On being minimally competent at a bunch of things...
When I was a child, I read Lloyd Alexander's <i>Chronicles of Prydain</i> fantasy series. I enjoyed all five books, but the one that especially spoke to me was Book Four, <i>Taran Wanderer</i>, in which the adopted protagonist goes looking for his birth parents. Along the way, he apprentices briefly to a weaver, and learns enough to make himself a blanket -- with some flaws, not the best quality, but it works and he made it with his own hands. He apprentices briefly to a potter, and learns enough to make himself a cooking-pot -- not beautiful, but it works and he made it with his own hands. He apprentices briefly to a smith, and learns enough to make himself a sword -- not the best, but it works and he made it with his own hands. (He also invents Fair Division Theory, in mediating a dispute over horses.) And I thought "That's what I want to be!" And in the decades since I have, in fact, done not-very-good weaving, not-very-good pottery, not-very-good blacksmithing, not-very-good bronze-casting, not-very-good carpentry, not-very-good baking, not-very-good knitting, and so on, because it's fulfilling to learn new skills and make things that are more truly "mine" because I made them with my own hands.
My wife recently encountered (in some online article) the statement "In the Midwest, when a person compliments another person on a physical possession, it is customary for the owner to explain that the possession was acquired at a significant discount."
In many cultures, ostentatious spending is seen as a socially hostile act, a way of "one-upping" your neighbors and denigrating them. Buying things "at a significant discount" or making them yourself, even when you _could_ have bought them for full price, can be a tactic to avoid being accused of such social hostility.
My wife and I have sometimes discussed hiring someone to help clean the house, which we could easily afford, but we've never done so, partly because we were both brought up in households in which that would have been considered profligate and "that's what rich people do". My 81-year-old mother has recently hired a house-cleaner, and justifies it to herself in several ways: not only is she older and less physically able than ten years ago, but it gives the cleaner a job, and it obligates my mother to tidy and declutter before the cleaner arrives. That last point is symbolically important: my mother is still doing _some_ of the work, just not all of it.
Before Adam Smith, Dr Sam: Johnson was using the word 'subordination'. Sometimes Johnson meant 'Dogs! Obey!' Sometimes Johnson meant what Smith later meant by 'division of labor.
Some of the earlier, Johnsonian meaning stuck with Smith's 'division of labor'. Sometimes that's good, but not always.
Straying from specialization at the appropriate time in the appropriate amount relieves the boredom caused by specialization, allowing one, on the whole to perform the specialized task more than if they did not habitually stray from it.
Most people’s income rises over time, until it decreases. An economical use of certain skills vary over that time frame, which we can only imperfectly adjust to. It is impossible for the individual to conclusively know which mundane uneconomical tasks add to our life and which detract from it.
Thanks to specialization we have a lot of free time. Modern Western society seems to value how those free hours are spent, including in gestures that signal how we value activities and other people. Making cookies for other people is a gesture that's difficult to fake, indicating that you value them in the amount of [X hours] and [Y effort] that it took you to make the cookies. If we had less free time, we wouldn't be able to signal in such a way, so that such signaling would be less common. But, on the other hand, what we choose to do would be just as important, as it would signal what things had true value (for instance, for our survival).
Make a bare bones economic question relevant to everyday life: How much time does one spend specialized and how much time does one spend generalized? Precise answers will of course depend on local and temporal conditions. Payoffs will differ.
In our safety we do still generalize. The activities are made more efficient by firms such as Home Depot and these and the rest are called hobbies. :-)
This article has a somewhat provocative title of the style: "Good thing is actually bad." But reading the article, we see that the benefit of specialization is "making the modern world possible," while the cost of specialization is losing a small hedge against an unlikely event, or an inability to provide nice gestures.
Concern for the costs seems to largely be a luxury facilitated by the benefits of specialization. Not that there's any problem with that. If one is rich enough to not need to worry about the marginal economic costs of doing something himself, then great!
Learning and practicing a craft also has an intrinsic value and pleasure of its own apart from its instrumental results. I play the piano well but not quite to a professional standard, and the quality of my recordings is better than my own playing, but I still enjoy and value it.
Yes! There is a joy in doing something yourself that goes beyond the thing you are doing. When I was in graduate school, I'd spend much of the day 'hitting the books' and working problems. It was hard to see any net result at the end of the day. But on many days I'd find myself in the machine shop making a new widget for my experiment, and at the end of the day I'd be holding this little piece of metal with holes and such in the right places. And that gave me a great deal of satisfaction.
True! When you are free to learn, you pick up skills that is useful in life. To be creative, flexible and take initiatives is good protection against uncertain times. Its is like selfdirected learning (Unschooling!)
On specialization, much can depend on how one's bundle of skills is defined. This can be a complicated task when we're not on a Ricardian island trading coconuts or making widgets but instead in modern knowledge or service professions. In the latter case, I wonder: is baking cookies on some occasions part of some usually unacknowledged bundle of activities that go with being a law professor? (One can take the inquiry further—isn't widget making really like the pencil, with each component being decomposable and requiring management bounded by transaction costs? indeed, every action and consciousness itself may just be the result of a sort of bidding process.)
It's kind of like learning languages. Everyone has to learn one language. Most people end up becoming familiar with a couple of languages. But the more languages you learn, the less the time spent learning them is worthwhile for what you get out of it.
Everyone should know the basics, but no one can know the basics of everything. In order to earn a living, you have to be doing something that someone else is not doing. If you find yourself naturally attracted to a certain specialization, it's a good idea - only for you - to specialize in it, but with your feet on the ground about how realistic it is, and in general making sure that you have at least some other basic skills.
On being minimally competent at a bunch of things...
