If you were worried that we haven’t spent enough time and intellectual energy pondering terrible people, I give you this thought-provoking tweet from Zach Weinersmith:

How come every crazy person eventually gets around to anti-semitism? Is there some kind of secret racism cabal trying to run the racist world for its own ends?

— Zach Weinersmith (@ZachWeiner) October 9, 2022

There’s a million unsatisfying answers to the question “Why are terrible people terrible?”, but maybe we can get a little traction here from a few simple economic concepts. Why are racist people and groups so often racist in the same way? Why do we observe so little innovation in racism?

Let’s sketch a toy model.

The production of social goods (mutual support, friendship, community, etc) can be reductively modeled using labor inputs (human time and energy) and social technology. One very important strain of social technology is the amalgam of ideas, identities, and institutions that groups leverage when producing the mutual support systems and emotional goods that all but the most pathologically isolated of us depend on.

Ideas have the important property that they are unaffected by parallel use i.e. use comes at zero marginal cost. That means they offer the possibility of not just significant returns to scale, but in some contexts increasing returns to scale. In this case, the path to massive scale returns through social technology will come through network effects. Goods that are consumed within social networks, and where the value of the good being consumed is positively increasing with the number of other people who use ie (i.e. social media, media formats, etc), will often be characterized by critical mass thresholds beyond which use rapidly escalates as each marginal consumer increases the value of consumption, attracting more subsequent consumption.

Racist ideas as zero-marginal cost network social technology

Let’s model racism as a set of ideas that serve as social technology that serve to increase the output from labor inputs into the production social goods. Internalization of stupid racist ideas by one person does not diminish the stock of stupid racist ideas (they have zero marginal cost), but the output elasticity from that labor is actually increasing as more people contribute to the production of social goods using the same set of ideas. The network effects of production using zero-marginal cost racist ideas gives them a least some range of increasing returns to scale.

What’s the net of all this? There will be extremely powerful incentives to return to the oldest forms of racist ideology because the pre-existing body of believers grant significant scale advantages over newer racist ideologies. For both your everyday racist looking to enjoy the social goods of mutual admiration and support from your fellow bigots or the aspiring leader of a racist faction aiming to effect social change through the scale of your community of monomaniacal twits, the returns to scale to be enjoyed by leveraging a set of racist beliefs that have already achieved historical critical mass are too attractive to pass up.

The pre-existing body of zero marginal cost ideas, in this model, endows a tremendous amount of path dependence to the ideas being leveraged by communities seeking to produce social goods using the technology of racist ideas. The deck is stacked against innovation, which means we should expect endless regurgitation of the same racist bullshit.

Path dependence is a systemic property where the current state is heavily influenced by past events and states. Much of the “Guns, Germs, and Steel” model of the world is that the current state of things is heavily determined by past states (widespread animal domestication and husbandry in the Old World) and events (Europeans bringing germs from those animals to the new world) that can never be undone. In much the same way, I suspect we observe the same racist tropes over and over simply because the old tropes got there first and there’s no undoing the past.

Or maybe racists are all just stupid and lazy? Who knows, I can barely even tell most racists apart.

A NYC councilman has proposed a reward system for civilian-provided evidence of parking violations. The revenue motivations are obvious, but the consequences are far easier to speculate upon than confidently predict. I’m usually reluctant to make policy forecasts, but in this one case it is probably fair to say I am unusually qualified. So how’s this going to play out?

Well, first of all, this is a relatively narrow set of bounties that promise a person 25% of the resulting $175 ticket for providing evidence of an illegally blocked bike lane, sidewalk, or school entrance (five minutes of googling did not yield insight into any associated fees that might be applied on top of the fine). Not only is it relatively specific in its aims, it’s also not unprecedented: rewards for NYC citizens who report illegally idling vehicles “generated 12,267 reports in 2021… netting the city $2.3 million and $724,293” for the reporting citizens. Which is to say that relatively modest rewards appear to be more than sufficient to get New Yorkers to snitch on each other, and the institutions appear to be more than comfortable issuing fines based on a civilian-provided evidence. Ninety-two percent of the idling vehicle reports lead to a fine being issued (though not necessarily paid), each generating a $87.50 bounty for the reporting party. One man has reportedly earned $125,000 from reporting idling vehicle.

For a bounty to be earned “a citizen needs to submit a time- and date-stamped video taken during the time of observation that shows the commercial truck or bus continuously idling for more than three minutes,… needs to contain the license plate and the company information [and] the sound of the idling engine needs to be clearly heard”. Given those standards, the 92% issuance rate is perhaps less surprising. It only takes a little reflection for $87.50 is seem a pretty healthy bounty. If we consider that affordablity of modern digital equipment (i.e. your phone) and video editing software (often bundled free with your phone or computer), opportunistic enforcement seems more than sufficiently incentivized.

