http://www.tomajazz.com/clubdejazz/jazzpana/orts_ernest.htm

Now to many external observers Ernest appears to spend a lot of time doing ‘nothing’. Barcelona has a lot of people like this. But from all this doing ‘nothing’ he may one day become a world class jazz musician, or maybe he won’t, the only thing he knows is that he has to try.

Ernets writes to me to practice his English, in this mail he expains the three levels of his life:

Let me try to explain to you my different “levels” in life, in the same way you were talking about this in the bar.

The first level of my life consists of doing something to earn money to eat and to maintain my home and my deal with the bank. I’m sure you know what I mean.

In order to do that I work in a Conservatory, as you already know. I’m lucky because most of my friends who were studying music ten years ago are now working in private schools and earning less money than a “cleaning person”. Well, I know to be able to work in a Conservatory you have to excel and to pass a very difficult test. And I’m also very happy because the Generalitat has just approved a new project I proposed to teach in the Conservatory. It is a collective-theorical-practical jazz subject. I am able to do this because I studied this approach in France some years ago. As far as I’m concerned nowadays it is necessary to spend time doing and improving and learning a lot of things, all them in a precise way, all them with discipline, to become a complete person and to be able to go into the labour market.

Besides, I often play in Jams, and rarely I play concerts. Just a few concerts, but good ones, and ‘well paid’ ones as well. This needs a lot of work at home and some rehearsals too. That would be the second level in my life.

The third one encapsulates a lot of things. Swiming, listening to a lot of music apart from my current work, and last but by no means least, writing to you and trying to improve my English, because I love travelling, apart from the need to learn languages and to apply them in life. My objective now is to become a four-languages-speaker, and to achieve the same level in Catalan, Castellano, English and French.

And after a night’s sleep on the topic.

What I think I want to make clear is that I am not saying everything is just fine the way it is, far from it. What I am attempting (rather clumsily) to do is situate what is happening in a more general context.

I think some of these data points don’t just happen for any old reason. There are underlying processes at work. There is an area of research call Life Course Theory which is quite relevant to all this.

Basically LCT is all about co-movements in things like age on leaving school, age at marriage, age on taking first employment, age at becoming a parent, age on retirement etc.

This is quite distinct from another body of theory - Life History Theory - which studies the biological parameters and how these shift: menarché, menopause, fecundity, longevity etc.

And there is a third one, Life Cycle Theory, which studies economic parameters like saving and consumption and how these vary across the life cycle.

Now essentially all these three are surely inter-connected, but at the present time we don’t really understand how.

But if we take puberty (biological) and adolesence (social) these two parameters seem to have been moving in different directions in recent years, with people entering puberty earlier, but leaving adolesence later. There must be some sort of explanation for this.

Again, ages of entry into the productive labour market do move around historically, and there seems to be a technological rationale for this.

In the hunter-gathering societies studied by the anthropologist Hillard Kaplan, young males didn’t go to work hunting - they were encouraged to act out role-play games - till they were 20, quite simply because they were not strong enough, or proficient enough, and would more than likely have gotten themselves (or others) killed.

Then came the agricultural society, and a lowering of the general skill requirements, so children started working earlier, and fertility went up to a certain extent.

Then we get early industrial society, and the age of entry goes up, but not too much. Then the late industrial society and again there is another small rise. Now we have the knowledge economy, and there seems to be a general phenomenon that people aren’t considered to be sufficiently mature to be really productive till they are in their late 20s. So they are - like in the hunter gathering times - encouraged to play. We shouldn’t simply look down on play as a useful formative structure.

Incidentally, it isn’t of course only in football that people peak earlier. I guess IT workers become productive much earlier, and this was seen as something of a ‘phenomenon’ in the late 90s (and with a lot of emphasis on the ludic component of the work).

“Maybe a more flexible BA-MA-PhD system will eventually develop in Europe. Given the rapid changes in the economy you should think that a flexible system and degrees in different fields would be good ideas.”

I don’t think we disagree too much. Clearly there is room for reform in European education, and I’m certainly not opposed to that. But I suspect the situation is very variable. I myself did a first degree in economics, and I then went on to a masters in the philosophy and sociology of science and then a doctorate in something else again (Marshall McLuhan and the technology of communication). And all of this was 30 years ago.

Indeed now I come to think about it my own son is a case in point. He is 26, and has already taken 2 years out of his studies. One to do a one year degree (with some overlapping compensation) in health management and administration (yes, he did do some economics) while he was actually doing a degree in medicine (it is quite easy in the UK to do things like this) and a second year he went to work in a hospital in Australia for six months - he wanted to see the country - and then when he came back he did six months teaching anatomy to undergrads. He is now studying to become a brain surgeon. Will he be any the better for all this? I think we’d better wait and ask the patients.

“I’m not at all sure that the a 28-year-old German with one university degree is so much more skilled than the 22-year-old American with one university degree.”

Obviously if this is the case then I don’t disagree with you at all, there is no purpose at all served by taking ten years to get a first degree when 3 will suffice. But somehow I doubt this is exactly the situation.

German education surely can’t be *that* inefficient, and indeed outside Southern Europe I’m not that convinced that university education in Europe is *so* backward.

“Furthermore, six years of work experience, or some fraction thereof with a second university degree, will bring about quite a bit of skill.”

But isn’t this exactly what many people are doing. I can only really talk about Spain in any detail, but I do think this is something we should collectively be researching. In Spain labour market reforms have been very extensive in the case of young people, almost everyone is working on temporary contracts, yet no-one is really offered a permanent contract till 28 or 29. This is why there is the extensive phenomenon of the mil-euristes - people who can’t earn more than 1,000 euros. Paola, in the Italy supply constraint post is indicating she was only getting 600 euros in Italy at 25 and she is well educated and a very good economist.

