Does increasing division of labor lead to greater credentialism?

 [[{“value”:”That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt: Consider business. For decades now, big businesses have been on the rise in the US, which means employment in large corporations that use a team approach is increasingly likely. One effect of this is that individual outputs are harder to measure. If a product
The post Does increasing division of labor lead to greater credentialism? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.”}]] 

That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

Consider business. For decades now, big businesses have been on the rise in the US, which means employment in large corporations that use a team approach is increasingly likely. One effect of this is that individual outputs are harder to measure. If a product does well, it is often not clear who should get the credit, because the inputs of so many people were involved in creating it.

It is difficult to recalibrate incentives to reflect this changing reality. Often companies respond by enforcing greater credentialism, trying to ensure that everyone is a worthwhile contributor. That could involve looking for an Ivy League education or a standout GitHub profile. Either way, companies are more likely to look for ex ante signals of quality and less likely to take chances on true outsiders, because if the outsider isn’t pulling their weight, it might not be evident for a long time.

And this:

The real losers in the team system are those who do not have the temperament for all the schooling and credential-gathering. Those credentials of course include recommendations from well-known contacts, so networking and socializing have become increasingly important. This is a workable situation for most people but a frustrating arrangement for others.

Some recent evidence indicates this problem is especially serious in the world of science. The number of authors on scientific papers has been rising sharply, a trend I have observed in my own field of economics. It was once rare for the research paper of a fresh job-market candidate to be co-authored; now it is common. The work may be wonderful, but how can you tell how much any one author contributed? In the natural and biological sciences, one paper can have dozens of co-authors.

Again, credentialism will become more important, not less. In relative terms, someone from MIT listed on a multiple-authored paper is more attractive than someone from Iowa State University.

The latter part of the piece also explains why we underinvest in databases, and in turn in LLMs.  It is difficult to reward people, under current structures, for contributing to such a broad collective enterprise.

The post Does increasing division of labor lead to greater credentialism? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

 Economics, Science, Uncategorized