Byron Auguste: belief

Transcript context

…The collective-action-problem version of your hypothesis seems much more plausible to me. As you know, putting aside pandemic times, employers are demanding not only more four-year degrees but master’s degrees or more for a lot of jobs. So the market has decided in a big way to move in the other direction. The level of market failure — Sorry, have you interviewed the market? How’s the market side of that? I think the institutional factors are really, really important to understand. The US labor market is not a spot market for ditch digging. It’s not a market in that sense. It is where years, decades of investment in human capital, if you will, are monetized. Like healthcare, it’s a market where the ultimate use is not necessarily by the person hiring or training, and even more so, it’s a market where self-concept plays a big role. For example, in the HR field — that was a field, 30 years ago, where if you were a good, conscientious, people-person manager, someone might say, “Hey, you should look into a stint in HR.” The HR department had people who had worked in operations, on the factory floor, in finance — just all over. It was a very diverse group. Now it’s a field that, over the last three years, has become the most credentialized. Now, that’s the front end of screening. “Hey, we’re hiring for an important job. Well, my job’s important, and I have a bachelor’s degree for it, so, probably this has to have a bachelor’s degree.” There’s a tremendous amount of cut and pasting going on, just without thinking about what the role requires. I think you can’t ignore these hysteresis effects, if you will. There’s a path dependency here that’s taken us far off course. It’s not just about some straight free-market decisions. We have such a diversified economy, so many millions of employers. They’re willing to do a lot of weird things. You see that in the tech sector. And to think this problem, they can’t overcome because they’re just massively failing at the level of millions of individual decisions —…

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