YouSaid · the spoken record

Byron Auguste

lines on the record: 62
first: 2022-09-21
most recent: 2022-09-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Bigger than at the time. So you were ahead of the curve. I have a hedge against the collapse of the global economy. It will be all the more useful.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, well, Charles Goodhart was actually my referee for my PhD, not my advisor. This was on international payment unions and clearinghouses. So it was central banking, right? And so, well, I would say it was good because, number one, I got my doctorate. And then number two, he recommended it to McMillan and St. Martin's for publication. That's why I was published as a book. It is definitely not my idea that the world needed a book on that, but Professor Goodhart thought so”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Filled. And the role is relatively standardized and understood. I think we should have a lot more where people can demonstrate that they're ready for a job. And even if they don't get that particular job, they get pulled into another similar job without a whole other.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, right. It might not be, but actually, I'm not sure it's the HR person who's got the more mediocre interviews. I mean, often on the one hand, I think hiring managers tend to know better what they need, but they may not be as thoughtful about the interviewing. But setting that aside, I think interviews can be really valuable. I wouldn't hire a senior executive, for example, without an interview. But for me, at that level, what I'm looking for a little bit is anomalies. Like I would put more weight on their track record. But in the interview, I'd want to understand, you know, you call it production function. Like how do they get that track record? And is that something that is more at the expense of the others around them? Or is it something that actually has sort of built up the success of the team too? And so if an interview doesn't jive with the track record, I want to dig deeper. I think interviews may be overrated or a whole series of interviews might be overrated for job four. There's a huge number of positions to be.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My interview questions tend not to be like a single question that's the same for everybody, which, rightly or wrongly, I tend to be really interested in what people have done and what they've learned. And if someone describes kind of a smooth progression without ever making a mistake or ever learning a thing, I'm not that impressed. And I'll tend to drill down when I get a sign that they learn something to really understand what they learned, how they learned it, and at what cost and how they apply it now. But it tends to be specific to the situation and to the role, of course, because I'd be looking for different things for someone who's doing, let's say, sales or business development versus someone who's doing analytics, like someone who's doing sales and business development who maybe can't sell me on anything in the interview, I'd be more concerned. But someone is doing kind of careful research who doesn't sell me on anything in the interview, I'd be okay with that.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, just speaking personally, I do not consider a school so great on the basis of its kind of huge rejection rate. I think that's terrible. The schools I respect the most are the ones that actually do the most to develop the most people. And it's okay if any one school does it a certain way because we have a tremendous amount of diversity in higher education and that's good because we have diversity in people and diversity in jobs and diversity in regions. But I think the problem is more when we go to this monoculture and we say there's a single metric by which to judge people, by which to judge universities, I think that's a pretty big mistake.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Although that's obviously important, but what they learn, they might learn that they want to do something completely different. So I think colleges should be judged by that. And right now we're judging colleges in the almost the worst possible way. So it shouldn't be surprising that many colleges feel the pressure to try to be elite, to see how many people they can get to apply, how many people they can reject, and not to add seats because then it would be harder to do that. So I think we need to change the incentive structure for universities. But that's a very different thing than saying we should disrespect college education or university education. I think it's obviously incredibly important and valuable for the country. We need more of it for more people.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Saying, like, everybody needs a college degree, and then we're saying you get to the top of the rankings in U.S. News& World Report by excluding as many people as you can, right? So that is a terrible incentive structure. So surprise, colleges are trying to rise up the rankings. They're trying to be better reviewed. And so you get what you ask for. That's the thing that's mystifying to me, Tyler, is how surprised businesses are when they say, oh, colleges aren't giving us the skills we want. It's like they're giving you what you ask for, which is people with bachelor's degrees, right? And then we're surprised when we say, oh, the best college is the one that keeps the most out. And then we're saying, well, why don't colleges let more people in? So the problem starts with this combination of an elitist attitude that says, oh, how do you know something's good? It's that not many people can do it. No, that's wrong. I think colleges should be judged by how many people they successfully include and how much progress they help to make and not just in terms of their potential earnings.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a fully cynical. Yeah, but I'm saying as economists, the idea that if you put a set of incentives in front of an institution over time, that they will respond to those incentives, that's pretty normal. So let's review the incentives for higher education. So we create this system where businesses decide that the way to decide whether they would even bother to spend the time to figure out whether somebody could get a decent job and lead a decent life as a result because that's how you lead it in America. You work, right? And you sort of advance. So if they say, well, this thing that was never invented for that, this college degree, and ideally a selective college degree, that's what we're going to base it on. So that's the thing. So it sets this incredible magnetic signal that everybody's got to charge towards that. And then we say, all right, so that sets off the competition in higher ed. So how do we judge whether you're doing well in higher ed? I'll tell you what. How about this? The more people you can exclude, the better you're doing.