When I was a child, I read Lloyd Alexander's <i>Chronicles of Prydain</i> fantasy series. I enjoyed all five books, but the one that especially spoke to me was Book Four, <i>Taran Wanderer</i>, in which the adopted protagonist goes looking for his birth parents. Along the way, he apprentices briefly to a weaver, and learns enough to make himself a blanket -- with some flaws, not the best quality, but it works and he made it with his own hands. He apprentices briefly to a potter, and learns enough to make himself a cooking-pot -- not beautiful, but it works and he made it with his own hands. He apprentices briefly to a smith, and learns enough to make himself a sword -- not the best, but it works and he made it with his own hands. (He also invents Fair Division Theory, in mediating a dispute over horses.) And I thought "That's what I want to be!" And in the decades since I have, in fact, done not-very-good weaving, not-very-good pottery, not-very-good blacksmithing, not-very-good bronze-casting, not-very-good carpentry, not-very-good baking, not-very-good knitting, and so on, because it's fulfilling to learn new skills and make things that are more truly "mine" because I made them with my own hands.
Loved that series as a kid
On "symbolic frugality"...
My wife recently encountered (in some online article) the statement "In the Midwest, when a person compliments another person on a physical possession, it is customary for the owner to explain that the possession was acquired at a significant discount."
In many cultures, ostentatious spending is seen as a socially hostile act, a way of "one-upping" your neighbors and denigrating them. Buying things "at a significant discount" or making them yourself, even when you _could_ have bought them for full price, can be a tactic to avoid being accused of such social hostility.
My wife and I have sometimes discussed hiring someone to help clean the house, which we could easily afford, but we've never done so, partly because we were both brought up in households in which that would have been considered profligate and "that's what rich people do". My 81-year-old mother has recently hired a house-cleaner, and justifies it to herself in several ways: not only is she older and less physically able than ten years ago, but it gives the cleaner a job, and it obligates my mother to tidy and declutter before the cleaner arrives. That last point is symbolically important: my mother is still doing _some_ of the work, just not all of it.
Before Adam Smith, Dr Sam: Johnson was using the word 'subordination'. Sometimes Johnson meant 'Dogs! Obey!' Sometimes Johnson meant what Smith later meant by 'division of labor.
Some of the earlier, Johnsonian meaning stuck with Smith's 'division of labor'. Sometimes that's good, but not always.
Straying from specialization at the appropriate time in the appropriate amount relieves the boredom caused by specialization, allowing one, on the whole to perform the specialized task more than if they did not habitually stray from it.
Most people’s income rises over time, until it decreases. An economical use of certain skills vary over that time frame, which we can only imperfectly adjust to. It is impossible for the individual to conclusively know which mundane uneconomical tasks add to our life and which detract from it.
Thanks to specialization we have a lot of free time. Modern Western society seems to value how those free hours are spent, including in gestures that signal how we value activities and other people. Making cookies for other people is a gesture that's difficult to fake, indicating that you value them in the amount of [X hours] and [Y effort] that it took you to make the cookies. If we had less free time, we wouldn't be able to signal in such a way, so that such signaling would be less common. But, on the other hand, what we choose to do would be just as important, as it would signal what things had true value (for instance, for our survival).
Make a bare bones economic question relevant to everyday life: How much time does one spend specialized and how much time does one spend generalized? Precise answers will of course depend on local and temporal conditions. Payoffs will differ.
In our safety we do still generalize. The activities are made more efficient by firms such as Home Depot and these and the rest are called hobbies. :-)
I think the terse form of that quote is
; to be best human you can is to be self-sufficient if necessary.
This article has a somewhat provocative title of the style: "Good thing is actually bad." But reading the article, we see that the benefit of specialization is "making the modern world possible," while the cost of specialization is losing a small hedge against an unlikely event, or an inability to provide nice gestures.
Concern for the costs seems to largely be a luxury facilitated by the benefits of specialization. Not that there's any problem with that. If one is rich enough to not need to worry about the marginal economic costs of doing something himself, then great!
Learning and practicing a craft also has an intrinsic value and pleasure of its own apart from its instrumental results. I play the piano well but not quite to a professional standard, and the quality of my recordings is better than my own playing, but I still enjoy and value it.
Yes! There is a joy in doing something yourself that goes beyond the thing you are doing. When I was in graduate school, I'd spend much of the day 'hitting the books' and working problems. It was hard to see any net result at the end of the day. But on many days I'd find myself in the machine shop making a new widget for my experiment, and at the end of the day I'd be holding this little piece of metal with holes and such in the right places. And that gave me a great deal of satisfaction.
True! When you are free to learn, you pick up skills that is useful in life. To be creative, flexible and take initiatives is good protection against uncertain times. Its is like selfdirected learning (Unschooling!)
On specialization, much can depend on how one's bundle of skills is defined. This can be a complicated task when we're not on a Ricardian island trading coconuts or making widgets but instead in modern knowledge or service professions. In the latter case, I wonder: is baking cookies on some occasions part of some usually unacknowledged bundle of activities that go with being a law professor? (One can take the inquiry further—isn't widget making really like the pencil, with each component being decomposable and requiring management bounded by transaction costs? indeed, every action and consciousness itself may just be the result of a sort of bidding process.)
It's kind of like learning languages. Everyone has to learn one language. Most people end up becoming familiar with a couple of languages. But the more languages you learn, the less the time spent learning them is worthwhile for what you get out of it.
Everyone should know the basics, but no one can know the basics of everything. In order to earn a living, you have to be doing something that someone else is not doing. If you find yourself naturally attracted to a certain specialization, it's a good idea - only for you - to specialize in it, but with your feet on the ground about how realistic it is, and in general making sure that you have at least some other basic skills.