Hi! I read your opinion piece in The Chronicle today - congrats on publishing there! Instead of commenting there, I decided to go back to your original piece here and comment. Thank you for these musings - I agree with the point and the general tone. My comment is on two observations that are a bit different from your own though.
First, while 'creative destruction' may be having a moment and feel like something that comes from elites - I don't see it as new or the capricious abuse of power you make it out to be. Since you like economics, perhaps you've already read, or would like to read Joseph Schumpeter "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy" (1942)? In it, Schumpeter effectively said creative destruction is what drives capitalism. And if you are equating elites controlling creative destruction because they control capitalism - well maybe - but that's a bit of a leap. I see creative destruction as marketably successful creativity. And that is certainly not the private playground of the powerful. Yes, it's hard to get creativity to break successfully in the market - but we certainly do have lots of examples of it. Is that getting harder because of elite control of capital? I guess that's an empirical question. And not one I've looked at or read about - but certainly all the budding entrepreneurs out there hope not!
Second, I found it interesting that you like 'Obliquity' by John Kay, that you talked about uncertainty, but you didn't reference his latest work, 'Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond the Numbers' (which you can find here: https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Uncertainty-Decision-Making-Beyond-Numbers/dp/1324004770 ... sorry to link Amazon - feel free to get it from your school library or some other non-dominant creative destroyer!).
I myself just ordered it cause your opinion piece led me to it! Here's hoping we both learn more about uncertainty from the esteemed Mr. Kay. (I also like Obliquity and make it available to my students as one of the choices for their full book read in Organizational Behavior).
Thanks again for your thoughts on liberal arts education. I do agree with oh so much of what you said. I am known at my school for saying, 'critical thinking ... whatever that means' and then spending time trying to figure out how we teach that. I've had the great fortune to be invited by members of the First-Year Seminar teaching crew from the school of arts and sciences to join them in that endeavor even though I'm a 'vocational' management prof. Further, I very often find myself defending what we teach in the school of business AND simultaneously point out that more than 60 of our students credits are 'liberal arts and sciences courses' ... so clearly the degree is NOT purely vocational - even if none of the business courses were about preparing for uncertainty and learning to think critically (which seriously is ALL we do in business isn't it?)
Thanks for these thoughts. I did see that Kay had published Radical Uncertainty, but I haven't read it yet. Maybe a forthcoming Read column!
I certainly have read the Schumpeter and I'm of two minds about it. The first is that I believe the Christiansen Institute as well as many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs either dramatically overinterprets what Schumpeter meant or cynically slings around "disruption" as a marketing slogan and ideological mantra without having any idea where it comes from or what it might imply. Schumpeter did not mean that "creative destruction" was an obligation or something that we should pursue as a universal motor force underlying the entirety of our lives, applied evenly to all businesses, all communities, all forms of stable sociality. Nor was it a complimentary label to be applied to anything new--e.g., the company making the Juicero wasn't entitled to crown itself a "creative disruptor" simply because it had combined an overengineered juicer to a bad digital-rights management scheme. Folks might respond that the market passed judgment on Juicero, so what's the problem? But the market has sanctified many other Juiceros that are still on the rampage.
How that happens I think is an important entry point to my second concern with Schumpeter or perhaps again with how he is used and cited. Namely, a lot of "disruptors" do not overthrow forms of state protection, existing cartels, obstacles to innovation, monopolies, etc. in favor of creating an open field where many new entrepreneurs can seek opportunities. Instead, many of them use "disruption" or "moving fast and breaking things" to essentially transfer those protections and impediments to their own enterprises. Many of them, for example (including Juicero) woefully abuse patents and trademarks to slam the door behind them as fast as possible, many seek to bully or cajole local, regional and state governments into providing tax havens and regulatory shelters for their businesses (remember Amazon not paying sales taxes for a very long time), many either seize hold of public goods or undefended commons or they evade important provisions simply by redefining their workers as contractors, etc. If there's any validity to Schumpeter's ideas in terms of the renewal of democracy and the prevention of oligarchy, all of that activity has to be the opposite of what he had in mind--"creative destruction" can really only be an engine of shared creativity and general wealth creation in an environment that is relentlessly hostile to monopolies and where public goods and shared commons are protected from enclosure and theft. There's a good argument to be made, for example, that taxi licenses issued by governments created a moribund semi-monopoly that was unresponsive to real consumer needs, and that the *app* offered by Lyft, Uber, etc. was a real answer to that. But if this was "creative destruction" aligned with democracy and a basic social foundation, what we'd have is the app without the relentless banditry of those companies--e.g., we'd have a company that made a small, fair profit from designing and maintaining the app as a way to allow ridesharing, or a small and fair profit from offering the app to existing taxi services and helping them make their services responsive.