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, I think the argument that institutions are self interested is not as much of an insult as some people give it credit.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, as you may know, Opportunity at Work partnered with the state of Maryland to do this, and we actually sort of showed them, Governor Hogan and his team, the data on, you know, there's 1.3 million stars in Maryland, half of whom have the skills for jobs that pay more, and they cut across all races and all regions. It's particularly powerful for veterans, for people in rural areas of Maryland. disproportionately African Americans also. And the state of Maryland had a lot of jobs it couldn't fill.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You think that the companies in their own internal systems that the AI could have sufficiently good attribution of who develops profits for the company? I think, look, if you're talking about like sales, for example, like maybe, but most jobs are collaborative jobs where the work product is team product. I think probably Google has the most, not probably, definitely has the most sophisticated people analytics team in the world. And they've concluded a couple of things. One, they've concluded that when you have all the data, the bachelor's degree has zero additional explanatory power. So that's one thing when you apply most of it. And the second thing is the best teams are not just aggregations of the quote unquote best individuals in the role. The best teams have dynamics of their own that include some that are more team players. So I just think it's not that applying AI has to be problematic. It's that applying AI to a problem that's poorly understood and poorly specified is not going to work.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not what I said. Isn't that a very uphill call? No, I'm not saying that garbage in, garbage out is what I'm saying. I'm saying if your process is biased and then you use AI to provide the word bias to tell you.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can sort of teach you as you go, can validate when you have the skills. It could be metered, and then it goes away, and you have all the skills. So AI can be incredibly helpful, but it's got to be trying to solve the right problem. I mean, this is the biggest thing about AI. What is the problem you're trying to solve? And secondarily, what are the constraints you're imposing? Because an AI will then go to town. But if you're trying to solve the wrong problem with an AI, it's a disaster. So I'm not blaming the AI. That's the wrong problem statement. A right problem statement is how do you have people who have tremendous amount of skills, but not all of them? And we're not quite sure. If you set AI to solve that problem, well, I think AI can be very powerful.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not saying the Aui program. No, I'm not saying the AI program is going to hurt black people. And I'm not saying the AI program is going to hurt. I'm saying that the current systems, if we were to keep it on stars versus people with bachelor's degrees, people who have the skills to do the job but can't get the job, there's millions of such people. They're being screened out not by AI. They're being screened out by a set of human systems. By the way, mostly designed by accident inadvertently with respect to their talents for the most part. And so that is what's doing it. What AI is doing, machine learning AI, is turbocharging the failures of the human system. I'm not blaming the AI to be very clear. I think AI could be very helpful, extremely helpful. I think to apply machine learning to human learning, for example, I think that could be very powerful. I could see in the future you could have a business model that had an AI patch, like you have 85% of the skills for the job. The AI can help you do the other 15%.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, as you described it, I think that's a terrible idea. And here's why. Because if you have an AI that can predict outcomes, and as you mentioned, we don't understand it, the way an AI is almost certainly predicting those outcomes is not by some inherent characteristics, it's by machine learning. So in other words, it's looking at the actual outcomes and saying, what's the pattern that generates these outcomes? Well, if the actual outcomes today are generated by all sorts of bias and most obviously for the purposes of this conversation, this degree bias, right? Well, then the AI will say, oh, well, you're not going to probably be able to get that job because all our data says you won't. But why is it? It's not because of some intrinsic reason. It's because we have a system that's biased against you. And the same can be true if you look at the levels of occupational segregation in this country by gender, certainly, but by race also, for you to believe that that's like an actually optimal situation. I mean, you'd have to have a pretty low.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Accidental pathways up through the labor market as intentional ones. And I think that can be the basis of an American system, if you will, that's much more related to data, much more driven by work, as opposed to just waiting. And I think that would be a far superior, or rather, not as a replacement for higher education, because again, pluralism matters. It's creating a wide variety of ways that people can succeed.