But what about more than opportunistic enforcement? There is the very real possibility that private enforcement could scale, and not in the way a city would at least purport to hope. If we may recap the context in question:

• There is an unending supply of vehicles
• low cost carried video equipment
• low cost video editing software
• Individuals with a high material reward for submitting evidence sufficient to receive a reward
• A city whose revenue needs provide it every incentive to be entirely credulous of any evidence provided
• A relatively high cost (if only in time spent) of challenging a violation

Revenue incentives distort police discretion. While it may feel like this bounty system is outsourcing the work to civilians, but what it’s really doing is moving the discretionary moment institutionally downstream to the court system that must now adjudicate the quality of the evidence provided. I expect the chain of command within a court system to be no less effective at channeling budget incentives down their own hierarchies of supervision and reporting.

Okay, I’ve laid out enough bread crumbs leading from incentives to potentially unintended consquences. What do I think will happen when this and other similar civilian traffic law bounties go into effect?

• Non-trivial revenue will be generated, which will accelerate contagion to other municipalities
• Violation issuance rates will be >85% (comparable to anti-idling laws)
• Violent confrontations will occur around people who appear to be taking videos with their phones. Many of these people will just be taking selfies.
• Most violation reporters will be one-offs, but a small number will make a very large number of reports (i.e. the distribution will be long-tailed).
• These “super-reporters” will focus on hot spots where pick-up/drop-offs are inconvenient. Some will use long range microphones to avoid conflict.
• Some super-reporters will be credibly accused of submitting videos with edited sound.
• This will hurt ride share drivers more than anyone else, lowering their supply, while simultaneously reducing passenger convenience and reducing demand. The net price effect is uncertain, but I expect that the supply effect will dominate.

I expect that other cities will introduce civilian bounty systems unless there is a news-worthy spike in violent interactions around traffic-snitching accusations. Most municipal governments are strapped for cash at the moment, especially those who saw their traffic enforcement revenues plummet during lockdowns.

Lastly, I would only remind you that revenue-motivated law enforcement always has social consequences. Anyone who has ever lived under an HOA has had to deal with busy-bodies operating with a low opportunity cost of time and an eagerness to exert power in the smallest of fiefdoms. Bounties systems may end up creating exactly the institutional structure needed to increase the social footprint and subsidize the lifestyle of the most annoying person you know.

Inflammatory Political Campaigns and Racial Bias in Policiing

Simple, clever, poignant. I wish I’d thought of it.

Congressmen earn disproportionate returns in the stock market

File under: duh, but that doesn’t mean someone shouldn’t reinvestigate this every 12 months.

Pounds that Kill: The External Costs of Vehicle Weight

This is the kind of thing that basic economic theory combined with Force = Mass X Acceleration will get you all the way to the conclusion, but that doesn’t have a chance at affecting policy until someone credibly estimates the costs. These estimates are credible and they should effect policy. I’ll give you my takeway though: this matters more as we transition to electric vehicles. As the cost incentives of gasoline become a weaker constraint on vehicle size, we will need to introduce new ways to internalize the external costs. Obvious policy solution: tax vehicles by the pound.

Monopsony in the US Labor Market

I’m working on monopsony in the paper I’m presenting at Geoerge Mason University next week. This is the final published version of the paper that presents the bleeding edge of the research in question. You should come to my talk if you’re in town.

I was happy to see the Wall Street Journal write a staff editorial about my recent paper with Patrick Warren, “Firearms and Lynching“.

I was made aware of the editorial on Saturday and I’ll admit I was a little nervous when I first clicked, only to be relieved to find an accurate summary of the research and a relatively restrained commentary.

But why was I nervous, you may ask. Isn’t media attention something scholars want? Yes. Earlier in my career, that was an unqualified “yes”, but I’ve been doing this long enough now that I appreciate just how little control a scholar has over the conversation that can happen around their work. I’ve had a couple papers get non-trivial media attention over the years and each time it’s a reminder that the research itself is not just the subject of a conversation, it’s a prop that gives people an opportunity to have the conversation they already wanted to have. The findings of the research in question can prove quite immaterial to that conversation.

When I posted a thread about the paper two weeks ago, I was happy to see enough retweets to pass the paper around and get it some attention.

Main result: greater access to firearms in the Black community reduced the rate of lynching in the Jim Crow South. In a context where you are excluded from the institutions of governance and public safety, where terrorism against you is condoned, the tools of self-defense matter

— Mike Makowsky is here to violently equivocate (@mikemakowsky) September 7, 2022

What was less fun was the predictably over-reductive quote tweets and comments excitedly parading the paper as evidence of “guns are good.” Not unlike people excited to reduce a paper to “minimum wages are good” (or “this paper is bad because minimum wages are bad”), it can be frustrating to try to make a nuanced contribution towards understanding a complex context, only to see it reduced to a television debate chyron.