So if people are not being employed in well paid positions until the late 20s then this seems to suggest that their economic value to the companies hasn’t reached its prime level before that time, that is the conclusion I am drawing. Under these circumstances some combinations of internships, temporary work and more study would seem to be the logical conclusion. What we need are more flexible adaptable people for more flexible adaptable employment opportunities.

Edward, I’m not at all sure that the a 28-year-old German with one university degree is so much more skilled than the 22-year-old American with one university degree. Furthermore, six years of work experience, or some fraction thereof with a second university degree, will bring about quite a bit of skill. Plus structurally, this tends to compress German careers to the considerable detriment of family life. Also, at the top end, people who feel that they can aim for the very highest reaches tend to stay in and get their second degree, which in Germany is generally a doctorate, so they are starting their careers in their early 30s, at which time they have maybe a decade and often much less to make the climb they have prepared for. This increased compression is also problematic. (Just some quick comparative thoughts.)

I agree with most of what you say, but I don’t see that a 24 year old American with an MSc is worse off than a 29 year old German with the same qualification. On the contrary, the American can get an additional graduate degree and relevant work experience by the time the German gets his first graduate degree.

In Scandinavia the average age of secondary (Gymnasium, lycee) graduates has been creeping upwards. There is a good reason for this, admission to universities is based on grades, and students get better grades the older they are in secondary school. So parents start them later in elementary school. An arms race!

I also like that fact that it is easy to switch field without time penalty in the U.S. For example, one of my good friends in the U.S. did an undergraduate degree in biology, a PhD in economics, and then a Master’s in Public Health. It makes perfect sense, but in Europe he probably would not have been admitted to a graduate program in economics unless he had an undergraduate degree in the same subject. U.S. universities use a spiral approach to teaching. When you start in graduate school, you start at the beginning, but at a higher level and at a faster pace.

Maybe a more flexible BA-MA-PhD system will eventually develop in Europe. Given the rapid changes in the economy you should think that a flexible system and degrees in different fields would be good ideas.

This is a very tricky issue Lars, and currently a very controversial one. I have a feeling that this is not like this, and have a post on Demography Matters which essentially says that:

http://demographymatters.blogspot.com/2006/09/young-and-over-educated-in-sweden.html

There are several points.

The first would be that we live in democracies and that really young people have the right to choose, and the global trend ex-US is that people are choosing to have children later and to get more education. This is such a strong trend that there must be some logic behind it. That is what my research is all about, and that at the end of the day is what the pointed barb I have just sent Greg Mankiw is about.

I don’t think we should be doing anything to discourage people from getting more education. At the end of the day it is the US that may have the bigger problem here, since they are definitely not producing enough qualified people, and some of their minority populations are seriously feeling the push.

Maybe the US can contemplate mass importation of Indian and Chinese engineers to fill the gap, but I don’t think Europe should go down this road. Young people are a precious (scarce) resource, and I think we should leverage what we have here to the best of our ability.

Secondly

I think the model where you encourage our young people to enter the labour market at the lower-skilled end (and that is what entering at 22 means) and encouraging skilled inward migration from the third world is a serious mistake. I think this way round of doing things will only make ethnic tensions worse.

Thirdly

“What we need are electricians and plummers, not history graduates”

This isn’t you, of course, but it is a view which exists.

I think this whole discourse is off the mark. We used to hear it a lot in Spain, but now we have plenty of semi-skilled workers from Ecuador, Columbia etc, and we simply don’t hear it any more. I think people recognise that the push from the bottom is creating more openings in the middle and above.

Fourth

There is a time consistency problem here. Noone really knows what the skill-bias inherent in the 2020 labour market is going to be when we get to 2020, so there is no way of getting a viable reading on this. But if we all want to move up the value chain then the most likely thing is that well-paid jobs will go with more, not less education. And remember all those 22 year olds will by then be 37, facing downward trending earnings through global labour arbitrage with people with similar (or more) skills in the developing world, and probably wishing that they had gotten more education when they had the opportunity. You cannot pay for ageing populations like this.

One example, earlier in the summer I read in the FT about how global corporations where no longer satisfied with candidates who have only one global language (the GLs being English, Chinese and Spanish), and how they are now demanding two. Soon this will be all three.

Also, back in the summer I got a mail from my Singapore friend Eddie Lee (see latest Hungary post for more from Eddie). He wrote me this on this topic:

Competition is pushing up the required qualification to land a ‘good’ job. Not just that there are more university graduates these days, but they spend more time acquiring their degrees. Incidentally, talking to 2 students last month, it seems the edge is to get a double degree enroute to an MBA. SO while I took 4 years to get my Masters, they will take 6 years to get their MBA. But its not just the length of their study period, it’s also the intensity.

It’s hard to think the ‘optimum age’ can keep rising, afterall there is a tradeoff here as you point out, but still, its equally hard to see where competition might stop.

Ok, this should give you some idea about why I feel I can’t really go along with you on this.

Such a situation is obviously science fiction when you take it to extremes. But if you look at the changing role of humans in the car industry since the introduction of robots, for example, you’ll see that this kind of thing really does take place, and the phenomenon could expand and accelerate in future. In some areas, the problem is not that we can’t replace menial workers with robots, but that we can’t train all those former menial workers to be philosophers, leading to demoralising inequality where some people are seen to have rare and precious skills and others are considered virtually worthless by comparison.

OK, your argument is theoretically valid, it is conceivable that we could have a society where the principal activities were things like judges, artists, central bankers, philosophers etc, and the rest was done by robots. I personally might not even mind living in such a society, but I am not sure we are anywhere near that at this point.