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You want. So that's like a much more direct path. And there's about 50 gateway jobs that are lower wage jobs where the skills required for them basically match the skills for middle wage jobs. So of the 70 million stars, 30 million of them have skills for a job that pays 50% more than the jobs they're in today. And you'll say, well, why doesn't the market allow them to move into those jobs? And the answer is it partly does. Like we have a database of 130 million job transitions. And that's exactly how stars, and for that matter, people with bachelor's degrees tend to move into higher wage jobs. They move into higher wage jobs with an overlapping, highly overlapping skill set to the jobs they're in. So like we see a much more direct impact than genomics or teaching third graders to code or any number of things you might also think might matter, a much more direct effect is instead of these movements happening at random, why don't we put some street lights around them? Why don't we put some traffic and actually treat these”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's better? When it works. Yeah, but think about the data we have right now. So Opportunity at Work as we got started, because we're trying to create a market change, right? So we're thinking about talent category creation, if people were skilled through alternative routes, 70 million people stars. And the fact is you can see what skills people have most easily by what jobs they do today, right? And one of the things that's really powerful is that there's a huge overlap in the skill set required for many low-wage jobs and those for many middle-wage jobs, right? So like a second level call center representative has a lot of the skills required for enterprise sales, for example, but enterprise sales might pay twice as much money. So if you think about formal education or training as more like topping up the skills you learn on the job, you have a much more efficient path to source people by the millions, like into jobs.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but I think, first of all, that college and vocational should not be nearly a separate as they are. You should think about vocational's applied learning, and there should be way more of it in college. I think Northeastern University, for example, has done a very good job of that. And I think college should also be much more seen as skills acquisition along the way. You think of a Western Governor's university, which is an example of filling a market, it's a nonprofit, but it's been growing by, I think, 10, 15% a year.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's more of a signal pluralism that I'm arguing for. In other words, I don't believe there's so many talents and there's so many different needs and skills. So the idea that we should all norm on a single way to evaluate talent at every level is measured.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stop learning. So that's what we need. So I think a lot of this is a second order distraction because what we actually need is more of the good thing, not just different ways of screening people out.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Job will then suddenly you've got huge demand for college degrees and you've got basically mostly fixed supply, right? And so what happens is an economist. Well, what happens is you create this horrible zero-sum bottleneck in the talent development system and in the signaling system. So yeah, you can debate what should be the signals that allow people to go to college, but the fact of the matter is we should have like 50% more, maybe twice as many high quality seats in college. That's the problem. So affirmative action and testing and issues like this become life or death issues because we put way too much weight on that bottleneck. What we really need is more quality college seats and we need many more valid alternative routes and that should be not just for people who are 18, 19, 20, but people in their 20s, people in their 30s, people in their 40s, people in their 50s because jobs are changing all the time. And we need all the talents. It is absolutely not the case that people”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very quickly. It just seems like a good thing to do. I think there's a much bigger problem. I mean, to me, the bigger problem is this. There is a greater demand for higher education, and rightly so. But if you look at the number of quality seats in higher education in this country, they have grown very little. In a period where we've gone from almost no one had a college degree, and by the way, high schools were to get the jobs of the future, right? High schools were not developed as a way to get into college. High schools were developed as a way to get into a good job, right? Jobs of the future at that time. And so now that in 1983 with the Nation at Risk, we suddenly decided that, oh, point of high school is for everyone to go to college. No one had told high schools up until that point. And so now that that's the case, the basic problem is if you keep the number of college seats constant and you demand that everybody try to go to college and in fact if businesses to some extent weaponize college degrees by saying like oh if you don't have a college degree you can't get into a decent job.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to high school to 79% going to high school. So now suddenly you had high school students applying to college. They were at Dubuque Normal School in Iowa. So the people from Choat didn't start taking the SATs, but the SAT, even though it was a pretty terrible desk at the time, it was better than nothing. It was a way that someone who was out there not in the normal feeder schools could distinguish themselves. And I think that is a very valuable role to play. And as you know, Tyler, the SAT does to some extent still play that role, but because now that everybody has had to use it, it also is something that can be gamed more and test prep and all the rest of it.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The prep you had Yeah, I think alternative markers are actually a pretty complicated issue, and I've talked to university administrators and admissions people, and it's interesting that the variety of different ways they're trying to work on this. I will say this. If you think about something like the SAT, when it first started, I'm talking about in the 1930s essentially, it was an alternative route into a college because it was started with the Ivies, right? It was started with James Conant at Harvard and the Ivies and the Seven Sisters and the rest, and then it gradually sort of moved out. But the problem they were trying to solve back in the 30s was that up until that point, the way you got into, say, Dartmouth is the headmaster of Chote would write to Dartmouth and say, here's our 15 candidates for Dartmouth. And Dartmouth would mostly take them because Chote knew what Dartmouth wanted. But then you had the high school movement in the U.S. where between 1909 and 1939 you went from 9% of American teenagers.