The key to surviving this process is accepting that a scholar, even those of tremendous standing inside and outside of the academy, has little to no control over the narrative that emerges around their work. Holding strong preferences over the surrounding narrative is folly varying only in consequences. You can try to fight the narrative, which typically results in the world either ignoring you or, worse, joyfully inviting you to wrestle in the mud. [Good rule of political discourse: never wrestle with a pig. You can’t win, you end up covered in mud, and the pig loves it.] Some scholars, though not as many as the more skeptical fear, prefer to shape the research to serve a narrative from the outset. This, of course, is no longer research, it’s advocacy masquerading as science. Don’t do this. And lastly, some create great research, only to apologetically bear the burden of the unintended narrative that emerges around their work. If you recognize yourself in this description, my only advice is a) don’t apologize and b) go easy on the sauce.

For what it’s worth, my view of “Firearms and Lynching”, in the context of the broader literature on firearms and public safety, is that things have to be horrifyingly bad before greater availability of firearms make for a safer public. Foreign invasions, institutionalized segregation, pogroms, lynch mobs, these are all contexts where an armed population can make for a better outcome. Probably not a happy ending, but maybe a less tragic one. The Jim Crow South was such a context. That’s how bad it was. That’s the takeaway.

If you want to translate this piece of historical research as evidence that a greater saturation of firearms in modern American society will make for better and safer lives, then I’ll admit that I think you are too pessimistic about the current state of the world. You’ve spent too much time reading about burning cities that actually aren’t burning. If you think that a greater taking up of arms by Black Americans will make their lives safer and better, then I’ll admit I still think that is probably wrong, but maybe less wrong. Black Americans have brought their reality to the eyes of broader America and that reality questions whether or not the police serve their communities or threaten them. It is certainly a legitimate question whether they can rely on police protection to secure their homes and their communities.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to make the next logical leap here. If police can’t be counted on, we’ll protect ourselves, and firearms are a tool to do that. That sort of thinking, however, is exactly why making leaps from history to contemporary contexts is so fraught. As bad as things are today, even in the most violent districts with the most contemptable police departments, it’s not the Jim Crow South. Lynch mobs are not roaming the streets and selling photos of their victims as postcards. Groups of young white men are not wandering into homes and stealing from them without fear of retribution. Firearms are tools of death, and their presence bring benefits and costs. To exceed the costs of broadly deadlier conflict throughout your community, the benefits to other dimensions of public safety have to be significant.

And we’ve haven’t even confronted the additional reality that an armed Black man in the United States should probably not feel safe in the presence of a police officer, no matter if that firearm is licensed, registered, and transparently revealed to the officer. In a land of no-knock raids, where police are bursting into homes under cover of night with fingers on triggers, I’m not sure a more heavility armed Black America leads to fewer men and women being killed by police.

I’m sorry, did you think that I was going to close out this post with a solution to modern violence and policing in America? With an answer? The world is complex and difficult, policy for it doubly so. My colleague and I wrote a paper that tried to answer the question of whether a minority living under an indifferent regime that condoned terrorism could better live their lives armed. That’s the question we made a contribution towards answering, and our results point towards “Yes”. If you want me to make big claims about what that means today, well, get used to disappointment.

I want to write about the economics of the Wrexam football club. They have docu-series currently airing on FX weeking until late October. They have two celebrity owners whose level of wealth falls squarely within the range of optimum dramatic tension i.e. rich enough to buy and improve a tiny Welsh football club, but so rich that they can buy their way out of every problem without utterly ruining themselves and their families.

I want to write about it, but I won’t. I’ll be patient and wait until the first season is over. Instead, I want to encourage you to watch all or part of the season with an eye towards the drama and risk there is to be found in solving such a complex economic problem. Pay attention, there will be a quiz in two months:

1. How do you optimize your committment to an investment whose financial payoff is gaining access to a higher revenue stream via a process as unpredictable as finishing at or near the top in a 24 team football league? How do you cope with that much noise in a system with such poor underlying odds?
2. How do you optimize your committment to an investment whose payoff has an enormous non-pecuniary element (i.e. joy from the success of the team) and that non-pecuniary element is a true local public good (non-excludable and non-rival) that represents a significant portion of total utility in local households?
3. How should local stake holders treat their relationship to the team? The supporters group has significant voting power when transitioning ownership. What should they be maximizing when they cast their votes? On what observables should they base their decisions?
4. In what ways are the owners failing to optimally allocate resources within the team?
5. In what ways is the manager and coaching staff failing to optimally manage the player resources they have?
6. Are incentives aligned top to bottom in the organization? Within the team?
7. How do you measure success and failure with a sports club? Should these metrics, or the relative weights on these metrics, change with the scale of the club, it’s resources, and its fan base?

