From: Reason (reason@exratio.com)
Date: Sun Sep 01 2002 - 16:37:50 MDT
--> Max More
> At 11:44 PM 8/31/2002 -0700, Reason wrote:
>
> >See article reference at the end of this e-mail:
>
> I think you don't know my background. I was practically weaned on
> Mises. I
> have been intimately familiar with the arguments of that article for over
> 20 years. I can honesty boast of having read (not skimmed) every page of
> Human Action (and Rothbard's Man, Economy, & State). The
> arguments are all
> excellent still. I'm just not taking this as the final word.
>
> It might help if you took my thoughts as a theoretical search for
> new forms
> of effective collective action, not as a current day proposal for
> a program within our existing govt. form.
Certainly.
> >If it's limited and temporary, it will simply fail.
>
> I'm not certain. I think DARPA does a good job -- probably the
> best of any govt. agency. It's funding of research specifically is set up
to be
> temporary and to prevent the build up of entrenched interests. See, for
> example:
Can't say I'm familiar enought with DARPA to say how good it is at avoiding
the problems of accountability inherent in government bodies. Like all
funding government agencies that actually lead to things being produced, it
could quite cheerfully be replaced by venture companies if it went away and
turned out to leave a market opportunity. Said companies wouldn't be
spending the money of people who have no say in how they are operated...
> >Ok, good. So we're on the same page there. See earlier comment
> and article
> >reference at the end. Why keep going back? Would you invest in a business
> >that you had even a fraction of the same concerns with? Of course not. So
> >why suggest another beating by the evil dwarf, figuratively speaking?
>
> Before even considering pressing my sketchy proposal in ANY govt.
> system, I
> would FIRST push for the removal of all government interventions that
> reduced the effectiveness of labor markets and the transfer of
> information.
> Only after that, if there were still clear structural problems, would I
> consider a govt. program of any kind, even in a reformed system.
I'm still not sure I see why there should be a government involved in here?
I mean, it seems like you're halfway to simply proposing a business
plan/philanthropic entity for retraining people.
> > It is done better. However, I am not at all sure that it works well for
> > everyone. How many of these "competing training institutions that make
> > their profit from future wages of the people they retrain" can
> you point
> > to? Perhaps you know of many that I don't.
>
> >Every major technology consulting company. Think about it.
>
> This isn't what I was expecting. I thought you had in mind companies that
> specialized in retraining for a cut of future income in a range
> of fields,
> not just technology. I am familiar with technology consulting
> companies. In
> fact I work with one. I do not believe that they take unskilled
> people and
> train them for a share of future earnings. They take people with MBAs or
> science degrees or some experience relevant to the job. They
> don't, as far
> as I'm aware, take the proverbial Pittsburgh worker, or N.
> England factory
> or mine worker and train them to work on Oracle software or certify them
> for Cisco or Microsoft. The people who can get accepted at such
> consulting
> companies are exactly the kind of people I am *not* concerned with.
As I said elsewhere in my previous post, one cannot expect to make huge
leaps in retraining. That just isn't feasible on short timescales. One
retrains people a bit at a time. I didn't get into my current location
running a telco VAS company by passing GO and collecting $200. I've been
through five different technology-related industries over the course of ten
years to get here, each one doing a more modest level of retraining, plus a
bunch of retraining on my own.
It's a gradual process. Unskilled labor trains itself to the point of being
accepted into a labor-needy industry for further training -- I mentioned the
Bay Area as an extreme example of that in technology. I'm unfamiliar with
other industries I could offer examples in, but the very fact that new
employees have to come from *somewhere* seems to suggest that a working
retraining-from-scratch distributed bootstrap process is in place in all
industries to generate at least the level of staffing companies require.
Guided by wage incentives that come out of the market of course.
I humbly submit that if there is a great enough demand for Oracle DBAs,
indicated by the cost of employing one as a reflection of their scarcity in
the market, then a retraining industry will arise that will eventually
retrain Pittsburgh workers from scratch. However, I suspect that the level
of demand would have to be astronomical...
Small incremenents, reflecting cost of retraining. One retrains helpdesk
staff to be Oracle DBAs before steelworkers, programmers before helpdesk
staff and DBAs before programmers.
This means that the guy in Pittsburgh is (shock) going to have to have some
sort of career plan in order to get to work on Oracle software. He'll have
to retrain in increments, work up through the ranks. If there's enough
demand for the employees various ranks, then this will be feasible. But
going from point A directly to point F, S, or Z? Doesn't happen outside of
strange circumstances like existed in the Bay Area for a while.
(Oracle is a bad example; their database business is about to get eaten for
lunch, but you see what I mean).
> >More obviously,
> >there are some small schemes involving sending people to university in
> >exchange for some percentage of their wages for the first X
> years after they
> >graduate. I don't think any of those really got off the ground.
>
> Why is that? Could it be that the market for this doesn't function well
> enough? Of course, pace Mises, that *doesn't* mean the government will do
> better. Government failure and all that. But it *does* mean that we can
> look for a way to either change the structure of the market so that this
> information flows better, enabling such schemes to actually work, or to
> look for a minimal but helpful way in which government might fill in the
> gaps. Again, for the latter, I would consider it a last resort. If I were
> discussing this option with a regular kind of person, I would certainly
> spend far more time emphasizing the failures of government. I don't think
> you need a whole of convincing on that issue!
Not in the "regular kind of person" box. Heh. Yes, point taken on the market
function thing. I think the current crop of things like myrichuncle.com are
a cyclical experiment. Takes half a decade to see if it'll work, and I'm not
digging through the archives to see in what form it was last tried.
So I could suppose that the fact that we don't see these things everywhere
means that funding radical, broad retraining (4 year degree) is unfeasible
or too risky from the point of view of much of the market. Companies (and
myself, come to think of it) might prefer to fund things like 1/3/6 month
training programs for specific skillsets. Increments are usually seen as
better; less risk.
> >I'm not convinced that there is such a thing as a real need that
> the market does not handle.
>
> Nor am I. Neither am I convinced that there is not.
Open minds are good, yes. We'll put that question to one side until
simulation-based economics provides a definitive answer.
> Anyway, 'nuff said. Since I'm not seriously looking to develop a
> government
> program of this kind, market forces dictate that I put my time into
> something more productive than continuing this discussion. :-)
>
> Reason, we really *are* on the same side. I think the only difference is
> that I am willing to occasionally peek into the enemy camp to see if they
> have any good ideas that could be made to work under different conditions.
I guess peeking into the enemy camp is just such a gloomy, despondant affair
for me. It's like watching a car wreck that never ends. And I get to help
pay for it, or else. Whee. "Different conditions" for me would mean no
centralized control, completely free market. Sure, there's plenty of
business plans that become viable if government monopolopy on the relevant
area goes away, but I don't think that's quite the same thing.
For this particular retraining idea, I think that the market is already
doing it to the extent that it's possible to know that retraining is useful
in any given situation. Of course, if a philanthropic training concern steps
in a retrains people for free, that alters the whole cost-benefit
analysis...
Reason
http://www.exratio.com/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:16:37 MST