Ahh so your beef with creative destruction is a) the way the term has been commandeered, and b) the way our government fails to safeguard consumers and/or society from overzealous marketing to blatant, unrepentant avarice that drains the commons. Agreed! And also agreed? that creative destruction, in so far as Schumpeter defined, described, and imagined it, is the stuff of entrepreneurial dreams - and a great deal of societal good. It's a shame people will pay as much, or more, for that which is not progress or best for us all. Hence, the need to really know how to teach how to think critically. See what I did there? Back where you started. And yes, I look forward to a post on the new book. I'll start reading mine soon!
This is a topic I have a lot of thoughts on perhaps unsurprisingly. Great piece. Agree with nearly all of it. Just a few trailing thoughts after reading....
- It's my observational experience that the teaching method of throwing kids into the water to 'figure it out' without much curricular structure can be surprisingly generative but also pretty bad. The difference, in my view, hinges on the student (and teacher's....) predisposition toward rationality. The more training in logic the people have, the better the experiment seems to work.. Where it fails is where students don't know what's at stake in a field or discipline, don't think to ask, and the teachers don't think to tell them (or don't care to). Then what happens is the really unprepared ones drown, and others get trained in the skill of mimicking gobbledygook. Leading to a bunch of people who think what matters is that they signal stuff, not that they know stuff or say interesting things.. I think the Liberal Arts obsession with "form" is one example of this. Perfectly formed papers (and yes, books) saying nothing of interest are very passable. Even if they make little sense and have no stakes.
- It's also my observational belief that the method of hand-holding kids through a structured course curriculum can also lead to some really simplistic people thinking they are really intelligent & getting A+s the whole time.. On the flip side, I absolutely wish my college curriculum had more structure and skill-building.
- Where teaching really went wrong is when we tossed out assigning full books in favor of assigning small excerpts scanned from janky PDFs. So much context and content is lost in the prefatory material. Also scanned PDFs are impossible to read and destroy the pleasure of it. It was an astonishing relief to graduate and begin ordering whole books from university presses to continue my education (and BTW someone should tell high schoolers & their teachers about university presses.... would change lives.)
- I think you know my thoughts on this, but I think the people in contemporary society who do liberal learning best are the petrochemical engineers and the vocationalists. I think these people are also the best at adapting to uncertainty: reason being that pragmatic work requires a consideration of systems, production flows, and economy. It also trains you in solving problems, such that when new problems arrive, you solve those too. (I've been on a big Peter Huber kick recently, and I think his training as an engineer made him a much better policy maker and lawyer than many before him. Also, his mechanical engineering training led him to propose a theory of how biological life might have formed on earth that is both novel and more sensible sounding than the proposed alternatives..) But: This is also a contention that is highly in favor of structured curricula.. As all vocational and engineering work has to be taught in progressions for anything really to make sense.. (otherwise, the bridges collapse!)
- I agree absolutely with the 'preparing for generative uncertainty' idea, and the rejection of 'manufactured precarity'. And I also really think that the liberal arts 'preparing for uncertainty' trope is astonishing nonsense. All the people I know who dealt with real actual uncertainty in their lives (my parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts) didn't have liberal arts training, and what's more is that they are deeply skeptical of it. Humans adapt to uncertainty by adapting. The best preparation for uncertainty is fierce and vigorous planning and paranoia. It's inquiry, sure, but it's inquiry into every practical thing you can imagine. It looks much more like threat modeling than close reading... Again.. thinking like an engineer. Moreover, many of the young liberal artists I know (and love as people) are astonishingly frail when it comes to not getting things they want, or having to adjust to inconvenience.