When the season is over we will revisit these questions and more. Running a sports team is an incredibly complex problem to solve. Most previous inside looks have been pure PR projects for the very biggest clubs, worth billions of dollars. These clubs/teams are enormous enterprises, with vast hierarchies and narrowly divided tasks. They are in many ways simply too big to fit into frame for an intimate documentary. If that’s what you’re interested in, fiction is the better channel because it can abstract away from all the field maintence and beer pricing, and just show you Brad Pitt cutting deals over the phone while stuffing food into his beautiful face.

To really understand this business from the inside, you gotta go small. To places where a small number of individuals are making an inefficiently vast range of decisions. Welcome to Wrexam so far looks to be one of the very best views into that world. I can’t wait to see more.

I just hope they find someone to update their zonal marking system on set pieces. I don’t know, maybe much some YouTube videos or something. Yikes.

Alaska had it’s first election with a new voting rule and Tom Cotton is pissed.

Ranked-choice voting is a scam to rig elections.

— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) September 1, 2022

I want very badly to be snarky here and make fun of the Senator for being so nakedly Trumpian in an effort to discredit any democratic institution the instant it doesn’t produce exactly the result he prefers. Fun aside, snark at Senator’s expense misses the bigger and more important mechanisms that are in play. I think the current instantiation of the Republican party is afraid of ranked choice voting. The Senator, in his angry little tweet, only lends greater credence to the theory. More broadly, its often worth unpacking when incumbents get upset about legitimate institutions, particularly when that anger is asymmetric across parties and coalitions.

What is ranked choice voting?

Quickly, ranked choice voting is any system where voters are asked to rank some number of candidates, n, from 1st to nth. Those rankings are then used to implement a runoff system, where a winner isn’t declared until a candidate he or she has a majority of the top choice votes. If someone has 50% of the first place votes, they win and it is effectively no different that a standard plurality system (i.e the standard system in most US elections). If no one has >50% of the first place votes, then the candidate with the fewest first place votes is eliminated and all of their votes are then divvied up amongst the candidates based on those voters’ 2nd choices. The process then iterates, tallying up the votes, eliminating the last place candidates, and allocating votes from the eliminated candidates based on their 2nd, 3rd, etc choice preferences. The election isn’t called until someone has greater than 50% of the counted votes.

It’s not a point system, like a Borda count, so it doesn’t grant a specific weight to being a 2nd or 3rd choice, so the balance of outcomes is still heavily tilted towards a voter’s top choice candidate. It’s not explicitly an approval system, though voters are under no obligation to rank all of the candidates i.e. if you only want to choose a 1st and 2nd choice out of 10 candidates, that is fine. What the system is explicitly designed to do is reduce the impact of large numbers of candidates splitting the electorate so thinly as to increase electoral noise while also reducing the impact of otherwise irrelevant candidates. It’s not a perfect system (nothing is), and it certainly doesn’t magically nullify the irrefutable math of Arrow’s impposibility theorem. It’s just another way of counting votes, and one that is in no way controversial or even especially complicated compared to the variety of voting rules used in established democracies around the world.

So why the fuss?

Political fragility

Overspecialization is an ecological trap, just ask the koala. Sure, it’s great if you can digest and subsist off of a food source that no one else can, that sounds like a swell way to avoice resource competition. But if you overspecialize in that food such that you can no longer live off anything else, well, then you aren’t likely to survive any meaningful shift in you environmental context. What someone like Nicolas Taleb extolls the virtues of anti-fragility, a lot of what he is talking about is akin to adaptability to and tolerance for unforecastable events.

At the moment, if we can put aside policy positions entirely for a moment, there is an argument to be made that the Republican party is looking incredibly fragile. A sequence of events, some slow progressions over the last 20 years, others shocking events of the last 20 months, have left the Republicans looking highly specialized. Senator Cotton’s response to the outcome in Alaska leads me to wonder if they are electorally specialized to succeed in a context that doesn’t exactly exist anymore.

When I think of the Republican coalition and electoral base, what stands out in sharpest relief is:

1. The urban-rural divide
2. Single-issue voters, predominantly regarding abortion and firearms
3. Trump

The urban-rural divide, specifically the overwhelming dominance of Republicans in rural settings, is the fulcrum upon which Republicans leverage their advantage through gerrymandered district maps. By cracking and packing districts, they’ve ceded a large number of landslide urban districts to Democrats for the express purpose of leaving them thinner elsewhere. The catch with gerrymandering as a minority party in the broader population, though, is that if you get greedy you can go grow accustomed to lots of predictable, but nonetheless narrow victories. Narrow victores, no matter how previously safe and easy to forecast, do not grant a lot of leeway for absorbing electoral shifts. Like, for example, significant numbers of educated urban voters moving to medium-sized cities in red and purple states.

Abolishing abortion has long been a rally cry to turn out voters, and seemingly a pretty good one at that. While pro-choice voters may be just as passionate, protecting the status quo has rarely the same draw as tearing down a cruel and unjust system. Voters may have remained the same, but the status quo has changed and, with it, the prospects for drawing voters to the polls.

