Comment by nhaehnle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nhaehnle | Hacker News Reader

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It's called degree/credentials inflation, and it's caused by a combination of persistent mass unemployment and the message that education can solved it.

Now, mass unemployment simply cannot be solved via education - the parable of the 100 dogs and 92 bones was discussed here not so long ago. (The original link was this one, I believe: http://alittleecon.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/the-parable-of-1...)

However, having a good education and credentials does increase the chances that you'll get one of the 92 metaphorical bones, so of course it makes sense to get one. But this only really works reliably if your education and your credentials are better than those of your peers.

This leads to an arms race which explains why degrees are become simultaneously worth less and more important.

Edited to add: The effect on degrees is actually old hat already. These days, it's about an inflation of unpaid internship to spice up your CV, at least for those in non-technical fields.

The real problem, then, is to figure out what is wrong with our system that it only consistently produces 92 bones...

Why does something have to be wrong with the system for that to be happening?

Keep in mind that the analogy isn't exact. We're talking about workers, not dogs, and jobs, not bones. Workers are productive. They produce when they have jobs. So 92 bones, in this case, means that 8 workers out of 100 are idle. Either society must support them, then, or let them starve.

I reject the notion that they should starve. I'm OK with supporting them, but wouldn't it be better, more popular at least, to have them produce something? A resource standing idle is an opportunity so, all else equal, idle resources should not exist.

I realize it's more complicated than that. Frictional unemployment, etc. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about a significant chunk of the population being permanently idled by structural changes in the economy.

Except that a fair portion of that theoretical 8% is frictional. In the US at least about half of unemployment has historically been frictional or structural.

I think it can be easily inferred from my comment that I'm not talking about frictional unemployment.

Well the problem for a start is the idea that there are only a fixed number of job openings available. My experience is that this is not really true.

In e.g. security consulting, we certainly hire good people wherever we can find and afford them. Being reductive for a minute, each consultant is essentially a cab with a little taxi meter over their their head, and more cabs = more money, up to the limit of available work (which no-one in the industry is anywhere near hitting).

I hear a similar story from my brother who is a plumber.

I acknowledge what you say at a micro level. Most knowledge-based businesses have some flexibility in hiring when "super stars" come along. I think this is essentially just noise contained in the cost of doing business, though.

The reason why I think this: This behavior would break down if things really changed at a macro scale. If there were suddenly lots of people who are great at doing penetration testing or code audits or whatever your particular specialty is, you would raise your standards and start to turn more people away.

Another way to look at it is supply and demand. If there really were demand for people - rather than just a permanent watchfulness for grabbing up above average people when you can - basic economics would predict that salaries would increase. Generally speaking (there may always be some very small, localized exceptions) this is not what is happening.

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