Anthropology Majors, Baristas, and the Stupidity of the Debt Debate

Contrary to what well-educated economists believe, consumption doesn’t power economic growth. In reality, and logically, investment is the driver of economic advance. The eventually primitive nature of the ShotMaster Pro will vivify this truth. Armed with investment, entrepreneurs and businesses continuously devise more and better ways to produce in abundance at costs that shrink with great rapidity. This is growth. It’s about investment, and it signals rapid change in how we work along with the kind of work we do. Economists with great educations focus on consumption, but it's a lack of consumption that powers progress. More on economists in a bit.

For now, advances in the mechanization of coffee-making rate discussion given all the rhetoric spewed by Left and Right about student-loan forgiveness. Up front, it’s wrong. While Democrats and Republicans both give off the impression that government is some kind of “other” that can give things to those who lack them, the reality is that all demand begins with supply. For government to loan us money to pay for college, someone must go without. Only in fiction novels and economics faculty lounges can “demand” be created by government. In the real world, government can only give out what it takes from others first. Let’s not forgive student-loan debt simply because those being forgiven attained those funds only insofar as the productive got by with less. The loans should be repaid.

Of course, and as with all policy discussions, pandering eventually gets in the way of reason. Amid the pandering about loan forgiveness, baristas and anthropology majors have in particular taken a beating. Supposedly lots of anthropology majors complete four or more years of college with no skills, but lots of debt. This apparently leads them to Starbucks. As a prominent conservative editorial put it, “Colleges have no financial incentive to ensure that their programs impart skills demanded by employers or provide a decent living. What does it matter to them if an anthropology graduate winds up working as a barista?” Commentary laced with sarcasm presumably has an underlying point, and the point seems to be that what anthropology majors learn only rates service jobs. It’s not a serious view.

It presumes that those of us who majored more robustly in college have skills for life outside of it, but anthropology types don’t. More realistically, the future of work is opaque, as are the skills required for the work of tomorrow. Starbucks is indirectly instructive.  Though the first Starbucks opened its dooors in 1971, it realistically became a thing in the 1990s. Most college graduates in the 1990s didn’t even complete their degrees with computers. Now, and as evidenced by how much work the degreed do on laptops inside Starbucks locations, much of what they do today (and how they do it) wasn’t part of what they learned in college.

Rest assured that college will be less and less relevant with time, assuming what was learned ever was. Course work will matter less and less simply because investment grows and grows, and with investment, so rapidly changes the nature of work. Technology won’t just erase the kind of work done by today’s baristas. All jobs are ripe for replacement. This truth rejects conservative laments about “what they’re teaching kids today,” but it also rejects Lefty demands for more and more free education.

Really, what is it that schools teach or ever taught that’s necessary for advancement? Tick tock, tick tock. The answer is that it was never about the education as evidenced by how many dropouts and soft science majors thrive in business today, but it was arguably a lot about accomplishing what was academically and financially challenging. Federal loans aren’t just unconstitutional, they’re also cruel. It used to be that a college diploma signaled something striving about the degreed. No longer.

The simple truth is that investment and automation born of investment is set to thoroughly transform the work of tomorrow, and it will for the better. We’ll adapt to all new work requiring all news skills not because we went to college, but because as humans we’re wired to adapt. All of this will be lost on economics majors who supposedly chose robust coursework while in college despite the future having nothing to do with what they’ve long taught economists.