- Another point re vocation and the liberal arts.... there's a reason, I insist, that the founding fathers were called "framers" (for that is what you do when you build a house! it's called 'framing a floor' after all) & that many of them worked as surveyors, inventors, and solicitors. It's bizarre that we think the study of civilization can be divorced from mechanical work.
- Easy fixes for smore at least in my view are the following: Make Logic 101 a requirement (or let people test out of it). Require an accounting class (or let people test out of it). And encourage teachers to place questions and context at the very forefront of coursework. Students in the liberal arts should be encouraged to write or vocalize wayy more questions than they seem to do.
- I think it should be really telling that small christian colleges hit similar marks as top Unis and LACs for the average LSAT score of their graduates. It makes me think that they are doing something in regard to teaching that the so-called top schools are neglecting. (after all, top colleges have the luxury of accepting top high schoolers... shouldn't equivalent, let alone the advertised 'better', educations result in these graduates extensively outpacing the small christian schools in test scores?)
anyway. Much to chew on. thanks for the blog post. - K.K.
So many great thoughts. You deepen my suspicion that what we credit ourselves for is really mostly about the social capital that we play some role in creating, not the substance of our instruction. I think the one thing we might claim credit for is extremely difficult to see from outside a course and we often don't call attention to it when it is happening, namely, the moment where interpretation, curiosity or discovery is actually happening in an unplanned way in a given session of a course--where students are producing a substantively unexpected response to the material, or are witnessing something happen in a lab or an experience that wasn't intended in advance. And there are so many powerful countering forces in many programs of liberal education: the pressure to "cover" material that compresses the time and space needed for the unexpected to happen, the worries we have about whether the unexpected response or event might actually undercut our own authority or expertise. And increasingly also we have some students who expect the classroom to produce a predictable transformation of the ethical and political subjectivity of students within it.
There is another sense of uncertainty that I didn't talk about here--there's the uncertainty that Nowotny means that I think you are referencing; there's the bogus uncertainty of "creative destruction" or "disruptive innovation" that is just a cover story for a bunch of wealth-seekers who are breaking open every piggy-bank they can find and running away with the cash; but there is also the uncertainty of trauma that we have to keep in mind. People adapt to the unexpected until they can't, and that "until" is itself unpredictable. We try to drill people to get them to prepare for traumatic disasters: bombings, earthquakes, fires, mass shootings, to give them a routinized "muscle memory" of what to do, and yet I think there is little rigorous evidence that drills work in part because every catastrophe is so sui generis unexpected in its specificities. What we do know is that people routinely surprise themselves and others in those moments: some people simply freeze up, some act decisively, some escape or hide effectively; and then beyond the moment, we are all surprised again by how we are trapped in or freed of the fear and suffering of such moments.
I think what this suggests to me is that another thing we could teach about uncertainty is humility in the face of it. But teaching humility is not something that liberal education excels at in the present moment.
That's really true re trauma. and maybe this is where humanistic learning has worked best for me. It's been excellent for trauma healing & growth. Affect theory in particular, but maybe the critical approach generally.. provided it's used as a building tool. (A workout is no good if your muscles breakdown and don't heal afterward. And sometimes I think the critical approach induces its own trauma, or awareness of trauma, and then forgets to provide recovery.. ignorance sometimes can be bliss).
On the topic of muscle memory and drill response: yeah. Adam Grant has a good story about firefighting in a recent book of his that I think is in line what you are saying here. In my initial comment I meant the idea of threat modeling and preparation not so much as a drill-based thing but as a mental exercise. Actual muscle memory drills seem very silly to me... because of exactly what you are saying: muscle drills routinize extremely specific responses, but we really want adaptability: many tools in the toolkit, not hammering anything that looks like a nail. But preparing for the future and having a paranoid mind can maybe be useful when practiced routinely in the hypothetical: a constant but not overwhelming stream of 'what ifs'. Deduction training, if you will.. But yeah these are just observational thoughts from my life & particular moments in it. Empirics may be better here.
In any case. Yes to compassion and humility. You're very right that we need more of it.
(Also, this switch to Substack is pretty cool. I'm enjoying getting the emails!)