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Terrible system and an individual employer, they can't necessarily change that whole system because the system works through hiring platforms and lots of other things. And the employers that have the biggest ability to change it don't need to change it as much because they're winning the poaching wars, right? It's the companies that are losing the poaching wars that are actually really sucking wind on talent and they don't have the power to change the system, but they can change their practices and we're working to help them.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are for profits that are taking pieces of this, and I think it's great. I think if I were doing this as a for profit, I would be sort of skimming. I would be taking the folks who are absolutely overwhelmingly kind of should have the job today. It's just not even a close call, creating some sort of arbitrage there. But I think there's a much larger opportunity. And I think no one entity, no one person, no one organization, not even one sector can solve this problem alone. I really think it's a multi-sector problem. So the question isn't how can a nonprofit solve it because a nonprofit can't solve it. The question is, what's missing? And fundamentally, I believe an opportunity at work believes what's missing is an actual set of valid signals, screen-in signals, as opposed to screen-out signals. You cannot interview everybody. But if you're screening out because on average you think people with a bachelor's degree are better, so therefore you're screening out millions of people who can do the job, well, that's a”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think you see that. That's absolutely true of college. Think about the information problem facing someone working in a frontline job, say making $15 an hour who wants to do better, wants to earn more, wants to be able to support their family more. Half the people will say, oh, you need to go to school. So you need to go four years, five years, six years, and then see what happens. And the other half of the people are like, oh, you should apply for a job. If you say to go to school, well, where do I get the money? And by the way, even if I can get scholarships or student loans or whatever, like who supports my kids? Who pays the rent? Okay, that's one problem.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of individual decisions. Well, just to be clear, I think it can be overcome. I mean, I'm working full-time to overcome it. To your point, I'm very optimistic about solving the problem. And for three main reasons. The biggest reason, even the one you're talking about, the biggest reason I'm optimistic about solving it is that you've got 70 million stars, half the workforce, who are busting their tails to learn new things, to actually figure out what it would take to have the skills for the job. I don't know if you saw this. There was a Harvard business review, the big survey, Harvard Business School survey and Accenture, I think, that actually looked at attitudes about digital transformation and senior executives said that one of the biggest barriers to digital transformation is that their frontline workers did not want to learn new skills. But they also surveyed frontline workers who off the charts wanted to learn new skills for digital transformation and saw as the problems that they weren't being given any guidance on what skills to learn.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now that's the front end of screening. So, hey, we're hiring for an important job. Well, my job's important and I had to have a bachelor's degree for it, so probably this has to have a bachelor's degree. There's a tremendous amount of cut and pasting going on, and just without thinking about what the role requires. So I think you can't ignore this kind of historesis effects, if you will, right? There's a path dependency here that's taken as far, of course. And it's not just about some sort of like straight free market decisions.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have you interviewed the market? How's the markets decided that? The institutional factors are really, really important to understand. So the U.S. labor market is not a spot market for ditch digging, right? It's not a market in that sense. It is where years, decades of investment in human capital, if you will, are monetized. And like healthcare, it's a market where kind of the ultimate use is not necessarily by the person hiring or training. And even more so, it's a market where self-concept plays a big role. So, for example, in the HR kind of field, that was a field 30 years ago where if you were good, conscientious people person manager, someone might say, hey, you should look into a stint in HR. And the HR department had people who had worked in operations on the factory floor, like in finance, like just all over. It was a very diverse group. And now it's a field that over the last 30 years has become the most credentialized.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To COVID were ones that employers said, oh, you need a bachelor's degree, but only 40% of American workers have a bachelor's degree. Well, then obviously that math doesn't work. And so it's absolutely self-harm at a system level. So it is market problem, but it's a collective action problem too.