Bizarre as it would have seemed to say this 10 years ago, Trump is a bonafide cult of personality. His people love him and he has as much influence with at least half the Republican party as anyone since Reagan, and probably more than even he did. I wouldn’t have said this 10 months ago, but there is a very real chance that he is going to prison. Even if he doesn’t, though, the investigation and trials are unlikely to put Republicans in a positive light with moderate and independent voters, and without the office of the presidency, Trump lacks the same power to shape the narrative that he previously enjoyed.

Actually, let’s revisit the Trump as Republican icon for a quick moment.

One of Seventeen

In the aftermath of Trump’s surprising win of the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, there was floated the possibility that Trump was a Condorcet loser. That is to say, in a head to head election he would have lost to every other major candidate. A retrospective analysis challenged this idea, suggesting that Trump had far broader support in the party than just a loyal and dedicated minority, but I’m not sure how much of that is a product of post hoc endogeneity.

What is not argued is that the 2016 Republican primary still had a lot of candidates late in the game. Seventeen candidates qualified for the first debate. By the fifth debate there were still 13 candidates sufficiently viable to claim a spot on stage. Even if we can’t perfectly adjudicate who Trump would or would not have beaten head to head, the outcome of the eventual election was highly sensitive to the voting rule given the sheer number of candidates. If the primary had been subject to anything other than standard plurality rule voting, it is highly possible, if not probable, that a different winner would have emerged.

The thing about a polarizing candidate is that you are that much less likely to be anyone’s second choice. Under a plurality system you rely on the people who love you, attack the ones that hate you, and comfortably ignore the rest. But some voting rules increase the cost of those you ignore.

About that Alaska Primary

Did I mention that Alaska didn’t just change the voting system for the general election? They had an open primary (meaning candidates from any party competed to be one of the final four candidates). Through a simple plurality rule election, everyone voted for their favorite candidate and the top 4 advanced to the general election where the ranked choice rule was employed.

What would have happened if such a rule were applied in the Republican primary of 2016? What would happen if such a rule were applied across the country where

1. Roe vs Wade has been overturned
2. Trump may very well be going to prison.
3. A lot of people are moving from big blue cities to low housing costs and adequate amenties of medium size cities in purple states

A Democrat hadn’t won a statewide election in Alaska since 2008. Less than a week ago they did it in an election against a former Alaskan governor and Republican vice presidential nominee who’s been on Saturday Night Live. In the second round of vote counting, the eventual Democratic winner received 29% of the votes redistributed from the Republican who finished in 3rd place. There are, it seems, a lot of Republicans who preferred a Republican to a Democrat, but nonetheless preferred a Democrat to Sarah Palin.

Cotton is right. Republicans should be freaked out

I don’t expect ranked choice voting to sweep the nation (though I do think it is better than a standard plurality rule). But I think it is one more sign that Republicans have become overspecialized as a party and are not well-suited to adapt to changing political landscapes. Big things, like Roe being overturned, happen. The public can turn on any celebrity, including your party’s talisman. Rural voters might still mathematically individually be weighted more in the broad political calculus (cough Senate cough), but there’s still the problem that fewer voters live there, which means it only takes a small percent of the population moving to break your map. And what happens when the baby boomers don’t dominate electoral math anymore?

No, the Republican’s aren’t doomed to irrelevance. Yes, they will adapt and rebrand…eventually. But the reality is that there is no greater sign that a party is forecasting electoral difficulty for themselves than declarations that the system is rigged against them, regardless of whether they are railing against fictional corruption or actual institutions that really do work against them. In both cases, however, they are signaling the same thing: we’re in trouble. The Republican strategy of recent decades has been to terrify and pander to the base, attack and ignore the rest. And it’s worked. Ranked choice voting is a threat to that strategy because it increases the cost of attacking and ignoring voters outside of your base.

Maybe that alone is a sufficient argument for ranked choice voting – it increases the cost of attacking people outside of your political base. Given the evidence of political polarization and associated social fracturing, anything that shifts the balance of political incentives from outgroup antipathy to big-tent inclusion is proabably a good thing for all of us in the long run.

In no particular order:

Moonshot: Public R&D and Growth by Shawn Kantor and Alexander Whalley. Whether its going to the moon or vaccinating a country, government spending sure seems to have a much better impact when there is a big, bright, and highly-specific outcome target.

The Economic Consequences of Being Denied an Abortion by Sarah Miller, Laura Wherry, and Diana Greene Foster. Being denied an abortion leads to significant financial distress.

Preferences for Firearms and Their Implications for Regulation by Sarah Moshary, Bradley Shapiro, and Sara Drango. Different types of guns serve as strong substitutes for each other, which will likely temper any regulatory effects from limiting one or more specific strata of firearms. As with any regulation, narrowly identifying what it is you want and expect from the policy remains the key to making an evidence-based argument for it.

