
Book Review: Anarchy Unbound
This is my Amazon review from some time ago, but I realized I never posted it here and I’m always looking for an excuse to recommend Leeson‘s work.
“Leeson puts together an amazing set of papers studying order in the most unlikely places. It will take decades for the main thesis of this books to really sink in, but when it does, it will radically change the foundational assumptions in the social sciences. Contra Hobbes and nearly every economist and political theorist since, Leeson shows that absent a coercive monopoly (a state), humans can, have, and still do cooperate peacefully and efficiently given the constraints they face. Leeson shows how complex institutions emerge to handle conflicts and bring about order, and how these institutions are often robust, nuanced, firm, flexible, and adaptive to the changing needs of the communities in which they emerge.
When it comes to comparative political economy and the much needed application of rational choice theory to historical and sociological studies, Leeson is the best in the business. It will take a little time after you read it for the implications of these simple yet radical discoveries to sink in.”
You can also listen to my podcast interview with Pete about this book and other ideas.