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, it is both, but it's definitely the latter. So, in other words, because you say privately we're overvaluing the college degree, again, if you unpack that at the level of a hiring transaction, absolutely in most cases, employers overvalue a college degree. But you've got a thin slice it. I'm not saying that doctors shouldn't have medical degrees, or perhaps even that you need a civil engineering degree to be building a bridge. in sales in general management, in like IT operations where you can easily see whether someone has the skills or notions of employers for millions of jobs, you're adding these degree requirements. And so I'm saying something, yes, at the individual level, I think we're overvaluing degrees and we are undervaluing the skills of people who are skilled through alternative routes of stars. But at a system level, it's incredibly destructive math. So if 70% of new jobs in the 10 year”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we could do better. We could lower your expectations, but you could also do better in your outcomes. So look, the kinds of issues we're talking about are disproportionately concentrated in white men without bachelor's degrees. And I think if you look at what was possible for white men without bachelor's degrees, if they work hard, were conscientious, they could make a lot of progress in their lives before. And more and more of those pathways where If you didn't have a college degree, but you kind of like kept your nose clean and you worked hard. I mean, again, for white men, that usually worked out. And I think now it often doesn't. And a big part of it is this just insane levels of pedigree bias where we attribute so much value to having a bachelor's degree as opposed to actually doing the job. And that doesn't just affect white men. I mean, it affects like many. But I do.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not, but I think there's a lot of evidence that it's how you thought your life would be relative to what it is. I mean, I think if you look at over time, if this American dream anchor point is sort of a life where your kids live better than you and you live better than your parents, that's something that certainly for white Americans north of 90% were experiencing if you were born in, say, 1940, and now it's a coin flip, right? As if you were born in 1980, you're age 30, it looks like about half of Americans were living better than their parents and about half were living worse. And presumably, when we see the 2020 data, it will have gone underwater. So we're the first generation in which Americans and certainly white Americans are living worse in material terms in terms of their life possibilities, or more than half are living worse than their parents. I think that is a profound shock. And I think that on top of it, given so much of it is economics and gender expectations being what they are, that probably does hit men.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm saying pre COVID, yeah. I mean, Russia is one place, right? Where it's sort of deaths of despair sort of drinking, and then in much of the United States. And look, I think the math says that if you were to anchor it in life expectancy, the issue is deaths of despair, right? It's suicide.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't know. It is very striking. I think as far as I know, there's only two places in the world where such a large part of the population is seeing reduced life expectancy. Well, with COVID now.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Even setting aside those measurement issues, I think it's very different to say, how does it make sense to act in the system as it exists today? And how should the system be? That's different because for an individual person, they can't change the system. So yes, absolutely. I think there's a lot of benefits to graduating from college. And if you are in a position to graduate from college from a sort of a quality college, you definitely should try to do that. That would be my advice, even if you want to be a plumber. Like maybe you should do that first because then society, as it exists, will both allow you to be a plumber and allow you to do other things if you decide you want to do other things later. But that's different than saying that we should organize a system in which something that costs tens of thousands of dollars and many years of your life is a prerequisite to having a decent job and a decent living. I think that's a terrible way to organize a society, which is different than saying”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know how much television really has to say about getting a great job. I think one of the worst and least realistic depictions and one of the most influential was this show called Celebrity Apprentice. You may have heard of, which is kind of fantasy and not the way it works. So I don't think on the whole television's been all that helpful. I think, though, if anything, I would less television and more kind of elite narratives, if you will, are, I think, really over-indexed on college. And it's not that that's bad advice to go to college because I think our university system is in many ways just an incredible asset. I think it's a wonderful thing. But the idea that the only path to success is through college, I think, becomes self-reinforcing.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, right now, I would say it's not mainly the ally, but back to your question about American novel. I would go for Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur's court. He became like a court wizard based on his practical Yankee understanding of things like the almanac and the pattern of solar eclipses. So that's a good example of practical knowledge leading to a pretty great job. I mean, in those days in King Arthur's court, court magician was right up there.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Applicable here, and in particular, I don't think the Hanseatic League and the hundreds of years of sort of history that went into the development of that system. You can't just replicate that here. I think a U.S. system would look different. I think the weakness of the German system and partly why you're seeing this more and more, Tyler, is they actually don't use this kind of system for, let's say, you're in your 30s and there's been a change in industrial structure and you need to retool. They don't use the apprenticeship system for that. A couple years before COVID, I was over, the OECD and the EU had a session on the future of adult education as part of their apprenticeship week. And adult education in the sense of those already in the workplace is not as strong as your apprenticeship system. I think the dynamism of the economy means that just an education to employment model is not going to be enough. And so I would like to see an American system leapfrog the German system be much more data driven, be much more inclusive, not just about education to employment, but”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I've spent some time in Europe on this question. Look, I think what the German system and a lot of the Northern European Swiss is similar to this, they are very, very good at pathways of education to employment. So, in other words, to have multiple pathways, you're in school, like upper secondary, you have pretty clear choices as to pathways, and you don't have to have what the equivalent, what we would think of as a bachelor's degree, but you could have very rigorous technical education and a pathway into well-paid jobs. I think that's a positive and remains a positive. I think it's really important to recognize, though, when we talk about, oh, adopting the German system, people here tend to say, oh, German companies do apprenticeship. So U.S. companies should do apprenticeships. But it's not just the German companies do apprenticeships. German companies plug into an apprenticeship system and they play their part in it. Upper secondary education, labor councils, industry councils, these kind of collective entities do the heavy lifting and they plug into it. So I don't think it's that.