Hi! I read your opinion piece in The Chronicle today - congrats on publishing there! Instead of commenting there, I decided to go back to your original piece here and comment. Thank you for these musings - I agree with the point and the general tone. My comment is on two observations that are a bit different from your own though.
First, while 'creative destruction' may be having a moment and feel like something that comes from elites - I don't see it as new or the capricious abuse of power you make it out to be. Since you like economics, perhaps you've already read, or would like to read Joseph Schumpeter "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy" (1942)? In it, Schumpeter effectively said creative destruction is what drives capitalism. And if you are equating elites controlling creative destruction because they control capitalism - well maybe - but that's a bit of a leap. I see creative destruction as marketably successful creativity. And that is certainly not the private playground of the powerful. Yes, it's hard to get creativity to break successfully in the market - but we certainly do have lots of examples of it. Is that getting harder because of elite control of capital? I guess that's an empirical question. And not one I've looked at or read about - but certainly all the budding entrepreneurs out there hope not!
Second, I found it interesting that you like 'Obliquity' by John Kay, that you talked about uncertainty, but you didn't reference his latest work, 'Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond the Numbers' (which you can find here: https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Uncertainty-Decision-Making-Beyond-Numbers/dp/1324004770 ... sorry to link Amazon - feel free to get it from your school library or some other non-dominant creative destroyer!).
I myself just ordered it cause your opinion piece led me to it! Here's hoping we both learn more about uncertainty from the esteemed Mr. Kay. (I also like Obliquity and make it available to my students as one of the choices for their full book read in Organizational Behavior).
Thanks again for your thoughts on liberal arts education. I do agree with oh so much of what you said. I am known at my school for saying, 'critical thinking ... whatever that means' and then spending time trying to figure out how we teach that. I've had the great fortune to be invited by members of the First-Year Seminar teaching crew from the school of arts and sciences to join them in that endeavor even though I'm a 'vocational' management prof. Further, I very often find myself defending what we teach in the school of business AND simultaneously point out that more than 60 of our students credits are 'liberal arts and sciences courses' ... so clearly the degree is NOT purely vocational - even if none of the business courses were about preparing for uncertainty and learning to think critically (which seriously is ALL we do in business isn't it?)
I will come back here soon - pd
Thanks for these thoughts. I did see that Kay had published Radical Uncertainty, but I haven't read it yet. Maybe a forthcoming Read column!
I certainly have read the Schumpeter and I'm of two minds about it. The first is that I believe the Christiansen Institute as well as many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs either dramatically overinterprets what Schumpeter meant or cynically slings around "disruption" as a marketing slogan and ideological mantra without having any idea where it comes from or what it might imply. Schumpeter did not mean that "creative destruction" was an obligation or something that we should pursue as a universal motor force underlying the entirety of our lives, applied evenly to all businesses, all communities, all forms of stable sociality. Nor was it a complimentary label to be applied to anything new--e.g., the company making the Juicero wasn't entitled to crown itself a "creative disruptor" simply because it had combined an overengineered juicer to a bad digital-rights management scheme. Folks might respond that the market passed judgment on Juicero, so what's the problem? But the market has sanctified many other Juiceros that are still on the rampage.
How that happens I think is an important entry point to my second concern with Schumpeter or perhaps again with how he is used and cited. Namely, a lot of "disruptors" do not overthrow forms of state protection, existing cartels, obstacles to innovation, monopolies, etc. in favor of creating an open field where many new entrepreneurs can seek opportunities. Instead, many of them use "disruption" or "moving fast and breaking things" to essentially transfer those protections and impediments to their own enterprises. Many of them, for example (including Juicero) woefully abuse patents and trademarks to slam the door behind them as fast as possible, many seek to bully or cajole local, regional and state governments into providing tax havens and regulatory shelters for their businesses (remember Amazon not paying sales taxes for a very long time), many either seize hold of public goods or undefended commons or they evade important provisions simply by redefining their workers as contractors, etc. If there's any validity to Schumpeter's ideas in terms of the renewal of democracy and the prevention of oligarchy, all of that activity has to be the opposite of what he had in mind--"creative destruction" can really only be an engine of shared creativity and general wealth creation in an environment that is relentlessly hostile to monopolies and where public goods and shared commons are protected from enclosure and theft. There's a good argument to be made, for example, that taxi licenses issued by governments created a moribund semi-monopoly that was unresponsive to real consumer needs, and that the *app* offered by Lyft, Uber, etc. was a real answer to that. But if this was "creative destruction" aligned with democracy and a basic social foundation, what we'd have is the app without the relentless banditry of those companies--e.g., we'd have a company that made a small, fair profit from designing and maintaining the app as a way to allow ridesharing, or a small and fair profit from offering the app to existing taxi services and helping them make their services responsive.
