Kyle Schwarber recently signed a 5-year, $150 million deal to stay with the Philadelphia Phillies. Which speaks to our exciting present and future. As a former college teammate once put it about Schwarber, he's "not going to go into macroeconomics and get an A," but "when you get on the baseball field, that kid might as well be Albert Einstein."
It’s a reminder of the bigger meaning of falling test scores, and the paradoxically powerful progress they signal. The great unlearning whereby young people cease building a little or a lot of knowledge in traditional subjects signals a brilliant narrowing of knowledge that will allow more people to pursue the career path most associative with their unique skills and intelligence.
All of this was written about in my 2018 book, The End of Work, the working title of which was The End of Laziness. The publisher erred. As progress frees young people to specialize in remunerative areas that don’t feel like work, laziness will decline. The book argues that no one is dumb or lazy as much as a lack of economic growth has for too long suffocated knowledge and skills not rewarded in the marketplace. Those days are coming to an end. With automation on a much faster rise, there will be something for everyone.
This is important considering the individual (Warren Buffett) featured in The End of Work's introductory chapter. Buffett observed in a 2015 Wall Street Journal opinion piece that if the U.S. economy were a sports-based economy, he “would be a flop.” Buffett added that “You could supply me with the world’s best instruction, and I could endlessly strive to improve my skills. But, alas, on the gridiron or basketball court I would never command even a minimum wage.”
No doubt some people who are perfectly smart, capable and ambitious feel about math and science what Buffett feels about sports. They could have the world’s best instruction, they could reveal vastly overrated “grit” to improve their math and science skills and knowledge, but their efforts would still not pay off in substantive, work and life enhancing ways.
Which explains the genius of free trade, along with the automation of so much human effort. As this column has argued more than once, free trade is the academic equivalent of a lover of literature and history getting to spend every school day on both without having to do the calculus that this same person might loathe. And vice versa. Automation is more of the same. Both free us not from a life of passionate work, but from the kind of work that we can’t stand and in which we will never prosper.
None of this is meant to say math and science will no longer be taught. While it’s arguably scandalous that centuries-old subjects like algebra are still subjects, it’s certainly true that some find joy in math and engineering that others don’t. Good.
The hope here is that in time school will evolve from a one-size-fits-all workload with required courses that frequently humiliate, into a place where young people can pursue what they’re passionate about from a much earlier age, all on the quite reasonable expectation that work divided with other humans and machines the world over means that there’s no need to educate everyone the same way.
Amid this, test scores will fall. Not because math will cease to be taught any more than English and history will be, but because young people will be free to increasingly de-emphasize subjects that have no relevance to their passions, and by extension their present and future life and career pursuits.
