Pressing need to focus on imparting technical skills while respecting serial failure

A New Year Wish 

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB


There is a pressing need to focus on imparting technical skills while respecting serial failure

The wish is for economies to focus on technical skills, instead of formal higher education. Rich countries with highly educated populations became rich first, with education catching up.What these countries had was down-to-earth practical skills.Germany, ever so robust, has nearly half its youth undergoing some apprenticeship -learning real, useable, things.
Beyond a point, education decreases entrepreneurial risk taking -the good kind of tinkering-style risk taking with small downside that has generated wealth since the Industrial Revolution. Just imagine what would have happened if Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Marc Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison stayed in school -and ended up as lawyers or consultants. We know that higher education increases the income of a family but it does not increase that of a country -label education is helpful for employment in bureaucracies and large mature corporations, and the parent's ego.Even doctors are trained according to an apprenticeship mode under the cover of science.
The other wish is for culture shift in favour of serial failure. Industries that perform the best -such as technology -are those in which failure is a badge of honour. “Fail fast“ is the mode of Silicon Valley , and places like Japan and France and India where failure carry a stigma are doomed.
The final wish is to have more long term stability via less overstabilisation: the 2008 crisis resulted from a US Federal Reserve providing cheap money to stifle economic volatility which, ironically, led to the accumulation of hidden risks in the economic system.
Preventing severe crises may be necessary; preventing fluctuations is not recommended. For it is during economic fluctuations that evolutionary pressures in an economy clean up the dead wood and opens up opportunities for newcomers -systematic stabilisation disadvantage entrepreneurs in favour of established large corporations fit for yesterday, not tomorrow.


Comments

  1. Unknown18 January 2015 at 19:51

    In India to fail is a sort of doom point, for failure to be considered a badge of honour, we need a total paradigm shift in our way of thinking.

    ReplyDelete

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