Ahh so your beef with creative destruction is a) the way the term has been commandeered, and b) the way our government fails to safeguard consumers and/or society from overzealous marketing to blatant, unrepentant avarice that drains the commons. Agreed! And also agreed? that creative destruction, in so far as Schumpeter defined, described, and imagined it, is the stuff of entrepreneurial dreams - and a great deal of societal good. It's a shame people will pay as much, or more, for that which is not progress or best for us all. Hence, the need to really know how to teach how to think critically. See what I did there? Back where you started. And yes, I look forward to a post on the new book. I'll start reading mine soon!
This is a topic I have a lot of thoughts on perhaps unsurprisingly. Great piece. Agree with nearly all of it. Just a few trailing thoughts after reading....
- It's my observational experience that the teaching method of throwing kids into the water to 'figure it out' without much curricular structure can be surprisingly generative but also pretty bad. The difference, in my view, hinges on the student (and teacher's....) predisposition toward rationality. The more training in logic the people have, the better the experiment seems to work.. Where it fails is where students don't know what's at stake in a field or discipline, don't think to ask, and the teachers don't think to tell them (or don't care to). Then what happens is the really unprepared ones drown, and others get trained in the skill of mimicking gobbledygook. Leading to a bunch of people who think what matters is that they signal stuff, not that they know stuff or say interesting things.. I think the Liberal Arts obsession with "form" is one example of this. Perfectly formed papers (and yes, books) saying nothing of interest are very passable. Even if they make little sense and have no stakes.
- It's also my observational belief that the method of hand-holding kids through a structured course curriculum can also lead to some really simplistic people thinking they are really intelligent & getting A+s the whole time.. On the flip side, I absolutely wish my college curriculum had more structure and skill-building.
- Where teaching really went wrong is when we tossed out assigning full books in favor of assigning small excerpts scanned from janky PDFs. So much context and content is lost in the prefatory material. Also scanned PDFs are impossible to read and destroy the pleasure of it. It was an astonishing relief to graduate and begin ordering whole books from university presses to continue my education (and BTW someone should tell high schoolers & their teachers about university presses.... would change lives.)
- I think you know my thoughts on this, but I think the people in contemporary society who do liberal learning best are the petrochemical engineers and the vocationalists. I think these people are also the best at adapting to uncertainty: reason being that pragmatic work requires a consideration of systems, production flows, and economy. It also trains you in solving problems, such that when new problems arrive, you solve those too. (I've been on a big Peter Huber kick recently, and I think his training as an engineer made him a much better policy maker and lawyer than many before him. Also, his mechanical engineering training led him to propose a theory of how biological life might have formed on earth that is both novel and more sensible sounding than the proposed alternatives..) But: This is also a contention that is highly in favor of structured curricula.. As all vocational and engineering work has to be taught in progressions for anything really to make sense.. (otherwise, the bridges collapse!)
- I agree absolutely with the 'preparing for generative uncertainty' idea, and the rejection of 'manufactured precarity'. And I also really think that the liberal arts 'preparing for uncertainty' trope is astonishing nonsense. All the people I know who dealt with real actual uncertainty in their lives (my parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts) didn't have liberal arts training, and what's more is that they are deeply skeptical of it. Humans adapt to uncertainty by adapting. The best preparation for uncertainty is fierce and vigorous planning and paranoia. It's inquiry, sure, but it's inquiry into every practical thing you can imagine. It looks much more like threat modeling than close reading... Again.. thinking like an engineer. Moreover, many of the young liberal artists I know (and love as people) are astonishingly frail when it comes to not getting things they want, or having to adjust to inconvenience.