A panel-based proxy for gun prevalence in US and Mexico by Daniel Cerquiera, Danilo Coelho, John Donohue, Marcelo Fernandes, and Jony Pinto Junior. Using “percent of suicides committed with a firearm” remains a the best proxy for firearms. Regional variation across the US remains exactly what you’d expect in the US. Is the same true of Mexico?

BONUS PAPER. From twitter this morning:

How Much Should We Trust the Dictator’s GDP Growth Estimates? by Luis Martinez

I’d seen this before, but I think about all the time. We don’t give nearly enough time consideration ro the endogeneity of results to the incentives behind data creation/recording anywhere, let alone autocratic countries. I get why – it invites the dismissal of any data inconvenient to your status quo thinking, but ignoring it completely is foolish.

As we sit here with both historically low unemployment, but also a labor force participation rate that hasn’t yet recovered from covid, I expect that we will start to see workers lured back not just with the prospect of high wages, but the prospect of re-tracking their careers. I expect to see a bump in field and industry switching, as well an interest in educatonal programs that might enable such a switch. Since we’ve already wrung our hands over the fields (teaching, nursing, etc) that are mired in labor shortages, we should start thinking more about the opportunity to re-track their careers that workers are grabbing with both hands. And with that, I’d like to give my one piece of universal career and education advice: be an investment, not just an input, and never customer.

This works in a lot of ways. First, and this isn’t trivial, it will keep you out of scams and traps. They want to hire you, but you have buy $300 worth of training videos? Scam. You can start immediately, but you have to buy your sales stock from the partner who recruited you? Ponzi scam and trap. You’re admitted to the professional degree program, but you can’t find any evidence that recent placements are earning at least double the tuition immediately after graduating? Trap. Your incoming cohort seems wildly underprepared given your expectations for the program? Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you’re not there to bring presige to the school with your subsequent exploits. You’re there to write checks and wait for your degree in the mail. You’re not an employee or a protege, you’re not even a product. You’re a customer and, I promise, you’re not getting your money’s worth.

Avoiding drains on your wealth isn’t sufficient, of course. You’re trying to pay your bills and hopefully build a career. Well, if you wank into an office filled with uniform, impersonal and undecorated cubicles filled with nothing but recent graduates and temps, you should be on immediate alert. Decent chance you haven’t stepped on the first rung of a corporate ladder – you’re entered a mill that does the grunt work for the people actually on the ladder. Your job, on the other hand, will be to execute monotonous tasks until boredom or a loose labor market pushes you out the door, while a rotation of temps ensures that your exit proves esssentially unnoticeable for your employer. You’re not an team member, you’re barely an employee. You’re a commodified cog, one that they expect to wear out before any improvement in your capacities or value could possibly pay off.

What you want to be is an investment. Whether it’s school or an entry-level job, the most important thing to find is firm/school that has a stake in your long-term success, incentive to invest in your human capital, and a structure within which this investment can in you can reliably flourish. Easily advised, harder to pull off, especially as a job applicant on the outside. There are, however, signs and signals to look for.

A mixture of employee ages is a good sign that people are sticking around because they see a payoff to long-term employment. While a program of temp-to-hire can actually be a great sign, a constant rotation of temps to backfill in a perpetual exodus is a huge red flag. Training and education reimbursement programs? Great sign, doubly so if they come with built-in time off. It might seem counter-intuitive, but I consider it a better sign if the company requires continued post-training employment i.e. you have stick around for at least x years or pay the company back for the training. It might seem like a limitation on your career, but it’s also a really good sign that your employer anticipates significant value in the labor market for your training. They’re not just looking for good PR, they’re looking to protect their investment in you.

Training and education are great, but the absolute best signal that your employer views you as an investment remains dedicated mentorship. If your senior leadership is investing time and energy to prepare you for the next round, great. What you really want, however, is leadership investing in you to eventually replace them. Why is that such a positive signal? Because it means that they don’t see training you as a threat because they’re going to keep moving up too! It means that the firm invests in their employees up and down the ladder, and everyone is anticipating the continuedf acquistion of skills and progression in their careers. If, on the other hand, every bit of process knowledge is a secret fiefdom, every scrap of credit jealously fought over? That’s a sign of employees that feel stuck, desperate only to find an exit while clinging to job security like under-paying driftwood in a storm.

If you’re going to grad school for a doctorate, it’s easy to assess whether you’re an investment or a customer.

1. Are they paying you or are you paying them?
2. Is there a defined pattern of how people are trained, granted a degree, and eventually placed within the job market?
3. Is the program transparent about their students first job placements?

If you’re picking a PhD program, you should obviously go work with professors whose research excites you, but always on the understanding that they view you as an investment. Sure, they’ll get cheap labor our of you with regard to research and teaching assistance, but even those should be investments in your skill sets and experience. At the end of the day, good departments are eager, bordering on desperate, to brag about their former students. They are willing to pay you to go to school there because you will become a valued and hard-to-duplicate input in their research in the short run and a labor market star that further contributes to their own prestige in the long run.

