“It is a central thesis of this book that centralization has reached diminishing returns and is no longer yielding any benefit. Instead, it has become the problem, not the solution; what worked in the past no longer works now. Centralization as a solution has been leapfrogged by decentralizing technologies.”
“Lazlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, made the following comments in an interview published by the New York Times in June 2013: “One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s (grade point averages) are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore…. We found that they don’t predict anything. What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college.” Doing well in college—earning high test scores and grades—has no measurable correlation with becoming an effective worker or manager. This is incontrovertible evidence that the entire Higher Education system is detached from the real economy: excelling in higher education has little discernible correlation to real-world skills or performance.”
“The goal of the education system is for students to obtain a credential rather than skills that are essential in the real economy. The credential is seen as a proxy for knowledge or even wisdom; but a proxy of knowledge is not the same as knowledge embedded in human and social capital.”
“When social mobility is lost, the status quo not only loses the talent of those denied access to the top rungs, it also enlarges the pool of ambitious outsiders whose energy and ambition are turned against the status quo.”
“If we measure academic achievement by the credential of a college degree, but the process of earning that degree does not measure or even require real student learning, then what are we measuring with college diplomas? What we’re really measuring is not what students learned but their ability to navigate an academic bureaucracy for four years. Since we’re not measuring useful learning, we have no way to hold colleges accountable for their failure to teach useful skills.”
“In this networked world, specialization is no longer a competitive advantage; the competitive advantage goes to those whose work cannot be commoditized or traded.”
“Economist Michael Spence (among others) has observed that value (in the form of assets and profits) flows to what’s scarce. Since automation and software excel at turning processes into commodities, commoditized goods/services create very little value/profit. Since central banks have pushed the cost of credit to near-zero, capital is easily borrowed for next to nothing and consequently it also has little scarcity value. The value in the knowledge economy is not just any knowledge, but knowledge that increases productivity, which we can summarize as faster, better, cheaper and doing more with less.”
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