- Another point re vocation and the liberal arts.... there's a reason, I insist, that the founding fathers were called "framers" (for that is what you do when you build a house! it's called 'framing a floor' after all) & that many of them worked as surveyors, inventors, and solicitors. It's bizarre that we think the study of civilization can be divorced from mechanical work.
- Easy fixes for smore at least in my view are the following: Make Logic 101 a requirement (or let people test out of it). Require an accounting class (or let people test out of it). And encourage teachers to place questions and context at the very forefront of coursework. Students in the liberal arts should be encouraged to write or vocalize wayy more questions than they seem to do.
- I think it should be really telling that small christian colleges hit similar marks as top Unis and LACs for the average LSAT score of their graduates. It makes me think that they are doing something in regard to teaching that the so-called top schools are neglecting. (after all, top colleges have the luxury of accepting top high schoolers... shouldn't equivalent, let alone the advertised 'better', educations result in these graduates extensively outpacing the small christian schools in test scores?)
anyway. Much to chew on. thanks for the blog post. - K.K.
So many great thoughts. You deepen my suspicion that what we credit ourselves for is really mostly about the social capital that we play some role in creating, not the substance of our instruction. I think the one thing we might claim credit for is extremely difficult to see from outside a course and we often don't call attention to it when it is happening, namely, the moment where interpretation, curiosity or discovery is actually happening in an unplanned way in a given session of a course--where students are producing a substantively unexpected response to the material, or are witnessing something happen in a lab or an experience that wasn't intended in advance. And there are so many powerful countering forces in many programs of liberal education: the pressure to "cover" material that compresses the time and space needed for the unexpected to happen, the worries we have about whether the unexpected response or event might actually undercut our own authority or expertise. And increasingly also we have some students who expect the classroom to produce a predictable transformation of the ethical and political subjectivity of students within it.
There is another sense of uncertainty that I didn't talk about here--there's the uncertainty that Nowotny means that I think you are referencing; there's the bogus uncertainty of "creative destruction" or "disruptive innovation" that is just a cover story for a bunch of wealth-seekers who are breaking open every piggy-bank they can find and running away with the cash; but there is also the uncertainty of trauma that we have to keep in mind. People adapt to the unexpected until they can't, and that "until" is itself unpredictable. We try to drill people to get them to prepare for traumatic disasters: bombings, earthquakes, fires, mass shootings, to give them a routinized "muscle memory" of what to do, and yet I think there is little rigorous evidence that drills work in part because every catastrophe is so sui generis unexpected in its specificities. What we do know is that people routinely surprise themselves and others in those moments: some people simply freeze up, some act decisively, some escape or hide effectively; and then beyond the moment, we are all surprised again by how we are trapped in or freed of the fear and suffering of such moments.
I think what this suggests to me is that another thing we could teach about uncertainty is humility in the face of it. But teaching humility is not something that liberal education excels at in the present moment.
That's really true re trauma. and maybe this is where humanistic learning has worked best for me. It's been excellent for trauma healing & growth. Affect theory in particular, but maybe the critical approach generally.. provided it's used as a building tool. (A workout is no good if your muscles breakdown and don't heal afterward. And sometimes I think the critical approach induces its own trauma, or awareness of trauma, and then forgets to provide recovery.. ignorance sometimes can be bliss).
On the topic of muscle memory and drill response: yeah. Adam Grant has a good story about firefighting in a recent book of his that I think is in line what you are saying here. In my initial comment I meant the idea of threat modeling and preparation not so much as a drill-based thing but as a mental exercise. Actual muscle memory drills seem very silly to me... because of exactly what you are saying: muscle drills routinize extremely specific responses, but we really want adaptability: many tools in the toolkit, not hammering anything that looks like a nail. But preparing for the future and having a paranoid mind can maybe be useful when practiced routinely in the hypothetical: a constant but not overwhelming stream of 'what ifs'. Deduction training, if you will.. But yeah these are just observational thoughts from my life & particular moments in it. Empirics may be better here.
In any case. Yes to compassion and humility. You're very right that we need more of it.
(Also, this switch to Substack is pretty cool. I'm enjoying getting the emails!)