Whatever step you are taking next in your career, especially if you are making a big sweeping change, make sure to find people who’s interests are aligned with investing in you, not just plugging you into their machine or selling you something. Remember, labor is an input, but that doesn’t mean you have to be an easily replaced and interchangeable commodity. Everybody wins if you become more valuable. Make sure you work and study somewhere smart enough to know that.

Rather than wade into the long running argument about how much of the value of education is in acquired skills versus the ability to signal ability or aptitude, let’s take a moment to appreciate the majesty of signaling in the wild. I hold the view that education has value far in excess of simply demonstrating to others that you can execute four years of tasks in a structured environment sufficient to warrant a degree. Make no mistake, however, I also firmly believe the labor market is constantly on the lookout for signals of high productivity employees that are entirely orthogonal to education and often values them more than most forms of broad training. To be honest, part of the reason I believe that education must have some training value is that the wage premium remains enormous, but the signal itself is actually kinda, well, generic. Sure, different degrees have different signals (i.e. did you dodge calculus?), but the fact remains that you really don’t learn all that much about a person from their simply having a degree.

If they worked the griddle at a Waffle House for a year? Now that’s a signal.

I’ll tell you straight up – I’d take a faculty job candidate with a PhD from State U and 12 months of Waffle House on their CV over someone who got an Ivy League PhD straight out of undergrad. And not just accept, I’d push hard for them. That person has seen. some. ahem, stuff, and they came out the other side a person that then went and finished their doctorate? That’s the stuff co-authoring dreams are built on.

Truest words ever spoken.
byu/5_Frog_Margin inwafflehouse

There are plenty of attributes that certain lines of work leverage. Grit. Attention to detail. Follow through. Resilience. Calm. Creativity. Cleverness. Reliability. I could go on for a 100 more at least, but at some point it just becomes a thesaurus for “awesome person who can accomplish tasks and handle challenges that are hard to define in advance”. And those kinds of things are difficult to ascertain without a) observing them first hand over an extended period of time, or b) those attributes being vouched for by someone whom you trust implicitly, neither of which are options for the typically hiring process, unless you’re “hiring” a 10-time All Star that was once coached by the person who took a knife for you in 5th period study hall 20 years ago.

There are some occupations and life experiences, however, like an extended run paying your bills scattering and smothering the world’s best hash browns, that do manage to signal those incredibly valuable, but hard to credibly observe attributes with at least some degree of reliability. Here’s a few that come to my mind:

1. Restaurant. Back of House and Front of House are very different signals. Bonus points for BOH in a short order or quick serve setting, you’re basically getting a soldier without a specialization in violence. Any generic FOH experience, short of selling ice cream at a posh beach, is at least useful for stepping out of social bubbles.
2. Military, especially if they fulfilled their duty, but chose to change careers. This is a person who not only follows through, but can make independent decisions. Immune to sunk cost fallacies.
3. Flight Attendant. They are emotionally bulletproof.
4. Hotel. Problem solvers.
5. Peace Corps or missionary work. Committed and make good on promises.
6. Delivery (i.e. UPS or FedEx). Big tasks don’t overwhelm them.
7. Independent Record Label/Zine distributor/Band promoter Utterly unfazed by high risk endeavors, get lots of intrinsic value out of their own labor

Before I wrap up, let me tack on a few specific summer jobs that have signal value to me. I’ve never met anyone who worked construction as a summer job who wasn’t tireless and reliable. Everyone I ever knew who worked at a movie theatre is funny and interesting, though usually a bit introverted. Kids with paper routes grow up to be independent adults. Screenwriters and novelists who never got a foot in the door make good industry creatives. Anyone who’s done an open mic comedy night more than once is probably a good teacher.

What about you? Are there jobs on a resume that let you know something important about a person that you couldn’t learn any other way?

I’ve been a sports fan for as long as I can remember, but there are a handful of athletes I’ve manage to form deep admiration for despite never having the opportunity to watch them while they were still actively playing. The two at the very top are Bill Russell (basketball) and Johan Cruyff (soccer). Russell passed away last week at the age of 88. He was an important man whose deep committment to the Civil Rights Movement we are still growing in appreciation of, but I want to talk about his genius.

