chiro said:
There are smart people who get annoyed that "jocks" (for lack of a better term) end up being in positions which end up earning more money and "social respect/status" (again for lack of a better term) than people who have slaved away at university and other post graduate studies, purely with their faith that they would be in a better position than said jocks.
And there is a reason for that. Getting money and power is all about convincing people to do certain things for you and to work with other people to get those things. These are
"jock" skills that you learn playing American football or trying to get a date.
Since I like learning new stuff, I don't mind learning "jock" skills.
You yourself have said quite a number of times about PhD graduates you have to change their ways if they want a decent chance to get something outside of the academic circle.
It's not so much changing that's the problem. Unless you want to starve, you really don't have that much choice. What I think needs to change is the "culture of academia" that discourages Ph.D.'s from learning outside skills.
In terms of economics, I don't believe that wealth is something that is finite. The models of economics that deal with resources that are treated purely as finite and hence valuable is, at least in my mind, not a true indicator.
Wealth is finite. You have to distinguish between what is *possible* and what *is*.
There's no physical law that prevents me from having a bowl of spaghetti in front of me, but as a point of fact, there isn't a bowl of spaghetti in front of me. If you give me about an hour, I can get a bowl of spaghetti. If you give me five seconds, I can't.
Similarly, wealth is finite since right now I can't go out and buy the Brooklyn Bridge. You can imagine a world in which this is possible, but that's not the one that we are in. Now you could argue that we are limiting the wealth available because of silly sociological rules.
Yeah... And?
It's not I think nothing is finite, but rather that technology and innovation has a habit of bending pre-existing notions and limits of the "finite-ness" of the resources available. Things that are created today help create better things for tomorrow.
But that requires a pretty sophisticated social infrastructure. One thing that seriously concerns me is that I think that current government policies in the United States are destroying technology infrastructure. One thing that I happen to believe is that technology requires massive government funding.
Silicon Valley came into existence because of massive defense spending and education spending in the 1950's and 1960's.
One problem with cutting government funding to education and technology is that the "lights don't go out immediately." It's pretty easy to "cut waste" because if you zero out technology funding, nothing bad happens immediately. But if you wait ten to twenty years, things fall apart.
Then you get into the brass tacks issues with running a company. You need risk capital. And health insurance is a royal pain.
In your question, if you are referring "turning knowledge into cash" in regards to the university model of education, then that's just like finance: it's a confidence game. We think earning so and so degree at so and so place means high probability of success and return on investment. Without confidence, things would collapse.
Everyone will work out if issuing degrees you generate enough new wealth to pay for the investments, at that point you have a good cycle. Degrees -> more education -> more wealth -> more money for education
The trouble is that I don't think that cycle is working. The fact that the best job that ParticleGrrl can find right now is working as a bartender suggests that something is very, very broken.
Also, I was thinking in terms of my own experience with the University of Phoenix. I taught algebra there. I make $1000 a month doing that. Now there are 15 students each paying UoP $1000/month. That is $15000 coming in. Now you'd think that I could charge 15 students half the price, make a lot more money and cut UoP out of the loop, but I can't because I can't issue degrees. Now where does that massive amount of money go? It turns out that about 10% goes to teachers and 35% goes to marketing.
Things work differently in East Asia. The thing about East Asia is that everything is test based, so you "win" if you pass the National Entrance Exams. As a result there is a huge industry of cram schools for doing that, and those cram schools tend to be massive money makers.
Since I'm something of a "big thinker" if it involves creating a new industry to get something done, I'll create a new industry. The trouble is that this takes about a decade, and in the meantime, I have to eat.
The thing is though, a lot of people are not entrepreneurial. The kind of blind optimism is so contrary to everything that people are taught, that most people are automatically filtered out on this ground alone.
There is an article by Malcolm Gladwell that argues that entrepreneurs are not optimists. In fact he argues that entrepreneurs tend to be massive pessimists that just see things that other people don't.
That makes sense to me. The "blind optimists" are people that think that they can get a job in academia. If I was a blind optimist, I never would have started thinking "creatively" to deal with the fact that I was just not going to get a job in academia with the standard route. I think of it this way. Someone that jumps out of an airplane with a parachute isn't an optimist if he realizes that the plane is going to crash.
One thing that helped me a lot is that I went to entrepreneur school (i.e. MIT). It doesn't take that much courage to start your own company if you know a dozen people that have also done the same thing.
If someone has enough blind optimism, then the perseverance needed to battle failure after failure, stressful situation after situation, and ability to really put everything of yourself on the line, is just too much for most people.
I don't think that's true. Google for the "Stockdale paradox."
Also don't think of it as a battle against failure. You will fail. You will fail badly. You just need to make sure that you don't fail in any fatal ways. You should never put everything on the line because if the coin flip goes bad, you are dead. Instead gamble what you can afford to lose. That way you can keep flipping the coin and make Kolmorgorov's zero-one law work to your advantage.
This involves "jock skills." One reason that jocks tend to get dates is that they try to get a date, and if it doesn't work, the head over to the next possible target, and they keep trying until someone says yes. Something that you quickly learn when you do sales is not to take someone saying no personally. Just smile, shake hands, and then move to the next lead.
Most people strive for security, and entrepreneurial people give this up almost completely.
I don't think that's true. Entrepreneurial people in my experience crave security. They just realize that what most people think is secure... isn't...
Also the idoltry of entrepreneurs is taken a really nasty turn. One justification for letting people make huge amounts of money is that if you let some people make massive amounts of money, it grows the pie and that the gravy trickles down. That's not what is happening.
My personal thought is that entrepreneurs become more able to deal with bad times, like economic cycles, purely because that is a natural thing for an entrepreneur to deal with.
The problem is that massive economic cycles just destroy small companies. If you have a big company, you can survive the business cycle with capital and if you run out of capital, you could be too big to fail. SME's get creamed by economic cycles.
One thing that scares me about looking at the University of Phoenix and academia in general is that you look at the problems that you see in universities and then realize that those problems are making it into general society. The problem is that that entrepreneurs need consumers, and if you are selling products to the government or to middle class consumers then there is no need for you to exist.
The one bit of optimism is that the United States has been through worse, and it might take a few years but people will react. My guess is that if my view of what happens next is correct that in 2020, when China and India announces that they are going to be sending people to the Moon, that the United States will wake up and fix what needs to be fixed.
