Did you ever see the 1991 Albert Brooks movie Defending Your Life? A movie that clearly could not be made today because it includes neither super heroes nor special effects and isn’t a sequel, it’s about a schmo (Brooks) who dies only to find heaven has an entrance exam of sorts in which you literally defend your life. Well the other day I watched a very good TED talk by my friend Bob Litan in which he defended his entire profession — economics. I know no braver man.
Few of us would defend our professions. I’m a journalist — what is there to say about that except that being a Congressman is worse? Yet Bob Litan volunteered for this gig, which he does with remarkable energy for a guy the size of a meerkat.
Bob names names and shows us the huge effect specific modern economists have had on our technological lives — everything from Internet dating to how to efficiently end ad auctions. A lot of this I didn’t know and you may not have known, either. It’s a way of thinking far beyond Freakonomics that has changed the way we all live, whether we knew it or not.
How would you defend your profession?
Just a bit of housekeeping. Apple’s big product announcement is tomorrow and I’ll have a pithy commentary up shortly after that deals more with strategy than products. My IBM wrap-up for the foreign book editions will be here on Wednesday. Today over at Forbes.com my first-ever post will appear on that capitalist tool, though it will also be right here on Thursday. It’s going to be a busy week.
Meerkat is a bit of hyperbole, but he sort-of resembles one. Could be the too-large shirt which has obviously spent some time in a suitcase recently.
Ok, so the “dismal science” might have some things going for it, but I still think that economics is the only field in which you can have a long and successful (monetarily, anyway) career without ever once making a correct prediction.
As someone who studied economics many moons ago, this common misconception always gets my goat. Economists are just like historians, or scientists, or mathematicians, and any number of other professions, which is to say, THEY CAN’T PREDICT THE FUTURE. Just because you can explain mathematically how something works, doesn’t mean you suddenly have a crystal ball and can see into the future. It doesn’t work that way. However, because economics deals with money, somehow we think they are supposed to magically be able to tell us what the stock market is going to do tomorrow, or what interest rates will 20 years from now, or any number of other predictions. It’s like asking a biologist, hey, you’ve figured out a pretty good theory of evolution. Tell me what cats will look like 1000 years from now.
Correct. Yet, at the same time, they have been given great latitude to define and shape the system of distribution which our society uses and coerces other societies to use. Unfortunately, they’ve decided their purpose is to evangelize cargo-cult capitalism as a moral matter, rather than create an economy that works for substantially all of us.
“Cargo cult capitalism”.
Pick one.
Or go ahead and pick all three.
I think biologists have a pretty good idea what cats will look like in 1000 years.
I’ll bet five bucks they’ll look like *cats*.
I’m an engineer. In defense of my profession, I’ll ask:
How long would would modern societies last without clean water, sewerage disposal, electricity, mining, manufacturing, chemical processing, transport, medical technology, food technology and IT? All other professions are critically dependent on engineering.
I rest my case.
I’m a software developer. Do I even need to defend my profession here? 🙂
Lots of software gets pushed out into the market place that wouldn’t pass minimal quality assurance test in most other industries. Microsoft Windows 8, Vista, Millenium come to mind.
I think your sarcasm meter is broken, TimKa. 🙂
Most software is ad related, malware or so buggy it’s barely usable. So most likely SWE needs to justify his life’s work.
Good luck with the Forbes.com gig. Collateral thinking is something they are not used to. Ideological thinking is more their line of thought. But they are in a position to carry thought intensive material in the field of business analysis.
Teacher here, enough said.
I feel that I read at least one article every other day directly attacking my profession. Since almost everyone went to school, nearly everyone feels entitled or qualified to critique education and or teachers.
How do I defend it? I stopped years ago, I rarely if ever post or discuss my job with anyone, as it is a waste of my time and effort.
Regards,
Joe Dokes
Basic problem is the requirement in so many places of an education degree. It tends to be the bottom quarter of college graduates that go on to that field. Then you have the same salary for all teachers put in place by the unions, so only the wealthiest districts can afford to pay for the highly qualified science and math teachers, because they have to raise everyone’s salaries to match.
I have both journalism and computer science degrees and have worked in both fields, so when it comes to defending my professions, I look for somewhere to hide. As a youth I served as an apprentice pipe organ builder but never went further in a profession that I guess never needs defending (unlike bagpipe making :)).
I’m an Academic Fundraiser in my current career iteration (basically that means fundraising for an expensive college)…My profession is guilty as charged!
Apologies for building & selling that stuff.
I work as an electrical engineer, designing systems that safely and reliably bring electricity to homes and businesses. I work with field workers who risk their lives building and repairing the stuff that my colleagues and I design. If you’re reading this, you have many of us to thank, including the teacher who commented above.
There are many jobs that are difficult to defend as having a net positive societal benefit. I am glad that I do not have one of them (for now).
Economics is a social science, not a hard science like physics or chemistry. So it is based on the behavior of people which is why the predictions are so hard to make accurately. Even in physics and chemistry you have whole fields that make predictions that don’t match up to reality like with global warming. There also you have some social science mixed in as when they missed China become the world’s leading CO2 emitter by ten years, not seeing it when it was only a few years away.
So economic predictions which are almost entirely built on human actions are that much harder.
I’m a civil engineer having spent most of my work life doing storm drainage, water and waste water work. Especially in waste water work, I find the field is self selecting. The people chose the field typically believe what they do has a greater benefit to humanity, are intelligent, nice and fun to work with. Try finding that in a lot of work places.
Why bother defending your profession? If you can’t start the day thinking you’re going to do something worthwhile no amount of rationalization or speech writing is going to help. I also can’t quickly and easily explain the technical side of my work. Many jobs involve specialized knowledge that others can’t understand the implications of. If people ask, I just say I’m a sewer engineer and that water flows downhill, which quickly ends that topic so we can move on to something else.
If your job doesn’t have a bigger purpose, maybe you can volunteer. Teach or train people, care for people, protect animals or your environment. Find an activity in which you give of yourself to get a purpose.
I’d agree that teachers have one of the hardest, lowest paid, most societally essential jobs. If life were fair, teachers would be living in mansions, driving Mercedes, on the cover of magazines, while sports stars would be unknowns driving junkers and looking for a day job.
All that being said, Cringley is not just a typical journalist, he assembles the technical jigsaw pieces, analyzes the situation, then presents the results in a coherent story. He’s not a perfect oracle. Predicting the future is high risk, especially when people are involved. But, in every case, understanding the factors, the technical, the financial and what’s driving the people, is worthwhile. That’s why we read.
I’m an electrical engineer, and electrons flow downhill.
>no amount of rationalization or speech writing is going to help.
Tell that to buyers of Prius and Apple.
Half a century ago, SF writer Mack Reynolds had a throwaway line in one of his novels, along the line of “If an economist could successfully predict the market even 1% better than random chance, he should be a millionaire.”
I suspect if you bet against an economist every time, you might make money…
Cringely thinks he’s a journalist. Fiction writer fits better.
If reality is what you want, get off the web and experience life.
Differences of opinion should not be confused with fact vs. fiction. It marginalizes those two important concepts.