I mean genius in a far more literal sense than what we typically mean when referring to brilliant athletes or (ugh) “sports IQ”. What Bill Russell did on the basketball court was no less genius than what might be admired in chess or physics. I really believe that. There are a handful of team sports (basketball, soccer, hockey, etc) where the game involves enough independent agents interacting that real-time prediction elevates to a level of complexity that success within the game demands that a player either

1. Dominate through one or more overwhelming attributes
2. Wait for randomness to grant you an opportuntity to contribute
3. Forecast events to maximally pursue opportunities to succeed

A teenager playing basketball with younger, smaller children can dominate absent any particular insight into the game. Similarly, someone who has practiced shooting 15 foot jumpshots or knows how to skate can contribute to a game simply by repeatedly going to a handful of positions and waiting for the game to presnt an opportunity. Neither, however, is remotely sufficient to come within a mile of sports played at the highest amateur levels, let alone sports played professionally. The very greatest athletes in professional sports come to dominate their respective games through their possession of both overwhelming attributes (both natural and acquired) and genius for pattern-recognition and real-time, within-game forecasting. We spend far too much time goggling over former and, in doing so, subtly denigrating the brilliance of the latter.

Bill Russell saw the patterns at play within a basketball game. When he played defense he knew where the ball was going, what the relevant player’s options would be, and how he could not only deny them the chance to score, but to deny them in a specific manner that would lead to his own team scoring in the subsequent transition. When Johan Cruyff played soccer, he could make as many as 6 or 7 consequent moves into open spaces, each creating different options for his teammates that would eventually lead to a goal scoring opportunity emergent from the series of micro-interactions created by the space and gravity of his own actions. These moments were neither clairovoyance or instinct. Their dominance was a product of intelligence in the purest sense.

Stop calling it “Sports IQ”

Instead of saying Lebron or Sidney Crosby is a genius, people instead often remark that they have a high basketball or hockey IQ. It drives me crazy. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad we’ve evolved from saying someone has great sport-specific “instincts”, which imply they are not even intellect-adjacent, but I don’t think we even need the sports-genre qualifiers. No one ever talks about a chemist or economist having field-specific intelligence, we just say they’re smart. You watch any fast-moving sport played at the highest level for a couple years, and you will come to appreciate that players are accomplishing feats of analysis under duress that are nothing short of incredible intellectual feats.

Funny enough, I think one of the contributors to our growing appreciation of the intellectual side of sports is video games. We knew chess players were really smart, but when we started programming computers to analyze millions of moves per second and it still took years for them to consistently beat the best humans, it probably raised our esteem for what chess players had achieved at the highest level.

Similarly, there is something about playing a game and controlling multiple players, transforming a team into a perfect hive mind of coordination granted by the top-down omniscience of their controlling deity that you appreciate what how perfect play might look. You participate in simulated perfection only to then subject yourself to the humbling limits of reality. Suddenly you are constrained by the information limitatons of a first-person view within the chaos of separate minds, moving at top speed (possibly on ice), while being hunted by an aggressive opposition (sometimes carrying lumber). And then it dawns on you that professionals produce an order within this caucophy of sweaty chaos that is only otherwise observable in a video game.

There are no doubt a host of reasons for this bias against crediting athletes with genius. First, racism. Nothing much more to say there other than, yeah, just straight-up racism and the penchant within sports commentary to de-intellectualize sports with the ascendancy of Black athletes in the 20th century.

Racism aside, I think there is also a particular bias against genius when it manifests in something hyper-specialized, particularly when the screening mechanisms are so intense that most of what gets observed is at the one in a million level (i.e. the 99.9999th percentile). At the highest level, professional sports are executed in a manner almost unrecognizable to how most observers might themselves have played or even observed first-hand, to the point of becoming unfamiliar, alien, and most importantly, unachievable. If something is intellectually unachievable, that may lower the relative estimation and status of the observer’s own intelligence. If, instead, what the athlete is demonstrating an innate proficiency for the specific physical task at hand, that’s just random, an anomaly made only relevant because of the peculiar game they play.

I’ll close with a manifestation of intelligence in sports that isn’t based in pattern-recognition or external complexity, but rather internal complexity. Simone Biles, in case you are not aware, is the greatest gymnast in history. To deny her standing in history is your prerogative, but even as a non-expert in gymnastics, allow me to assure you that you would be wrong. A moment that stuck with me in revealing her brilliance, ironically, was when she pulled herself from the previous Olympics. During the floor exercises and vault, Biles creates speed, vertical lift, shape, and multiple dimensions of body rotation. To organize a singular force diagram of her a physicist would require significant computational assistance or a whole bunch of math. Not only does Biles do this, she does it while her body is running, jumping, and rotating. She essentially tracks the problem in real time. What was amazing is that in the recent Olympics, still competing at an age considered well post-prime for gymnastics, she understood that she was not managing the physics problem with the reliablitiy and accuracy sufficient to perform her own routine. Could she have managed a set of simpler routines? Probably, but simpler ones had never been practiced. She confronted a dilemma: she had practiced routines that up until that moment no one else in the world could do but her, only now even she could not do them without presenting significant danger to herself and, in turn, no real help to her team. So what did she do on global television?

She withdrew from the Olympics. Which might be the single greatest moment of self-possession I’ve ever seen from an athlete. That probably counts as emotional intelligence, but I don’t actually know how that works and is a different post anyway.

There is real genius in professional sports. It’s time we started crediting them for it.