Curating talent

Dwarkesh Patel writes,

if talent, not capital, is the bottleneck to growth, we should use our excess capital to empower the world’s underleveraged talent.

The question is, why aren’t more people trying to curate talent, whether for philanthropic reasons or simply for their own benefit?

But they are. Today, every business that isn’t in its death throes is trying to figure out how to acquire the best talent. But the significance of talent is easier to appreciate in the 21st century than it was previously.

In 1998, I wrote

In an agricultural economy, land is the scarce resource. In an industrial economy, capital is a scarce resource. The institutions that evolved in an industrial economy differ from those in an agricultural economy. This raises the question: what is the economic problem today, and how might institutions evolve in order to address it?

…To me, it is easier to understand the economic challenge today as one of allocating talent to solving problems. Furthermore, when we consider the nature of software as a quasi-public good, the problem is one of allocating talent to producing quasi-public goods.

9 thoughts on “Curating talent

  1. Curating talent is (much) harder than acquiring capital because, unlike capital, talent is not fungible. By definition, talent is differentiated and at least somewhat unique. (If lots of people can do something, then it’s not really a talent.) So, while $10M checks are indistinguishable, not all engineering PhDs are interchangeable, to say nothing of general bachelors degree holders. Yet, it’s quite common for VCs — who think in terms of financial capital — to talk about a company having this many PhDs or that many engineers. One might view increasing credentialism as the result of attempts to acquire talent that treat talent as though it were fungible and measured in units of credentials.

  2. I would not accuse FAANG of being particularly effective at curating talent. That’s the case at least from what people on Reddit who have been there write about them. On the dimension where automating the coordination of large numbers of programmers on a single code base, they’re brilliant. But on the dimension of correctness and being resource-careful they are not.

    But that’s largely a problem in CS academia more than just at FAANG. The incentives for correctness don’t really exist; often, quite the opposite.

    And the quasi-public nature of software is also pretty easy to question. I suppose we’re better off with Github than without it but care is required. It stands well as a source of examples to use. But almost by definition, the quality is of a wide spectrum. This is to be expected;all “software engineering’ doctrine is organized around contracts and risk.

  3. [quote]
    I had one fundamental question about economics: Why do some places prosper and thrive while others just suck? It’s not a matter of brains. No part of the earth (with the possible exception of Brentwood) is dumber than Beverly Hills, and the residents are wading in gravy. In Russia, meanwhile, where chess is a spectator sport, they’re boiling stones for soup. Nor can education be the reason. Fourth graders in the American school system know what a condom is but aren’t sure about 9 x 7. Natural resources aren’t the answer. Africa has diamonds, gold, uranium, you name it. Scandinavia has little and is frozen besides. Maybe culture is the key, but wealthy regions such as the local mall are famous for lacking it.
    [end quote]

    Eat the Rich – By P. J. O’ROURKE

    https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/o/orourke-rich.html

  4. Today, every business that isn’t in its death throes is trying to figure out how to acquire the best talent.

    Ironic that the modern business structure has done its part to lure high performing women off the child rearing track and onto the low fertility career track, thus cutting the supply of future talent.

    There’s a parody video interviewing soldiers on a landing craft prior to D-Day. One states he fighting for the rights of women to enter the workforce and not raise children. “We need more worker units, not mothers.”

  5. Odd use of the word, curate. But you can surmise the meaning.

    But really it comes down to property rights. You can own land, and you own the improvement. You can own capital, even when owed back with interest and you get to own the improvements that come from that capital. But all your efforts to develop talent in someone else leaves you with no claim on any portion of the future use of that talent or any property interest in improvements made to that talent.

    I suppose a real question is why we remain desperately tied to schooling, under the misnomer, education, as the only way to develop “talent” when it is so rare that a talent someone exhibits can be traced back to their schooling. We should at least expect there would be other institutions or programs developed. I suppose we do to an extent when an Olympic athlete gets their GED instead of wasting their days in the classroom, but rarely is there a young person permitted to test out of schooling to work on a business they develop.

    I do expect there are alternative talent development paths forming with the internet. Perhaps accelerated with the pandemic disruption of the “school helplessness” so much schooling imposes on students. Louis Rossman, who runs a macbook repair business and does videos of these repairs has commented on quite a few followers of his channel reporting they have developed their repair skills and opened businesses, even teenagers.

    • But really it comes down to property rights. You can own land, and you own the improvement. You can own capital, even when owed back with interest and you get to own the improvements that come from that capital. But all your efforts to develop talent in someone else leaves you with no claim on any portion of the future use of that talent or any property interest in improvements made to that talent.

      I’ve been mulling over the farming/fishing dichotomy as it relates to cultivating talent. The farmer carefully husbands his best produce and saves the seed. Fishermen catch the biggest, best specimens for immediate harvest. No incentive for fishermen to breed the product for improvement, as it could well end up in a competitor’s net. Tragedy of the commons.

  6. > rarely is there a young person permitted to test out of schooling to work on a business they develop

    I mean, the entire tech industry was pioneered by founders who were dropouts, whether Gates dropping out of Harvard or Jobs from Reed College. For the last decade, Peter Thiel has been funding a couple dozen kids every year to avoid college and do something else of their choosing.

    > I do expect there are alternative talent development paths forming with the internet.

    Oh yeah, this has been going on for decades already, it just hasn’t been formalized yet. When somebody finally does that, the existing paths will quickly collapse, as they’re that wretched.

  7. “Today, every business that isn’t in its death throes is trying to figure out how to acquire the best talent.”

    From what I read, it seems that “every business that isn’t in its death throes” is trying desperately to make its workforce more “diverse,” talent be damned.

    The good news, I suppose, is we are getting fresh loads of hot, diverse “talent” coming across the Rio Grande in unheard of numbers since Biden was installed in the White House to save us from Trump’s tweeting. Indeed, 10,000 Haitians are waiting under a bridge to help American business meet the hi-tech challenges of the 21st century. And to make all of our host’s libertarian dreams come true.

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