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't think you look at Singapore and say if Singapore max is unconsciousness and it went from, you know, being an extremely poor country in the 1950s, an extremely vulnerable country to one of the richest in the world, I don't think that speaks poorly for conscientiousness. I'm smiling, though, because you're alluding to, I spoke at Singapore, they're jubilee, the 50th anniversary, and they invited me out there to speak about kind of economics and technology. And I looked up the Gallup, you know, the Gallup ratings on engagement at work, these international ratings. And there's a set of people who are so unhappy at work that they want to sabotage things. And there's a set of people who are so engaged at work that they're excited. And there's a set of people in the middle. Singapore has like the highest percentage of people in the middle that are neither sort of lit up nor are they disgruntled. And I mentioned that to the crowd and there was a lot of knowing laughter.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think Singapore's gotten a lot of things right in education. And I think one thing that they recognize is that there has been a bit of a conformity. And so I think one of the best things you can do is to widen.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there are people. I'm not doing that. Are you doing it? No, there are actually lots of people doing it. I mean, it's a small scale because obviously it's easier. It's a quicker path to profits to market to employers people who they already think they want, right? So to market based on pedigree and so forth. And of course employers want skills and in places where skills are very easy to quantify. You do get businesses like Hacker Rank, if you will, or there's a bunch of businesses in tech, for example, that are really about assessing people's skills. That's definitely happening for software developers. And then there are also businesses exactly like the ones you're talking about that actually they train and hire people and they actually provide outsource services to companies because those companies wouldn't hire those individuals because they don't have degrees, but those individuals are great problem solvers. They're great. And again, technology is the area where you see it the most, but that is happening, actually. That's an arbitrage opportunity for sure.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They need, and they basically would have to go six, seven years, they run out of money. They might just plane run out of money. There's all sorts of family instability. So in other words, I just don't agree with the view that says that the reason most people don't leave college don't complete it is because of some animal house behavior. I disagree. It's mainly because of the economic and social conditions and what they have to do to manage a totality of life. And then finally, I'll say most people in college right now are not like a 19, 20-year-old, right? Most people in college are actually working learners. That's the typical college student today. So they already come to this with children, with responsibilities. So I just think our picture of what college is is very different than 50 years ago. I mean, it should be different than 50 years ago hasn't caught up.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So if college right now is a signal of many things, but I think the statistics would say it's a huge signal of affluence and generational wealth, like being able to not only be prepared for the tests that go into Selective College and being able to complete it, having the social capital, having the positions. If the position is that the people who complete college never make mistakes and therefore they're the most conscientious, well, I disagree. I think the people who complete college make lots of mistakes, but they tend to be the ones that have more cushion, more fallback, more shots on goal. And there are millions of people who, yeah, they aspire to go to college. I mean, when we talk about people who are skilled through alternative routes or stars that don't have bachelor's degrees, about 40% of them actually do have college credits, but they didn't finish for a lot of reasons. For example, they had to work and they had to work a lot. And if their work schedule doesn't correspond to their class schedule, then maybe they can't get the class.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think if you're an employer looking to hire someone, the best test of conscientiousness is how they do at the job they're in. Well, well, I suppose.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think there's two problems with what you just said, Tyler. One is you slipped in the on average, whereas a person is not on average. A person is an individual. Which is a very big deal because I don't know what the average level of conscientiousness is for college graduates versus not, but let's assume that it might be higher on average. Well, what it means is there's tens of millions of people who don't have college degrees who would rank very highly on conscientiousness. For example, if you start at college and you're a first generation college student and then your mother who's providing for your younger siblings gets sick and you drop out of college to earn money to support your family, are you less conscientious than the more affluent person who stayed in college? I don't think so. So in other words, that's not.”
2022-09-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source