When I was driving home from my father's house one day, I heard a commercial for a service in the local area (which includes the town where I grew up) called "Captain Laundry". The commercial started with a couple devolving rather rapidly into a screaming match over who would do the laundry, because neither of them had any time to do it. "Captain Laundry" kindly makes itself available to come to your house and do your laundry and dry-cleaning for you, so you don't have to worry about it.
This rather irritating commercial got me thinking about the concept of comparative advantage: in economic theory, nations will supposedly specialize in those areas where they can produce more value than other nations. I wonder if this idea has started to permeate individual lives, as well.
There seems to be an increasing tendency to think that all of our actions have opportunity costs that are measured in real income. If you are better at one thing than at all other things, you should devote almost all of your time to doing that thing, because you will be able to make more money doing that. Since you command a premium in that one activity, you can then afford to pay someone else to do all the stuff you are slightly less good at, but in which they excel. Economically, everyone wins, because they get to demand the highest price for their time.
Does anyone else see this as being increasingly true? If so, do you think it is healthy for the human mind to be transformed into a one-dimensional task handler? Do we lose something of ourselves by devoting what is fundamentally a generalist intelligence and skill set to an increasingly limited scope of activities?
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I would wager that we lose something when we say "Yeah, I'll be the best whatever I can be." But, at the same time, that sort of 'rugged individualism' is a cornerstone of American society. What you are pointing out is that ideal being pushed to its extreme, and that's nothing new these days.
That being said, I'd like to see 'wandering philosopher' make a come back as a viable career. I am far better at talking about the esoteric points of life and such than building web pages.
Specialization is a tough one. A lot of our technology and science is so advanced by this point, that specialization is almost necessary to make future advances in a given field. If people want to advance physics, for example, it takes nearly a lifetime of studying to learn enough about physics to do so.
It's something I see a lot of. I went to school to be a 'programmer'. Now that I'm out, people aren't hiring 'programmers', they're hiring 'Java programmers', 'Coldfusion programmers', et cetera. Training is something most companies don't want to waste the time on, they'd rather hire specialists.
This leads to my counter-question. Rather than asking 'is specialization necessary, or taken too far', I think we should ask a different question. Each of us is, in many ways, a Renaissance Man. So my question is this: what is the role of the Renaissance Man in modern society? Where do they(we) fit in? Or is there a place for us? Will we eventually specialize, while our other talents and skills drop off or become habits and curios of days when we had more free time?
An excellent beginning to the Salon, I think. MattS and Aeolus, thank you for your considered responses so far.
In a way, I think you are both saying the same thing. There are certain forces as humanity has developed that have encouraged or necessitated specialization in the service of some "other", be it the national/cultural good or some broader progress in human achievement. There is a certain spiritual satisfaction to advancing either cause, but there is also an inherent struggle between individual and common goods. As Matt points out, this is nothing new, but I feel that this struggle has grown more pervasive as the world has shrunk, and we are seeing increasing pressure towards "value add" activities as a result.
As such, then, I wonder if society has an interest at all in the Renaissance Person. Although our educational system encourages and produces "well-rounded" students, employers appreciate well-roundedness only to the extent that it makes an individual better at the job he or she was hired to do. There seems to be little interest in the totality of a person in the workplace, except to the extent that coworkers become friends and develop an appreciation for shared interests outside of work.
The only job I can think of that really values Renaissance abilities is entrepreneur, because having varied talents allows an entrepreneur to function in many roles, increasing the speed of labor and decision-making while reducing the costs of both.
Does that mean the drive to be Renaissance is a zero-sum game between a person and everyone else? How do we carve a balance between the societal interest and our own?
I don't know that companies are actually specializing to this degree, though I am not in the job market right now. I think most companies assume that everyone who they hire (especially those right out of school) will need retraining, and they see this as a basic requirement. What companies are looking for when they hire is not skillset, but flexibility and the ability to adapt to many different situations. (alki pointed this out) There are studies showing that a diverse workplace (racial and gender) produces better results than a uniform one -- somewhat interesting given that defenders of a uniform workplace would say that they are just hiring the best people!
