Range, by David Epstein. You can listen to a Russ Roberts podcast with him here. The book argues for the virtues of cultivating talents in multiple areas.
I find the main argument convincing. One of my rules for financial life is
When you have little left to learn on your job, it is time to move on.
2. But I don’t buy everything in the book. He has a chapter on problems that stumped specialized experts but were solved by outsiders. OK, but what makes those stories fun is that more often the reverse is true. Specialized experts solve problems that would stump outsiders. Don’t get carried way with this outsider problem-solving stuff.
3. He points to research suggesting that teachers improve when they change schools. Of course, any research that claims to measure teacher effectiveness and show significant differences is suspect. The Null Hypothesis does not concede defeat so easily.
4. But I can readily imagine that changing organizations would improve anyone’s performance. Your supervisors and colleagues provide you with cultural learning. When you go to a new organization, you get exposure to another set of cultural practices, and you can pick the best from both. Unless you are rigidly attached to the first organization’s approach, or the second organization doesn’t let you port over any good ideas from your first organization, you should get better.
5. Look at the guests that Tyler Cowen interviews for his conversations with Tyler. They are almost always generalists. A top-tier economist (or top-tier anything) with little or no experience or interests outside of his or her specialty would be really dull to interview.
6. One can argue that you need multiple cultural influences to be an interesting person and, in the modern world, to be an effective person. The small-town resident who has never traveled more than 50 miles, the professor who has never functioned outside of academia, the professional who has never had an adult friend or colleague who lacked a college degree–all of these people are stunted in their cultural growth.
“Good schools” are schools with students who “get with the program” and do well. That almost always means they are smarter, better disciplined, and more academically focused. When a teacher moves from a “worse” school to a “better”school, she will pretty much automatically get better results because she will be dealing with better students. This may have nothing (zero, zilch) to do with her inherent “effectiveness”.
The test would be to compare teachers who move from worse to better schools with teachers who move from better to worse schools. I assume most movement is from worse to better.
A teacher does best when surrounded by smart involved parents. This effect beats the Null hypothesis every time. Best schools have smart, involved parents.
There is a very high correlation between “smart involved parents” and “smarter, better disciplined, and more academically focused students who ‘get with the program’.”
But if you have the first without the second, the teacher won’t do well. If you have the second without the first, the teacher will.
About point 4…
Changing organizations more often than not degrades performance in the short term (of course) and so there are going to be time scale-specific factors.
Of course, the classic story is about degradation during movement for high performers (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ashish_Nanda/publication/8558898_The_Risky_Business_of_Hiring_Stars/links/541373740cf2fa878ad3db15/The-Risky-Business-of-Hiring-Stars.pdf). Some of this is regression to the mean; and that they were well adapted to their spot; and institution specific capital and knowledge. Also, that if they were high performers, it might not have been their performance, per se. There may have been the Matthew effect where it was, essentially, a center of excellence with culture and peers contributing to be more than the sum of the parts.
There may also be different types of ‘stars’ with different attributes and portability (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0149206316628644).
The Roberts interview raised the Tiger vs Roger (Federer) question, that is does specialization at an early age is a superior approach to a more generalist child rearing approach and what I gathered from that (perhaps mistakenly) is that innate characteristics of the child may trump all the child rearing interventions. Apparently Tiger was internally driven and his father was responding to Tiger rather than the other way around. Maybe people are different and there is no one right way to be.
If there are any people in small towns who have not been farther than 50 miles from home, they are pretty rare and unusual. In my experience, many are very well traveled but extremely reluctant to discuss anything that might make them seem like they consider themselves better than other members of the community. There are plenty of extremely wealthy small town farmers who are extremely modest and you would have a difficult time in discovering their wealth. Many are prone to making extremely generous charitable contributions completely anonymously, with general knowledge of their giving only coming out at funerals. In many parts of the country this unwillingness to reveal much about oneself, many might call it an aversion to bragging, is deeply ingrained and perhaps descends from Dutch Golden Era “embarrassment of riches” Calvinist culture. My experience may be entirely idiosyncratic, but my guess is that small towners are more interesting and surprisingly varied in experience and knowledge than Washington Post subscribers.
3. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done for many teachers due to the way their pay is tied to seniority.