[rsnor]

Is it fair to say that because there will always be more specialized skills to be learned, that none should be learned?

Everyone may not need to know how to repair their car, but to perform basic, routine maintenance on it and to learn driving technique as intended is something that, when neglected, can cause major inefficiencies.

[scarface74]

Specialization says just the opposite. That everyone should specialize in a combination of what they are good at and there is a demand because it is much more efficient and trade those goods and services that they specialize in for goods and services that they don’t. In the modern era instead of trading directly, we use money as an intermediary.

Economics 101 says just the opposite, that you create inefficiencies when you don’t specialize. Why is car maintenance anything that everyone should know and not plumbing, electrical work or carpentry?

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> Economics 101 says just the opposite, that you create inefficiencies when you don’t specialize.

That's simply bullshit. If you specialize on only installing tires on cars, but not removing them, you have specialized more than a business that swaps your tires, but you have created massive inefficiency by requiring your customers to somehow move around vehicles without tires for you to install tires for them.

There are particular circumstances where specialization increases efficiency, and there are (obviously) other circumstances where specialization decreases efficiency, so it's nonsensical to just say that specializing is always the more efficient choice, which is why all your analogies fail: You use an example where specialization (arguably) increases efficiency, then you completely fail to explain how computer skills fall into the same category as that example, and then you conclude that therefore it is in the same category.

[scarface74]

And you left out the part where I said “and there is a demand”. There is no demand for someone who can remove a tire but not install it....

Every specialization is about knowing the level of integration and specialization.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> And you left out the part where I said “and there is a demand”. There is no demand for someone who can remove a tire but not install it....

Well, then that's simply the claim that markets solve all problems optimally ... which is equally bullshit?

> Every specialization is about knowing the level of integration and specialization.

So ... specialization is always better, except when it's not? Yeah, duh!? How exactly does that help us with determining what the right level of integration and specialization is?

[scarface74]

On a personal level, the “right level” depends on your disposable income and your talents. I have the disposable income to throw money at a lot of things that I don’t want to do - not bragging almost any software engineer in the US should be at the top quintile of earners for their local market.

On a broader scale that’s the entire idea of the value chain.

[michaelmrose]

If you know nothing whatsoever about cars or maintenance thereof you will get taken by the salesman then you will run your cars into the ground burning money and then get ripped off every time you need someone to maintain or fix your car because you don't know enough to know when someone is bullshitting you.

People are expected to know SOMETHING about cars because they are frequently a huge expense that you are required to expend to be able to exist in a lot of places.

Econ 101 in this case assumes that time and money are fungible in any particular increments and that the money they earn doing whatever they are optimal at is greater than the cost of the specialists services.

Example someone making 20 bucks an hour needs a professional service that requires 3 hours of work for a professional at a cost of $900 learning to do so ineffeciently for 5 hours then spending 6 hours seems like a, huge waste but consider.

- Just because their labor is worth $20 an hour doesn't mean that they they can trivially in the context of their current obligations convert a day off into extra pay right when they need it.

- 11 hours x 20 hours will furnish 1/4 of the money required. Even given an immediate alternative it will require 45 hours of additional work.

Incidentally if you own a home you probably ought to learn at least enough basic maintenance to fix simple things.

This is often effecient in practice.

[scarface74]

Yes there are transaction costs to doing anything that you pay someone else for. In the IT industry it’s just like deciding to build versus buy and using managed services. Setting up a few VMs on Linode and hosting all of your own databases, queueing systems, etc is much cheaper than buying the same from AWS, yet and still organizations pay more for AWS everyday, why is that?

Every time you go out to eat, you are paying a markup over something you can do yourself - do you go out to eat?

Would it be more efficient for me to cut my own grass and maintain my yard on the weekend than pay someone else since I can’t convert that time I save on the weekend to cash - of course. But that’s time I can spend with my wife or relaxing. I also haven’t washed my own car, preferring to go to the car wash since I got my first real job out of college.

My maternal grandfather was a “man’s man” he built his own house, could fix cars, he took his pigs to the slaughterhouse and had a ranch with cows that he maintained until close to the time he died. On the other hand, my father isn’t as mechanically inclined, always looked up to his father in law and it took him years of convincing that it wasn’t emasculating to pay someone to do something that you’re not good at.

[concordDance]

You're ignoring transaction costs.

Doing a bit of maintainence can take you 2 minutes, having it done by an expert could take 2-3 man hours once all the inefficiences are considered (getting to the mechanic's shop, setting a price, waiting for things to be done, all the overhead of running and advertising the shop).

Based on my experience with talking to clients and observing them while doing B2B, if the average office worker had decent Excel and Googling skills (let alone the skills of the average vim user) they'd save a couple of hundred hours a year.