I do think that there is an unfortunate focus on specialization in education, and this is where I am more concerned: I don't know that there is any market benefit to skill diversity (beyond a specific point -- obviously just about everyone will need people skills, presentation skills, the ability to have an interesting conversation), but there is a personal satisfaction that people gain from having diverse interests. If we haven't at least been shown the door, we won't know what might be there.
With the recent focus on testing as a primary method of education, I worry that people will see academics as the only purpose of life vs just something else. I once did an interview with a woman involved with a dyslexia reading group, and she put it this way: by focusing on reading and test scores we inspire students to feel bad about academic failure vs a more positive attitude such as "well, I may not be very good at reading, but I am good at soccer". Different people can have very different lives and still be happy.
From my perspective as a fledgling in the wild and wooly world of cultural non-profits, specialization is not desired by your employer, especially once you have the job.
In a mission-based organization where project-commitment and appreciation of educational opportunities must by necessity trump cash incentives, employers can't afford to hire people who don't demonstrate the potential to grow to fill unforeseen niches. Someone who is only interested in handling collections might become frustrated when asked to contribute to a research effort.
That being said, as organizations grow larger, traditional corporate structures tend to solidify. HR and Finance increasingly require various departments to justify their employees presences and sometimes the only way to effectively do that is to say "without so-and-so, no one would be able to do whatever essential task."
For that reason, I find myself wary of large, efficient organizations. Is there a way to create a functional community where all endeavors are small-scale and everyone does many different tasks? What would happen to free time in such a community?
Which leads me to a related question... We we be culturally better off if everyone valued time more than money?
I think the desire for specialization is somewhat dependent upon where you work. (This is echoing Museophile a bit, but stay with me.) Working formerly in direct health care with patients, I was absolutely expected to be a specialist. The nature of medicine insists on it because of how complex the human body is. Now working in the non-profit policy world, it's completely the opposite. I know for a fact that part of the reason I was hired was because I was able to sell myself as a non-specialist, someone who was knowledgeable about several things rather than focused on one. Either that or it could have been the bribes I slipped to my future boss...
I also readily admit that I'm a card-carrying member of that great association of professional naval-gazers, the liberal arts graduates, so take these comments with that requisite grain of salt.
I do think that developing a specialty is sort of mental health inoculant for a lot of folk. It's a way of psychologically guarding against failure. For most of us, the majority of things in this world are things that we're either going to suck at or at best be only moderately good. Having a specialty is our psyche's way of declaring to everyone else, "check me out - you may be able to restart my cardiac rhythms with your fancy medical degree, but I promise you you'll be thanking me when I remember your order after you sit at a table in my section of the restaurant."
Museophile, to your direct question, I think we already value time pretty much at the expense of most other things. I think the difference is that we're always looking forward in it, rather than backwards or presently. We're acutely aware that our time is limited on earth, so we go to great lengths (and spend scads of money) to push back that particular calendar appointment as much as we can.
Clovis, I think it's extremely interesting that, from a healthcare perspective, you see 1) specialization as an expression of personal worth and 2) the desire to convert money into time. While I definitely see some of the first one, in the business world I usually see people converting time into money, with money-making also driving specialization. Very few people actually like public accounting, although it does happen. Mostly, while accountants take pride in their abilities, they measure their success in terms of earnings power, and measure the value of their time similarly.
I wonder, if you subtracted the necessity of money-making from the average person's life, whether they would still prefer to be excellent at the one thing they can do best, or whether they would be content to not be especially good at anything (either by not trying very hard in general or by tinkering with what interests them at the moment). Clovis, has anyone tried to study what winning the lottery does to a person's mental calculus?
I also find fascinating the idea that, when we are young, we convert time into money. Most of us, I think, are looking for "financial independence", or the opportunity to convert that money back into time at the end of our lives, hopefully at a net gain of free time. Is this a good deal, or do we trade away our time too easily? How about our health and our relationships? How many find, at the end of the road, that retirement cannot make up for the energy they gave up to get there? How should that affect our choices for today? It sounds like the assembled Societe has some very varied experiences regarding the fulfillment our respective work provides.
This has been a good thread, and I think we got the diversity of perspectives we were looking for. Please, everyone, feel free to continue to comment on this theme.
Since we have had this theme for a week now, though, it is probably time to add a thread to the big board. Anyone have anything they would like to introduce?
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